Kung Fu Master Baiting

Bigger Stronger Leaner
21

[quote]batman730 wrote:

[quote]Grimlorn wrote:

[quote]Airtruth wrote:
What about the extreme or sometimes deadly force aspect of Martial Arts. Many techniques as Muay Thai and Boxing teach things you can use in sparring, such as a punch to the face, but many MA teach techniques such as eye gauging(Crane Style), and specific Adams Apple strikes. If you got a 5’5 woman who’s only learned those how is she going to spar that with someone who punches and kicks? thoughts?[/quote]
My thoughts are if you can’t spar those techniques regularly against live opponents, how are you going to get good practice? A boxer is going to learn to dodge punches coming at his face in sparring and in fighting. How hard do you think it would be to dodge a similar strike to the eyes? I don’t think anyone has to worry about a strike to the adams apple if they keep their chin tucked. Even then is that going to stop someone if you punch them in the neck? You think a groin shot will always stop a guy?[/quote]

I agree that it is important to train against live, fully resisting opponents. However if you believe that it is safe to train eye gouges, throat attacks etc. in a live, presumably contact sparring setting, I think you are underestimating the potential damage of these techniques. The throat especially is an unforgiving target and legally considered to be lethal force. This is not some sort of martial art bullshido thing. It is legitimate. As far as keeping your chin tucked, and slipping eye jabs etc, that’s great advice, but if it were infallible no one would ever land a clean shot in boxing.

The other consideration, besides safety, is how practical/tolerable it is to train this stuff “live” on a regular basis. Who is going to come out 3+ times/week to get their face/neck/ears/eyes etc. clawed/gouged/bitten etc. “live” in training? Who is going to roll with someone who gets out of a a mount by grabbing the back of your neck and driving their thumb into your eye socket as deep as it will go? This is no fun at all.

You can train this stuff full speed and almost full force but imo it needs to be in a very controlled setting with the aid of a protective combative suit of some kind. Usually this works better where a designated aggressor attacks and the trainee responds. The aggressor in the suit simulates likely responses to strikes to protected areas (eyes, groin etc) and the attack/response continues until the threat is neutralized or the trainee disengages and escapes. Sparring with it’s back and forth rhythm, measuring, distancing, multiple feints, complex footwork etc. is a useful tool. However it bears much less resemblance to a real self protection/fighting scenario than people tend to think.

[/quote]
I’m not saying it’s safe to train those techniques in sparring. What I am saying is if you don’t get to practice techniques in sparring you won’t be as proficient in them as you would be if you had. Nothing is infallible. Hitting an eye is going to be a lot more difficult than the head in a fight, same with the neck. Someone who’s never practiced eye gouging can still poke someone who trains in the eye in a fight.

22

[quote]Whelanj wrote:
This is a documentary that a friend of mine started as a student project in 2009, it tries to take a thoughtful look at those weird situations where Kung Fu Masters are forced to acknowledge that their might be some wholes in their theories.
[/quote]

Yawn

You totally miss the point in the training people. Physical culture, which is what the vast majority of people who do an MA do, is just exercise and a social event. That is perfectly fine and I think it’s pretty goofy of you to be down on office workers who want to improve themselves. So you can hand some middle-aged guy his ass in a fight – so what? If you are 20 years his junior and in shape, there is something wrong if you can’t.

Try this one of for size:

I kinda knew Becky, even trained with her a bit. She was about 30, totally bought into the MMA/cage rage thing and decided to get back into “fighting”. Took a punch from a 19 year old that killed her. (Her MMA idiot friends made a whole bunch of noise about dying a “true warrior’s death”, but they are really full of shit. She was a geography prof. who was the victim of their marketing as much as anything else, IMHO.) This is the reality of fighting and those masters know it.

So what to do? A lot of those guys (and I’ve been doing jujutsu for 30 years or so, so this is kinda sekret) are fucking nasty as Hell and know a lot of sneaky shit that will really hurt you. If you really manage to be a threat, they kill you like any other assailant. You are interested in a sporting match. They can’t do that and can’t afford to lose either (who pays my rent and takes care of my kids cause you want to impress you bros? You are so totally not worth the rest of my life. To get me to engage is going to take a lot of work on your part, to the point that every judge will say you had it coming if it gets to that.)

