Martial arts discussion thread

[GoktimusPrime]

While we learn techniques we partner up with someone our own size, but once we learn the techniques we switch partners around to learn about leverage and throwing people of different shapes and sizes.

That's good. It's good to always practice with different people, not just because of different size but also different speed, tempo etc. Even in the same style/school everyone fights differently; I find fighting forms are like handwriting - it's unique to each individual and no two are exactly identical. Having two people from the same school trained in the same style is like watching two people write the same text in the same language... but the actual handwriting itself is uniquely distinct.

I also questioned my sensei last night because he was explaining about how all the moves in our kata including the prep are actual fighting moves. One movement we do is an eye gouge. I questioned the honour of using an eye gouge. He told me that while it wasn't honourable KRMAS concentrates on practicality and if you ever get into a situation where you need to use the techniques chances are your opponent wont exactly to be concerned with honourable fighting techniques.

Very true.

And I suppose this is where some of my skepticism about sport fighting comes from because when you fight as a sport you are fighting within set conditions and set rules; whereas when training to fight for self defence we should never assume that anything will be set. For example one of the single most common mistakes I experience with sport fighters is that they often leave their groin exposed, and I've even met some sport fighters who outright REFUSE to guard their groin (instead they just demand that I don't attack there) - insisting that it's a "dog" move. Of course it's a dog move... but as your sensei says, we should never assume that our opponent carries a sense of honour that prevents them from using cheap moves.

My question about the eye gouge would be that it seems to me to be more of a fine motor skill technique, which as Hot Rodimus pointed out before, is impractical in a real fight where you're scared poopless. Furthermore, I've heard people say that eye gouging is overrated as even dogs will continue fighting with eyes bitten out. But I suppose it all depends on the exact scenario and situation too... <shrugs>

I am probably coming across as arrogant or a hater of traditional styles.....I don't intend for this to happen

I'm glad you cleared it up. And I'm sure I sometimes come across as an arrogant hater of modern styles too - which isn't my intention either.

but from my real life experiences my opinions differ greatly from what has been posted by others and as this is a 'forum' I thought I would throw my two cents in.

We're all entitled to our own preferences and opinions. You're right about me having a greater theoretical knowledge of martial arts than a practical one though. I recognise this as a weakness of mine and I do definitely plan on changing this.

If there's anyone in Western Sydney willing to get together on a casual basis for some friendly training, I'd be up for it. I have all kinds of equipment to keep it safe. All styles and levels of experience welcome of course... we are all students of the martial arts.

[Hot Rodimus]

having boxed and done muay thai before and sparred against those guys I would still back one of these guys in a street fight over any traditional stylist, especially if both have only been training for a short amount of time.
Having trained in traditional and 'sport' styles I have pretty much moved on to only being interested in training in sport styles... I will throw judo in as being a sport style too lol.
Ask yourself, which styles are respected world wide for striking? muay thai and boxing. Grappling - Brazilian Ju jitsu and judo most likely, both very much sporting styles. What makes them effective? All of them are relatively simple in their approach and techniques but most importantly they are all trained in a manner that prepares students for what a real fight is like.
If you train in martial arts, ask yourself when was the last time you got hit in class? Sure most people learn this stuff so they don't get hit but if you have never been hit your never going to know how to not get hit or what to do when it does happen.
Once again I don't intend to put down traditional styles as they do have a lot going for them but for a lot of them to advertise they offer 'self defence' is a joke and it really cause for false advertising claims lol

[Bartrim]

My question about the eye gouge would be that it seems to me to be more of a fine motor skill technique, which as Hot Rodimus pointed out before, is impractical in a real fight where you're scared poopless. Furthermore, I've heard people say that eye gouging is overrated as even dogs will continue fighting with eyes bitten out. But I suppose it all depends on the exact scenario and situation too... <shrugs>

The eye gouge in our Kata comes after a back elbow. I believe it is in only in there because our arms extend completely in the opposite direction in that movement and they want us to show martial intent.

[GoktimusPrime]

Ask yourself, which styles are respected world wide for striking?

I think that entirely depends on which people you ask and which circle you're looking at.

muay thai and boxing. Grappling - Brazilian Ju jitsu and judo most likely, both very much sporting styles. What makes them effective? All of them are relatively simple in their approach and techniques but most importantly they are all trained in a manner that prepares students for what a real fight is like.

It depends on the training. And this applies to both all martial arts - sport or traditional.

In my experience a lot of muay thai fighters that I've sparred with are just shockingly POOR at defending their genitals and often hitting them in the groin is just too easy. And as I said in my last post, I've come across some (not all) sport fighters who, instead of thinking, "Gee, I need to keep that area guarded," just outrightly _refuse_ to do so and instead just tell me not to attack there (i.e. they're asking me to be a compliant partner, which as you pointed out is a training flaw).

