Well that may be a cool parlour trick (for lack of a better word), but is it self defence/martial arts? I mean, there are people who can levitate themselves and walk in thin air without any wires or supports etc. (only they openly claim that they are illusionists - it's just that they won't tell you how their illusions are performed). Some people can make objects/people disappear or produce objects/people out of thin air. These are all really cool things, sure... but when you start teaching it as a martial art and give people that you're teaching the impression that it can be used in self defence, then there's an argument that you could be giving people dangerous false confidence.Originally Posted by Oldschool78
I mean, if someone says, "Wanna see a cool trick? I bet I can move you without touching you." and that was effectively it... then fine. But to do the same thing and then say, "Now I'll teach it to you, and you can use it to protect yourself in real life from attackers," now that's potentially putting people's safety and lives in danger. Like that guy I mentioned before whom I used to train with who believes in this stuff... he absolutely believes that if someone were to try to hit him, that he could stop the attack just by projecting his chi energy. That's why the rest of us in that group just shook our heads in disbelief and always speculated about what would happen to this guy should he actually be viciously attacked IRL and he tried to defend himself with no touch. I'll tell you now, he'd get the crap beaten out of him!
The real problem I have hear isn't just that these people are mucking around with these tricks, but instilling people with the steadfast belief that learning these tricks can keep them safe and possibly save their lives in a self defence situation. Now I find this whole 'no touch push' thing highly dubious and I remain skeptical. You say you've experienced it... fine. But that's anecdotal hearsay testimonial from a single individual. It's not what would be acceptable as actual evidence from an academic POV.
There's a lot better research out there on how fights work, such as those conducted by Darren Laur and his studies into how fear affects fights, because in his research he actually established:
+ The independent variable: Augmenting standard riot police training with cyclical breathing/meditation training.
+ The controlled variable: one group of riot police did not undergo cyclical breathing/meditation training. There was no alteration to their standard riot squad training. They were the control sample.
+ The dependent variable: the study found that the 'test sample' (officers who underwent the breathing/meditation training) saw a massive improvement in their defensive skills as opposed to control sample who saw only a small/marginal improvement.
Conclusion: cyclical breathing/meditation (an element of traditional martial arts training) greatly increases one's ability to control fear and recall learned techniques in a highly stressful/frightening fight scenario.
What I've seen in these videos are merely these people performing these tricks on their own students -- who are unlikely to be skeptics and I have no idea what their previous martial arts training may be. If someone wants to gather dependable evidence on 'no touch' fighting, then they need to do a proper experiment like what Laur did with cyclical breathing/meditation. Also remember that a phenomenon needs to be dependably repeatable in order to demonstrate that it does work and it wasn't just a freak occurance. What these guys have done in these videos is establish confounding variables, i.e. "variables that the researcher failed to control, or eliminate, damaging the internal validity of an experiment." (reference)
And thus training should attempt to simulate such conditions. Which I'm not seeing in these videos (nor similar people that I've met IRL) who claim to be practising/teaching self defence. If there were NO claim of fight/self def applicability, then fine... I wouldn't object. I'd see it just as another "parlour trick" alongside all the cool stuff that magicians like David Copperfield or even Penn and Teller, who often tell the audience how their illusions are done and often go around debunking myths in their documentary series Penn & Teller: Bullsh!t! -- including one episode where they debunked martial arts.
In all seriousness, if someone wants to be able to defend themselves without touching an attacker there is a way. Carry pepper spray.
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