Martial arts discussion thread

[GoktimusPrime]

i didn,t say traditional martial arts are ineffective, i said in an earlier post that any style can be made to work if trained right, which is my point. it is pretty fair to say alot of traditional schools dont train in a way that prepares students for real violence. and yes some sport styles are guilty of this to but it would be a minority as their very nature dictates students learn to hit properly, get hit and lots of hard sparring.

That may be in your observation but not in mine. In my observation I find more traditional schools better train their students for actual fighting compared to sport fighting schools which seem more oriented at scoring points and impressing judges. But that's just my observation.

I think it's fair to say that there are plenty of good and bad schools of both traditional and sporting sorts, and it seems that you've happened to come across more good sport schools and I've happened to come across more good traditional schools. The ratio between good and bad traditional and sport schools may vary depending on where you live. For example when I was in China I travelled to Foshan, a place reknowned for producing famous Kung Fu practitioners like Yip Man and Huang Feihong - and I observed a demonstration at a school there... and it was just rubbish. The demonstration was supposed to be Hongjia Kung Fu, but instead of looking like this it looked like this:



...yeah, cos that's gonna be really useful in a fight... </sarcasm>

i agree that traditional styles would have been very effective back in the day but few if any train like they did back then. they werent worried about law suits from students they were worr about dieing and the training would have been gruelling.

Teaching methods have changed, but that's not always a bad thing. You're right about training being far more gruelling in the old days - especially in temples like Shaolin. Cos when you're a full time celebate monk you have NO life outside the temple. But for people with commitments to family, study, work etc., such sadistic methods of training just aren't practical in the modern age. Also - in places like the Shaolin Temple, the monks also spend a lot of time healing each other as well.

A lot of modern age equipment and training techniques can be used quite effectively in traditional training... like velcro strap-on wrist/ankle weights or the incorporation of plyometrics etc. Martial arts - especially the external styles - have always had plyometric movements; but modern sport science has given us a better understanding of how it works and how to better train in it.

now with the commercialisation of martial arts and it becomming a busiess ppl are more likely to make things easier to retain students and boost revenue but preach they teach the methods of old.

Yeah, these are the "McDojos" that's been discussed before. (-_-) And ya know, that Kung Fu demonstration I saw in China was commercialised too... it was all acrobatic showmanship to attract tourists. But I'm sure you can appreciate that a commercialised martial art is not exactly an authentic representation of that art.