Of course traditional styles work. They were forged in war across countless battles fought before the advent of the machine gun. The evolution of traditional martial arts is a lot like Darwin's evolution by natural selection - survival of the fittest. Hundreds of years ago if you went to war trained with an ineffective martial art you would be quickly killed in battle. Simple as that. If a traditional style can equip someone to defend themselves against an armed enemy combatant whose sole preoccupation in battle is to kill you quickly (so they can move on and kill your comrades and win the war), then surely it can work in modern civilian street self defence.

Scientifically speaking in order to demonstrate something you need to be able to consistently repeat a result over and over and over again right? If we look at the pre-machine gun history of martial arts... that's your continual repetition and we can see consistent results. Techniques that survived have done so because they've repeatedly worked. If we take sport martial arts and observe the volume of people around the world who train in it versus the number of people who actually become good enough to win tournaments and be considered exceptional fighters, I'd argue that those exceptional fighters would be a selective portion (arguably a minority?) of all people who practice sport martial arts. YES - you can also make the same conclusion about traditional martial arts, I will accept this - and I would say that this demonstrates the decline in the quality of traditional martial artists (note I said artists, not art).

Theoretically speaking, if we could wave a magic wand and undo the invention of the machine gun, then teach different martial arts to various armies of the world (say for example if the Australian army learnt a sport style and the North Korean army learnt a traditional style etc.) and then had a world war -- THEN we could see how well the styles and practitioners would fare! Of course this is impossible.

I'm not to say that learning a traditional martial art is an instant guarantee that you will be an effective fighter. It all depends on the training, as well as other factors like teacher competency and student competency. The best martial art will still fail at the hands of an incompetent practitioner. It's like say taking a really well made car and letting a bad driver drive it - then they smash the car. Do you blame the car or the driver?

If you train in martial arts, ask yourself when was the last time you got hit in class? Sure most people learn this stuff so they don't get hit but if you have never been hit your never going to know how to not get hit or what to do when it does happen.

Legally you're not meant to get hit in class. A martial arts instructor has the same legal duty of care as a school teacher and is lawfully bound to maintain student safety. Students can and do take legal action if injury occurs were reasonable means have not been taken to ensure student safety and/or treat injury if it occurs. I'm aware that a lot of martial arts teachers do ignore these regulations - and as many instructors have told me, it's a major factor as to why the insurance premiums for instructors keep going up every year... a cost which is then passed onto students with increasing fees.

Now I do agree that people do need to be conditioned to take hits... but there are safer and more legal ways to do this beyond allowing students to actually hit each other. Because if simply getting hit was enough, then just smack yourself with a hammer all over every day and you should be invincible. Traditional martial arts use body hardening conditioning exercises like arm knocking and leg knocking. I've seen this done in Goju Karate so perhaps you've experienced it. Others exercises like Pigua also involve striking yourselves in places like the body just to condition it to being hit. The difference between this and allowing yourself to be hit is that you can control the degree of how hard or soft you want to be hit. The idea is to start of with gentle bumping then gradually increase the severity as your tolerance improves. It's the same with any kind of conditioning -- if I started doing weights for the first time I wouldn't jump onto 100kg dumbells straight away. You start with something light first then gradually lift heavier weights as you get stronger.

I visited a Goju Karate Dojo in Japan and this black belt asked me to punch him in his stomach as hard as I could as many times as I wanted. I belted away as his gut and he didn't flinch! This was obviously done through gradual conditioning. I know that Seido Karate practitioners do little punches over their body as they do sit-ups.

Some sport martial arts and non-martial art sports have stuff which conditions endurance too. Practitioners of any art that involves throwing/falling like Aikido, Jujutsu, Judo etc. are naturally conditioned because their bodies are frequently hitting the mat. Anyone who plays a sport that involves tackling (e.g. rugby) have good endurance too for obvious reasons.

So there are ways of conditioning the body to endure hits in a safer and more legal way beyond just hitting people.

Once again I don't intend to put down traditional styles as they do have a lot going for them but for a lot of them to advertise they offer 'self defence' is a joke and it really cause for false advertising claims lol

You know what - the majority of martial arts schools I come across - traditional, sport or otherwise - do not teach proper self defence. And it's simply because the training is wrong.

If traditional martial arts are unworkable, then what the hell did people do in battle for the last several centuries and millenia of human conflict?? You think the Spartans just stood in front of the Persians and hurled "Yo Momma" insults? Or that the Romans Legion just carried weapons for the fun of it?? It's not as if it's only been in recent times that effective martial arts were suddenly invented and anything before it didn't work.

Just because a lot of people don't know how to use traditional martial arts properly doesn't mean they don't work. Imagine if you found a group of children with Transformer toys, and most of them didn't know how to transform them properly. Does it mean that all Transformer toys are crap and poorly designed? Not necessarily... it could just be a group of kids who don't know how to play with them properly

[GoktimusPrime]

My last post was written in a rush, so it probably comes off as being more defensive than it ought to be. So here's a hopefully more measured response...

having boxed and done muay thai before and sparred against those guys I would still back one of these guys in a street fight over any traditional stylist, especially if both have only been training for a short amount of time.

