poll: why do you practice taido?

i’m will­ing to bet that most of us have more than one rea­son for prac­tic­ing taido. in fact, i per­son­ally have been doing taido so long that i have a really hard time imag­in­ing what life would be like with­out it — iden­ti­fy­ing my rea­sons to prac­tice are like defend­ing my deci­sion to eat chicken or list­ing the ben­e­fits of drink­ing water every­day. how­ever, let’s be sim­plis­tic here, and for the sake of trend-spotting, attempt to iso­late our biggest cur­rent rea­sons for prac­tic­ing taido.

this poll isn’t ask­ing why you started taido or what ben­e­fits you think you may even­tu­ally achieve through con­tin­ued prac­tice. i’m inter­ested in find­ing out why you are doing taido right now — what ben­e­fit do you receive that pre­vents you from skip­ping prac­tices and watch­ing tv? ide­ally, these should be imme­di­ate ben­e­fits (ie, not “because some­day maybe i can kick ass like bruce”).

in my mind there are three big rea­sons for prac­tic­ing a mar­tial art. they are:

• to learn how to defend one­self from a vio­lent attack
• to exer­cise their bod­ies for improved health
• for social inter­ac­tion or as a hobby

i’ve extrap­o­lated these three main objec­tives to short-term ben­e­fits in my poll choices. of course, there may be oth­ers. if you find that none of these these three cov­ers your own rea­sons, com­ment below, and i’ll add a new cat­e­gory to the poll.