And all of this has to do with adolescent posturing like good mammals. A fight is just a type of consensual combat, viz., a duel. This is very different from a real life and death encounter. Trust me on that one do… Let me tell you about my buddy who was body-guarding and got shot about 20 times then stabbed about 50 on top of it. It was damned sad telling his little daughter about her daddy. Yeah. Been in the business too long. Seen too much to take a thread like this seriously…

Now back to telling us how older people don’t know jack shit and you can prove it by assaulting some senior citizens.

– jj

23

[quote]jj-dude wrote:

[quote]Whelanj wrote:
This is a documentary that a friend of mine started as a student project in 2009, it tries to take a thoughtful look at those weird situations where Kung Fu Masters are forced to acknowledge that their might be some wholes in their theories.
[/quote]

Yawn

You totally miss the point in the training people. Physical culture, which is what the vast majority of people who do an MA do, is just exercise and a social event. That is perfectly fine and I think it’s pretty goofy of you to be down on office workers who want to improve themselves. So you can hand some middle-aged guy his ass in a fight – so what? If you are 20 years his junior and in shape, there is something wrong if you can’t.

Try this one of for size:

I kinda knew Becky, even trained with her a bit. She was about 30, totally bought into the MMA/cage rage thing and decided to get back into “fighting”. Took a punch from a 19 year old that killed her. (Her MMA idiot friends made a whole bunch of noise about dying a “true warrior’s death”, but they are really full of shit. She was a geography prof. who was the victim of their marketing as much as anything else, IMHO.) This is the reality of fighting and those masters know it.

So what to do? A lot of those guys (and I’ve been doing jujutsu for 30 years or so, so this is kinda sekret) are fucking nasty as Hell and know a lot of sneaky shit that will really hurt you. If you really manage to be a threat, they kill you like any other assailant. You are interested in a sporting match. They can’t do that and can’t afford to lose either (who pays their rent and takes care of my kids cause you want to impress you bros? You are so totally not worth the rest of my life. To get me to engage is going to take a lot of work on your part, to the point that every judge will say you had it coming if it gets to that.)

And all of this has to do with adolescent posturing like good mammals. A fight is just a type of consensual combat, viz., a duel. This is very different from a real life and death encounter. Trust me on that one do… Let me tell you about my buddy who was body-guarding and got shot about 20 times then stabbed about 50 on top of it. It was damned sad telling his little daughter about her daddy. Yeah. Been in the business too long. Seen too much to take a thread like this seriously…

Now back to telling us how older people don’t jack shit and you can prove it by assaulting some senior citizens.

– jj[/quote]

I think there is plenty of room for “most people” to enjoy their social outing doing MA and I don’t think anyone here is trying to condemn them or take that away either. That being said the reason MA came about was for combat and there are some of us who have trained different styles and would like to see a Kung Fu master fight using the very sylistic combatives in a real situation and raise the question does this really work? I feel that was part of the point of the video.

as far as nasty techniques and maming people on the street when they attack you, I can assure you that you need to spar with a certain amount of reality to become good at it and you need to be put in situations where you have to defend and stay calm in order to look for those shots. Doing MMA or fighting in a ring or cage with limited rules is a great step to understand the reality of fighting and people who talk it down are probably just scared to get in ther and try it themselves and rely on how damaging they would be with there super flying throat grab and shoryuken! ala street fighter punch.

Also part of training lets you know the consequence of fighting and use it only when you have to. If you bully people long enough you will get shot or stabbed possibly when you are sleeping. I have seen it happen to some pretty bad ass dudes. So don’t put yourself out there and you will have less problems and if you do most time you will be just in taking care of business.

24

[quote]Ranzo wrote:

First off, I have paid my dues and have busted damn near everything twice to prove it. Fought hard full contact for many years. I have nothing at all against “fun” which in my book includes broken bones and the occasional concussion.

But…

Self defense is 90% context. Those times I have had to actually defend myself, the physical aspect of it was fairly negligible by the time push came to shove. The complaint with over the top training is that I thought I was actually doing something realistic, but while war games are good fun and can be a useful training adjunct, they also are a complete artifice. You do not learn how to judge earnestly hostile intent, look for being set up or figure out when people are getting ready to deploy a weapon. Having someone well and truly committed to hurting you with a baseball bat (btdt, barely managed to get out of that one) is a world apart from having some guy trying to “fight” you. As a good buddy of mine said so memorably, “punching or kicking someone who is trying to beat you doesn’t work so well”. He was a semi-pro boxer and worked in the rougher barrios of South Texas doing security.

