ABSTRACT
It could be argued that the new millennium is one of global crises in terms of health and well-being. How and in what way can notions of lifelong learning, in this case that of martial arts, contribute to health and well-being and how do they impact, if at all, on everyday lifestyle and practice from the perspective of those who practice them? These are important questions, given the concerns of health and well-being dominating the 21st century. There is currently a growing global concern related to the impact of a range of health challenges and the demand on resources to tackle them. Could exercise, and martial arts specifically, offer a cost-effective source of support and help to these concerns? To illustrate, in 2015, global life expectancy had increased by 15 years from that of the 1960s (World Health Organisation, 2017); yet, at the same time, death rates from cardiovascular disease had increased by 41% (Roth, Forouzanfar, Moran, Barber, Nguyen, Feigin, Naghavi, Mensah and Murray, 2015). To illustrate, one in four deaths in the United States(US), almost 38% of deaths of those under the age of 75 in the United Kingdom (UK) (Heart UK, accessed July 2017) and 31% of deaths globally (WHO, 2017) were attributable to chronic heart disease or similar. Whilst deaths from heart disease have risen, it is perhaps unsurprising that most of these deaths occur within the top income countries (WHO, 2017). Clearly, lifestyle could be argued as having a bearing on this. Any number of searches will highlight the increasingly sedentary nature of these as well as the importance of diet, weight, smoking, alcohol consumption, blood pressure and diabetes, as well as physical activity in determining the risk of heart attack; indeed, the UK National Health Service (NHS, 2017) states that those who undertake no physical exercise at all are twice as likely to suffer a heart attack as those who do.