That's too much of a generalisation for me. There are too many variable factors. If I had to make a bet I'd look at both fighters individually and decide which one I thought was better. Even though I have a preference for traditional arts, if I thought the sport fighter was better I'd back the sport fighter. As in the hypothetical Mohammed Ali (sport fighter) vs Bruce Lee (traditional fighter) scenario, I would definitely put my money on Ali, not Lee.

Having trained in traditional and 'sport' styles I have pretty much moved on to only being interested in training in sport styles... I will throw judo in as being a sport style too lol.

I can accept that. You've tried both traditional and sport styles and find sport styles work better for you. That's great - as I always say, do the style that works for you. For me I've tried both traditional and sport styles too and my interest is primarily in traditional styles cos I find that works for me. But I would never recommend that you abandon doing sport styles and change to traditional if traditional doesn't work for you.

Once again I don't intend to put down traditional styles as they do have a lot going for them but for a lot of them to advertise they offer 'self defence' is a joke and it really cause for false advertising claims lol

As I said in my last post, this is a widespread problem among all martial art schools - regardless of being traditional or sport oriented. In my last post I talked about my experience with sport fighters with poor groin defence - but to be fair, I've also encountered traditional fighters with poor groin defence too.

I once sparred with some Karate fighters - and I was once sparring with this black belt 3rd Dan, and during the skirmish I grabbed his groin expecting him to be wearing a cup (as was the regulations of this Dojo). He wasn't. As soon as I felt his scrotum in my hand I immediately released and profusely apologised - he said it was okay as I had "let go just in time" and we both had a good laugh about it later. But I find the difference between this guy and those Muay Thai fighters mentioned in my last post is that the Karate fighter admitted that it was his fault for leaving his groin open and knew that he simply needs to keep his groin better covered. In other words, he was willing to learn from his mistake.

The muay thai fighters I sparred with vehemently refused to accept the suggestion that they should protect their groins. The next time I came to spar with them I actually used my own money to purchase an external groin guard (because they didn't have any guards of their own) and brought it along to the school and offered it to my partner for use in sparring. My partner angrily threw the guard away and stormed away from me complaining about how people can't attack the groin because it's an illegal target in competitions. I was told that I either had to guarantee not to attack the groin otherwise I was disallowed from sparring.

So I was given 2 choices:
A/ Become a more compliant partner, or...
B/ Leave

I went with option B. I have no hard feelings against those sport fighters, but if they expect me to become a more compliant partner and lower my standards, then it's just a waste of time for me.

[Hot Rodimus]

on the t hub again so hard to type but i think u misunderstood me gok. by getting hit in class i did not mean kids getting snotted. look at boxing, muay thai and mma classes. use protective equipment....unless they are meat heads lol. this still allows reasonable contact to be made without injury and law suits. students usually arent thrown in the deep end either.

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.

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. 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.

[Hot Rodimus]

my preference for sport styles comes from the simple techniques and the limited number of them. they translate to a real fight situation easily and the practitioner is used to actually getting hit and aally hitting back instead of pulling punches or punching air. it is very easy to become conditioned to pull your punches and have it translate to real life.
the reason i would back a noob sport fighter over traditional stylist is that 'simplistic' styles like boxing or muay thai allow the practitioner to reach a reasonable level of proficency in a relatively short time compared to most traditional styles as they tend to be more complex which includes wing chun which one of the reasons it was developed was the other styles at the time took too long to become proficient in them.
once again not knocking trad styles just explaining my reasons why i typed what i did, and yeah u r right in that a major part of what determines the outcome is the person themselves and not the style but i firmly believe the other part how u trained.

[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.

[Hot Rodimus]

we are going to agree to disagree I think Gok. You love traditional styles and the mystery and mysticism and smoke and mirrors that surround them. I have come to appreciate more realistic methods of protecting myself based on real life experiences.
What is the most realistic form of fighting these days? MMA surely, yeah it is a sport but it is also the closest thing you can get to a street fight without being in one.
What styles do these guys train in? Not traiditonal arts, even Machido who states he does Karate doesn't actually do Karate even though he markets it like that for his family business.
How come we have never seen any traditional stylists do well in them?
I am sure you have an answer for this.
Anyway I am tired of going round in circles, I never intended this to be a traidtional vs sport/modern arguement, merely that you should base your opinions on many different experiences instead of theory and reciting thousands of words of text that I have already read before in other media.
But in all honesty I wish you good luck with your training, I admire anyone who gets off their but and trains, I also hope that if you ever have to protect yourself or a loved one your training will be of use (though I pray that never eventuates, for you or anyone else here).