Oh and the answer you don’t expect out of this: A martial art is a reference book for how things don’t work in the body and busting people. They involve pedagogy (how to teach it) and training information. A good martial art should give you a lot of tactical and strategic information, virtually all of which is useless in a ring. As are most of the techniques, since they can’t be done with a glove on, or rely on sissy moves (like kneecapping someone). It is the training and the accumulated wisdom of the art that makes it work. Bad MMA analysis is to assume that only what works in the ring is real, toss out everything else from a traditional MA, then declare that there really isn’t much to one.

You think something else is the ueber ultimate martial art? Prove it. Take some 80 year old granny and show me how you’d make her kick butt. Pretty much all the challenges to traditional MA I’ve seen (yeah, and a lot of old MAs, I admit, suck too) rely on being an athletic male in your late teens/early 20’s. A lot of the best MMAers are also some of the best conditioned people on the planet. Georges St. Pierre doesn’t need martial arts to kick most people’s asses. So what aside from straight athletic ability makes any MMA or variants superior? Take their techniques and teach them to someone small and frail and you will quickly see that they are no better than a lot of traditional martial arts techniques. If its superiority requires 3 - 4 hours a day at the gym, then it is elitist in nature and all you’ve shown is that someone who could probably win gold at the Olympics is a really awesome athlete. Not quite an amazing statement. (Yeah, I’ve heard lots of people tell me something or other is the greatest then toe the carpet while they mumble about how they really don’t have the time to do it, but they’ll get back to it one of these days.)

– jj

25

^ This is the point though. At the end of the day, If you can’t impose physical superiority on someone (whether it’s athletic, weight or technique based) then your strategy needs to change. I dont care how big or bad ass you are, something heavy on the back of your head when you’re not expecting it, or something sharp pushed repeatedly between your ribs, will end you, whatever MA, MMA, Boxing etc you know. Seriously, i don’t care if you can fucking levitate, hovver near ground level and there are children who can fuck you up.

I know of more than a few big, mean guys from round my area who were put on life support by kids who didnt yet have hairs on their balls. The most dangerous weapons you can ever have in a real fight are a lack of a sense of proportion and nothing to lose. They’re the things that stop most of us being the first ones to pick up a shard of glass, or a potentially lethal weapon. That’s why the single best bit of self defence is always to walk away.

26

[quote]jj-dude wrote:

[quote]Whelanj wrote:
This is a documentary that a friend of mine started as a student project in 2009, it tries to take a thoughtful look at those weird situations where Kung Fu Masters are forced to acknowledge that their might be some wholes in their theories.
[/quote]

Yawn

You totally miss the point in the training people. Physical culture, which is what the vast majority of people who do an MA do, is just exercise and a social event. That is perfectly fine and I think it’s pretty goofy of you to be down on office workers who want to improve themselves. So you can hand some middle-aged guy his ass in a fight – so what? If you are 20 years his junior and in shape, there is something wrong if you can’t.

Try this one of for size:

I kinda knew Becky, even trained with her a bit. She was about 30, totally bought into the MMA/cage rage thing and decided to get back into “fighting”. Took a punch from a 19 year old that killed her. (Her MMA idiot friends made a whole bunch of noise about dying a “true warrior’s death”, but they are really full of shit. She was a geography prof. who was the victim of their marketing as much as anything else, IMHO.) This is the reality of fighting and those masters know it.

So what to do? A lot of those guys (and I’ve been doing jujutsu for 30 years or so, so this is kinda sekret) are fucking nasty as Hell and know a lot of sneaky shit that will really hurt you. If you really manage to be a threat, they kill you like any other assailant. You are interested in a sporting match. They can’t do that and can’t afford to lose either (who pays my rent and takes care of my kids cause you want to impress you bros? You are so totally not worth the rest of my life. To get me to engage is going to take a lot of work on your part, to the point that every judge will say you had it coming if it gets to that.)

