The Martial Art of Safety

Adapting principles from internal martial arts offers a powerful way to help workers internalize safety, improve body mechanics, and prevent injuries before they happen.

• By Robert Pater
• May 01, 2025

Personal safety is the ultimate self-defense. Its bottom line: people protecting themselves from getting hurt (or worse.) Yet, a range of statistics shows that despite significant resources expended on safety, many companies are still beset with the “personal” injuries of strains & sprains and slips/trips/falls. 

In addition to the damage to individuals and associated organizational “direct” costs, these incidents affect performance—where the effectiveness of impaired workers is reduced (even among those not injured to the point of filing a claim.) And operations coverage is diminished as well. This in an era when many industries, such as manufacturing and distribution, have reported difficulties in getting and remaining fully staffed. 

Further, well-implemented environmental and equipment controls—while definitely important—have clearly not been the panacea for reducing the incidence and severity of these injuries past a certain (too high?) level. Unsurprisingly, there are numerous recent studies confirming the impact of such “human factors” of individual and psychosocial contributors on soft-tissue injuries and slips/trips/falls—both at work and off the job. Given that, leaders seeking to actually make sizable improvements might consider harnessing these forces towards, rather than “against” Safety performance (e.g. as in “squelching” or trying to fight down human “weaknesses” or tendencies). 

Further, any real solution should have six critical characteristics:  

1. Actually prevent injury and cumulative trauma buildup (that can later “erupt” into impairment). 
2. Be easy and quick to learn by pretty much everyone through a range of ages and conditions.  
3. Be transportable/applicable to a wide array of tasks and potential risk conditions  
4. Be energizing.  
5. Be readily internalized, self-reinforcing—showing almost immediate positive results so that people truly want to utilize methods without having to be insistently externally reminded or consistently monitored.  
6. Enlist a range of inherent human capabilities—both mental and physical factors—towards safety.  

Additionally, there’s an ideal 7th characteristic: Simultaneously improve overall performance beyond just preventing injuries that people don’t believe will actually occur to them—until they do.  

Granted that at least one potential obstacle exists here—how can leaders effectively transfer practical prevention methods and techniques to their workforce that show real results they can see, that they don’t tune out, that they’re actually personally inclined to put into practice even when no one is closely monitoring them? That gets attention even from those not highly “physical” to those “tough” or resistant workers and managers who often write off Safety methods as theoretical or impractical. One way we’ve found to accomplish this is by offering select mental and physical methods and techniques adapted from internal martial arts, specifically honed towards fostering internalized safety. Delivered by peers to their co-workers. 

Martial arts? Safety? Contrary to what some might assume, the goal of most internal martial arts goes well beyond just “fighting.” It’s offering principles and methods that emphasize self-control and responsiveness. (The Japanese word “do”, as in “judo”, means “a way of living.”) They’re about accomplishing all desired activities with maximum strength and minimal unnecessary tension (that might otherwise mount toward cumulative trauma or mental stress.) Further, the Japanese term for martial arts (“budo”) has been translated as “the way of stopping the spear,” i.e., ending the conflict. The Chinese word “gung fu” or “kung fu” literally means “skill achieved through hard work and practice” and can apply to any activity—including those that don’t involve combat.  

The main gist: internal martial arts focus on safely directing and redirecting forces. With an initial emphasis on people being better able to control themselves (such as being relaxed and effective under pressure), it’s the ultimate step in embracing practical responsibility. This practical philosophy can readily apply even to those who never go to a formal martial arts class. So, for example, we’ve seen in numerous industries and across many countries how relatively simple-to-learn skills for elevating balance, usable strength and safer re-routing of forces (away from damaging more vulnerable, “injury prone” areas such as lower back, shoulders, hands and knees) has significantly reduced strains/sprains and slips/trips/falls (with reports of up to 85 percent reductions in such injuries—even among people doing physical tasks while exposed to the elements). 

Someone defined power as the ability to change the future. Internal martial arts principles and methods can unleash the power to parry potential Safety risks towards high performance. An internal martial arts core message equally applies to business: real knowledge is evidenced by actions, per a well-known Japanese warrior maxim, “To know and to act are precisely the same.” Pledges and objectives are ultimately empty when not grounded in practical actions and don’t by themselves change safety’s reality. Here’s another relevant martial art truism: “Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.” 

So my recommended takeaway for breaking through a nagging Safety plateau: if your company has suffered an unacceptable history of recurrent strains/sprains and/or slips/trips/falls—and you’ve just been incorporating variations on the same intervention themes to no real avail—consider finding and implementing an approach that internalizes the potential latent powers within your workforce, and positively works on psychosocial contributors, all to move towards their becoming “black belts” in taking better control of their own personal safety.  

This article originally appeared in the April/May 2025 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.