Peter Ralston recently claimed an interesting thing. My memory is bad so let me very freely paraphrase him:

All is not one. Martial arts, body-being work, meditation, contemplating the truth do not all lead to the same place. You practice body-being to improve your skill and meditation to improve your well-being. Nothing against that, but it is not the truth. Contemplation leads to the direct consciousness of a truth.

As mentioned, I far from remember his exact words, so this is my (mis)interpretation but the main message was clear: you cannot fight, eat, or body-be your way to enlightenment. To achieve an enlightenment experience - the direct consciousness of the truth of something (who am I, life, other, …), you have to deeply contemplate a suitable question. On the other hand, he also said that a physical practice is useful for grounding in reality. With contemplation alone, it is easy to end up in a fantasy world, while a physical practice (martial arts or another) provides hard feedback.