And all of this has to do with adolescent posturing like good mammals. A fight is just a type of consensual combat, viz., a duel. This is very different from a real life and death encounter. Trust me on that one do… Let me tell you about my buddy who was body-guarding and got shot about 20 times then stabbed about 50 on top of it. It was damned sad telling his little daughter about her daddy. Yeah. Been in the business too long. Seen too much to take a thread like this seriously…

Now back to telling us how older people don’t know jack shit and you can prove it by assaulting some senior citizens.

– jj[/quote]
So because one person gets killed by a blow that means that no one else should compete or fight? She was taken in by the cage rage marketing of mma? Really? How do you know that? Are you saying she didn’t know the risks? Yeah there are risks in competing in sports. That doesn’t justify a bunch of “masters” who’ve never competed in fighting claiming their techniques are deadly because their “master” who taught them told them. There is a reason these people don’t ever compete and claim their techniques are deadly, because they’re afraid to put their egos on the line.

27

Your talking combat sports I am talking just fighting. I am sure there are MMA fighters out there who had traditional martial arts in there line of learning but they also moved to other systems.

Cung Le is one that comes to mind though. He uses Sanshou which is a form of Kung Fu and he was pretty succesful in mma so they do exist.

I dont agree with this. What is the joke is the mcdojo scene that erupted after the karate kid. This idea that Martial Arts is not for fighting but some higher ideal. to learn to fight without actually fighting is mind boggling. Money like it does to most things pretty much made Karate and Kung Fu a joke.

28

I dont agree with this. What is the joke is the mcdojo scene that erupted after the karate kid. This idea that Martial Arts is not for fighting but some higher ideal. to learn to fight without actually fighting is mind boggling. Money like it does to most things pretty much made Karate and Kung Fu a joke.[/quote]

I have to agree with this, and don’t forget I am a 23 year tma guy. I think it was the combination of karate kid in the late '80’s and the UFC in the '90’s that were a big part of this. Young guys who want to learn to fight quickly went for mma and parents who wanted the “increased, focus, self esteem, adhd, better grades, respect” thing put their 4 year olds in karate classes.And it did ruin karate for the masses.

There are tma dojos that teach some good stuff, but they are hard to find.I don’t think it is the art as much as how it is trained. Boxers have an inherent advantage because they always train all out-because the gloves and techniques make it possible- so in a real fight it is not a different mindset. And many tma guys have never crosstrained and some have never been punched in the face in anger!(Remember Mike Tyson’s trainer’s quote “Everybody has a plan until they get hit?”).

Some tma systems do train all out. I did a few years of small circle jujitsu which opened mu eyes. Great system which I wish I discovered when I was younger. No sparring per se, but all out attacks, ambushes, muggings etc. You learn pretty quickly that standing still and thinking “there is no first strike in karate” will get you killed. A good thing for anybody training a combat art to learn. Training against knives and guns is also something that I think has value and mma doesn’t train this nor does boxing. Any mma guy or boxer should consider this as something to add to their game.

As a guy that turns 58 in 2 days I also think it is important to find a system that one can train over the long haul. For me karate has been it. Crosstraining is a must, and I still try to adapt what I see other styles and systems doing to what I do. The guy in the video has clearly bought into the idea that he is invincible and that his art, chi, or whatever will bail him out in a real confrontation. This happens to a lot of guys when they get older and stop training with resistent opponents. Can’t do that if you want to continue to be any good.

I also find that kata and pre arranged kumite have a place in training and in health. Yeah, I probably wouldn’t feel this way if I was turning 28.And if I was turning 28 I’d be training mma.But, I’m not so I do what I do and train what I can. I’ve found something THAT WORKS FOR ME, and I hope others here who love combat arts can find something as well.

29

[quote]Grimlorn wrote:
So because one person gets killed by a blow that means that no one else should compete or fight?
[/quote]

You cannot infer that I said that. I said she was too old to hop in a ring with someone 10 years her junior since her timing was off.

Because I knew her and the club she trained in. Are you such an expert that you can discount all first hand experience and eye witness accounts?

The milieu in which she trained – and this is not so far off the mark from other such schools – has a curious doublethink in place: The techniques are the most effective ever, at the same time they are a really safe. How can that be?

