Martial, meaning, of or in reference to war, and their arts are the entelechy of weaponizing the human body, a dolorimetric discovery of the archetypes in slumber awaiting our fists, elbows, knees, and skulls to find their exact path to actualization. There is an ideal way to strike another person. And there has been since our contemporary form was settled hundreds of thousands of years ago. We’ve had the brain to discover it for at least 200 thousand years. There was no other path but brutal research to finalize the art.
I used to feel appropriative bowing to the mat, now I do it to pay respect to the people who wrote it all down so I could walk into a gym and learn what hundreds of years of bloodshed yielded.