In a previous post covering ‘Action vs Reaction’, I mentioned the ‘gunslinger paradox’.

In classic Western duels, the person who draws first tends to lose, while the person who reacts to the other’s draw tends to win. This seems counterintuitive — how can reacting be faster than initiating?

The explanation lies in neuroscience and motor control:

• Initiating a voluntary action requires a conscious decision, which involves slower prefrontal processing — typically 200–300ms.
• Reacting to a visual stimulus can engage faster, more automatic motor pathways — sometimes as quick as 100–150ms.

This is called a paradox because it inverts our intuition that going first is an advantage. In reality, the “reactor” is running a faster neural program (a reflex-like response) while the “initiator” is running a slower, deliberate one.

So, how does this affect the martial arts and possibly self-protection strategies?

The person who throws the first strike has to make a conscious, deliberate decision to attack. The defender, however, only needs to detect and respond to an incoming stimulus — which can engage faster, more automatic neural pathways. So paradoxically, the defender can sometimes beat the attacker to the punch or at least respond with near-equal speed despite “going second”.

It challenges the assumption that aggression and initiative are always advantageous. However, the strategy of keeping an attacker away from you still holds, as they may also have developed a close advantage by masking any clues that you may pick up that they are launching an attack.

These are some clues that martial arts practitioners work with:

• Telegraphing — attackers give away intent through body language before the strike lands, giving the defender even more reaction time.
• Flinch response — defenders can train gross motor reflexes that respond even faster than conscious reactions, essentially making the response subcortical.
• Anticipatory reading – experienced martial artists don’t just react to movement; they read patterns and predict, which effectively eliminates reaction time altogether.

Martial artists train to collapse the distinction between reaction and initiation — either by baiting the opponent into attacking (so they can exploit the paradox deliberately) or by training responses so deeply that their own initiations become as fast as reflexes. The paradox essentially teaches that waiting intelligently is not passivity — it can be a tactical advantage.

My take is that regarding self-protection, I would assume that action still beats reaction in a chaotic and tense situation and will regard keeping a distance as the safer and more reliable option. My ‘Action beats Reaction’ blog conclusion is that blocks don’t work, so the premise is still to attack pre-emptively.