In some (ok, most) cases certainly I agree. A lot of these great Kung Fu masters got their skills the same way a lot of current UFC/MMA/NHB people did: They made them up. (How can someone get “certified” in MMA? Oh yeah, their buddies give them awards.) Remember the TV show “Kung Fu”? You are too young to remember that damn near every street corner sprouted a school that was run by someone whose credentials boiled down to reading a few issues of Black Belt magazine. Again, I’ve been doing this for ages and the same sorts of marketing schtick I see in more recent MMA and its awesome effectiveness, in suitably modernized form, is what these KF guys did. Now a lot of these schools can claim a lineage of being around for 40 years and you have to deal with their idiot students who think they are

This has not been helped by such organizations as the Kukiwon. This is the main training hall for Tae Kwon Do which, under government auspices, runs Korean martial arts as an export industry. Simply dreadful MA and we can point to the same issue that it was founded in the 1950’s (by General He, in this case) and has no martial history to speak of, but does get Korean government subsidies. Worst offshoot of all of these was the Chung Moo Kwan (look it up) the worst martial arts cult ever.

My point is that I am an expert (yes I am) and I have a very jaded eye turned to all of martial arts. What made a lot of these traditional schools laughable is a social dynamic that is also running rampant in MMA. I’ve seen countless fads come and go and all lay claim to being really effective. I see little to no difference, except that a lot more people are stepping in the ring when they shouldn’t because they do not know the risks. (I used to box in addition to kickboxing, so I really do know this shit.) I would not have advised Becky to do what she did, but I was not her trainer and not in her school and therefore could be discounted as a source of information (and a lot of the MMA schools I run into are as stupidly insular and narrow minded as they get, since they think they’ve figured it all out*).

I’ll take such ruminations as yours seriously when you show the good common sense to apply it to the MMAers themselves. You’ll get an opening experience if you do.

– jj

  • Example. I was training in a gym a few weeks back and there was a small BJJ club training there too. So they were doing the usual things they ought to and were working on arm bars. Good solid stuff, and their coach – who has no idea who I am – starts talking about street applications. So he shows a really nasty arm break that works against someone who almost has a cross lock (juji gatame) on you. Facepalm What drunk cowboy is going to slap an armbar on you from the mount? Why would you need to do this to him? His justification was that since it was nasty (and again, a pretty standard move) it must be a street application. Is this so different from those stupid shit TKD defenses against a mugger that tries a spinning back kick on you? Who the Hell does that on the street? See where I am coming from?
30

[quote]punchedbear wrote:
ZEB wrote:Really now, why don’t you name them all. And I don’t mean Kun Fu fighters who can beat other Kung Fu fighters. One can be a champion at pillow fighting but what does that really mean? Name some Kung Fu fighters who can compete and defeat the worlds best (real) fighters.

Your talking combat sports I am talking just fighting.[/quote]

Oh I see…well then that changes everything sorry I brought it up…WHOA…NOT SO FAST!

If you don’t think that sport fighters like Josh Koscheck, for example, (and most of the others) couldn’t take it to the street and pound the daylights out of the typical Kung Fu master then you’re drinking the same flavor koolaide as the typical 16 year old brain washed kid who wants to believe that his teacher is superman. Guess what? When the rules are eliminated for your Kung Fu master they also go out the window for the mma fighter. You don’t think that these guys are capable of groin shots, throat strikes, eye gouges and a number of other techniques currently barred from mma? You need a dose of reality my friend. Not only can they do them but because of their superior athleticism, strength and conditioning they can do them better, faster and with far more (shall we call it) gusto!

In fact, while the UFC currently bars groin strikes and other types of techniques in the early days they didn’t. It was virtually no holds barred. Where were all the Kung Fu champions then? I saw a couple of them entered the first few years but none of them did very well. There’s a reason for that and it had nothing to do with their “lethal” techniques being barred. But everything to do with those techniques not working!

Sanshou was developed by the Chinese military as a more practical form of fighting. Not exactly an old school Kung Fu form. But in all fairness I’ll give it to you. But let’s remember that Cung Le fought most of his fights in the stand up game. Certainly nothing you can call “mma”. He fought only 9 mma fights to my knowledge beating only one outstanding fighter “Scott Smith.” And dam near getting killed against an aging Wanderlei Silva (I thought they were going to have to call the police to get Vandy off of him). But again, I’ll give Kung Le. So we have one reasonably good mma fighter out of how many practicing Kung Fu stylists? Now how many wrestlers, BJJ stylists, and Thai Boxing athletes are there?

