Many years ago, I was studying judo from someone who had done judo since he was a kid and was teaching for fun. He was not a very large man, but he was a very skilled one. One time, he told a very interesting story.

He was in a match with a man who was a body builder or a power lifter or something of that ilk—an immensely, extraordinarily strong man. He got the strong man into an arm bar, which is a hold in which the elbow is braced against something and the arm is being pulled back at the wrist. Normally if a person is in a properly positioned arm bar, this is inescapable and the person holding it could break his arm if he wanted to; this (joint locks) is one of the typical ways of a judo match ending—the person in the joint lock taps out, admitting defeat.

The strong man did not tap out.

He just curled his way out of the arm bar.

That is, his arm—in a very weak position—was so much stronger than my judo teacher’s large core muscles that he was able to overpower them anyway.

Next, my judo teacher pinned him down. In western wrestling, one can win a match by pinning the opponent’s shoulders to the ground for 3 seconds. In judo it’s a little more complicated, but the point which is important to the moment is that you have to pin the opponent such that he can’t escape for 45 seconds. Once he had pinned the strong man, the strong man asked him, “you got me?” My teacher replied, “yeah, I got you.” The strong man asked, “are you sure about that?” “Yes, I’m sure,” my teacher replied.

The strong man then grabbed my teacher by the gi (the stout clothing worn in judo) and floor-pressed him into the air, then set him aside. (Floor pressing is like bench pressing, only the floor keeps your elbows from going low enough to generate maximum power.)

Clearly, this guy was simply far too strong to ever lose by joint locks or pinning. So my teacher won the match by throwing him to the ground (“ippon”).

The moral of the story is not that skill will always beat strength, because clearly it didn’t, two out of three times. The moral of the story is also not that strength will always beat skill, since it didn’t, that final time.

The moral of the story is to know your limits and always stay within them.