[quote]ZEB wrote:Traditional karate/Kung Fu (compared to today’s MMA fighters) is a long running joke that doesn’t go away as long as there are gullible youth nodding their head with an open mouth.

I dont agree with this. What is the joke is the mcdojo scene that erupted after the karate kid. This idea that Martial Arts is not for fighting but some higher ideal. to learn to fight without actually fighting is mind boggling. Money like it does to most things pretty much made Karate and Kung Fu a joke.[/quote]

I agree with you on this point. But I will go a step further, Kung Fu, compared to other fighting styles is a joke in and of itself!

31

You’re talking out your ass

[quote]ZEB wrote:

If you don’t think that sport fighters like Josh Koscheck, for example, (and most of the others) couldn’t take it to the street and pound the daylights out of the typical Kung Fu master then you’re drinking the same flavor koolaide as the typical 16 year old brain washed kid who wants to believe that his teacher is superman.[/quote]
Who is a typical Kung Fu Master? Somebody who says he is? If I’m chinese, and walk around flowing like water can say I’m a Kung Fu Master? Your talking about a typical brain washed 16 year old, then you use the same definition. Not too bright.

[quote]
mma fighter[/quote] MMA = mixed martial arts = mixed MARTIAL ARTS. As in different combination of styles. NO Champion fighter uses one fighting style. A fighting style is American Wrestling, Tae Kwon Do, Jiu Jitsu. Kung Fu is not a fighting style, it is a discipline and life style. Practice of mastery. The exercises and styles a master chooses are what he thinks will strengthen him, and his students. 4 Different “Masters” is likely to produce 4 different styles, while basic techniques are probably the same, the advanced techniques can differ greatly.

[quote] Where were all the Kung Fu champions then? I saw a couple of them entered the first few years but none of them did very well. [/quote] Who were the ones that entered that didn’t do well? I doubt any since none of them would say they learned to fight using Kung Fu since as I said before it’s a mastery of discipline and lifestyle. The aspects of which only the best fighters use at the best times. Such as Jon Jones the process of using meditation to to enhance his mental acumen before the fight is more Kung Fu then throwing a punch.

[quote] Sanshou was developed by the Chinese military as a more practical form of fighting. Not exactly an old school Kung Fu form. But in all fairness I’ll give it to you. But let’s remember that Cung Le fought most of his fights in the stand up game. Certainly nothing you can call “mma”. [/quote] Seriously??? Did you use your brain to type this? What fighting style is “MMA”? So are you telling me every “MMA Master walking around in the street can beat Josh Koscheck” That’s how your stupid your Kung Fu statement sounds.

32

[quote]Airtruth wrote:
You’re talking out your ass[/quote]

I’ve read a few of your posts and you live out of your ass. You’ve tossed logic to the side faster than Lindsay Lohan looking for her first drink of the day. But I’ll cut through your pointless rhetoric and get to the chase. Produce some serious Kung Fu fighters of any age shape or nationality who have Kung Fu as their base style that have been effective fighters against other styles, or in mma in general. We know as a pure fighting art it is inferior.

As I’ve stated in the early days of the UFC with very limited rules there were a few who tried and lost early. Unlike say the wrestlers and Jiu-Jitsu practitioners. Now get busy and produce that long list for me, or shut up. Hmm I should not have said that this is the Internet and no one shuts up–oh well the intent is still good.

Simple huh?

33

[quote]ZEB wrote:

If you don’t think that sport fighters like Josh Koscheck, for example, (and most of the others) couldn’t take it to the street and pound the daylights out of the typical Kung Fu master then you’re drinking the same flavor koolaide as the typical 16 year old brain washed kid who wants to believe that his teacher is superman. Guess what? When the rules are eliminated for your Kung Fu master they also go out the window for the mma fighter. You don’t think that these guys are capable of groin shots, throat strikes, eye gouges and a number of other techniques currently barred from mma? You need a dose of reality my friend. Not only can they do them but because of their superior athleticism, strength and conditioning they can do them better, faster and with far more (shall we call it) gusto!
[/quote]

So here is the scenario for you: You have one of these super tough fighters in your living room, pissed off as Hell at your wife and threatening to beat the shit out of her in front of your kids. (This was pretty much an actual situation that occurred, btw.) You are also convinced he really means it. If he is invincible, then what? Are you helpless to come up with something? Seriously. What would you (as in any of you) do?

Brown nosing him until he can’t walk, is, of course, one option…

– jj

34

[quote]jj-dude wrote:
[/quote]
Listen maybe I inferred wrong. I thought you were talking about it being wrong to compete. You said you trained with that girl once or twice. I didn’t think that meant you knew that much about her or the gym she trained at. I don’t know what kind of gym this was. And I still doubt that you know whether she was being hyped up for cage rage or that she genuinely wanted to compete or not. Sure you may have known she wasn’t ready to fight and that gym is probably a bad gym if it’s not making it clear the risks and doesn’t know how to tell if someone is ready to compete or not. But I think every fighter knows there are some risks to competing. Brain damage and very very rarely death. It doesn’t take a genius to tell these things. I don’t really know why she was getting in the ring with a guy. He probably weighed more than her too.

And you’re right a lot of tae kwon do and other schools out there have started offering MMA classes because it’s a fad. I don’t think it’s going to come and go though. There is a ton of fraud in the martial arts community. That’s why it’s safe to go with a popular gym that trains amateur and pro fighters if MMA is what you’re interested in. MMA is going to be around for a long time like boxing.

Some techniques from TMA do transfer pretty well to MMA. It’s mixed martial arts. It takes things from everywhere, whatever works and is effective. If a champion arose who trained primarily kung fu for striking, I’m sure kung fu would see a spike in popularity. But no one that’s a “master” is stepping up and competing and proving it can hang with the others. Movies and tv have romanticized a lot of martial arts so much that people think they are really effective by themselves. They see a guy who’s trained in just kung fu or karate beating the crap out of 5-10 guys at once. It’s a joke.

That’s why competing is so important. Movies like the Karate Kid and tv shows like Kung Fu will come and go, but competition will keep MMA around just like it has for boxing.

I’m not familiar with sanshou and I’ve only seen a couple of Cung Le’s fights, does he actually use it when fighting? I’m reminded of that Wing Chun guy that fights or use to fight MMA. He’d swear he was a Wing Chun guy and Wing Chun was great but when he fought he never used any Wing Chun techniques. It just looked like a MMA fight.

35

[quote]Grimlorn wrote:

[quote]jj-dude wrote:
[/quote]
Listen maybe I inferred wrong. I thought you were talking about it being wrong to compete. You said you trained with that girl once or twice. I didn’t think that meant you knew that much about her or the gym she trained at.

And you’re right a lot of tae kwon do and other schools out there have started offering MMA classes because it’s a fad. I don’t think it’s going to come and go though. There is a ton of fraud in the martial arts community. That’s why it’s safe to go with a popular gym that trains amateur and pro fighters if MMA is what you’re interested in. MMA is going to be around for a long time like boxing.

Some techniques from TMA do transfer pretty well to MMA. It’s mixed martial arts. It takes things from everywhere, whatever works and is effective. If a champion arose who trained primarily kung fu for striking, I’m sure kung fu would see a spike in popularity. But no one that’s a “master” is stepping up and competing and proving it can hang with the others. Movies and tv have romanticized a lot of martial arts so much that people think they are really effective by themselves. They see a guy who’s trained in just kung fu or karate beating the crap out of 5-10 guys at once. It’s a joke.[/quote]

Thanks for the kind words. I do agree with what you wrote, btw.

Here’s a good one for you to read up on: http://www.wimsblog.com Wim is a really good guy that kicks butt with the Muy Thai folks, was heavy weight champion in Sanshou and does … traditional Tai Chi Chuan. He’s also just frikkin scary if you ever get a chance to play with him. Nice guy.

His blog talks a lot about his views on TMA, MMA and self defense and all of it is level-headed, clearly reasoned and totally no nonsense. TMA done right.

– jj

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[quote]jj-dude wrote:

[quote]ZEB wrote:

If you don’t think that sport fighters like Josh Koscheck, for example, (and most of the others) couldn’t take it to the street and pound the daylights out of the typical Kung Fu master then you’re drinking the same flavor koolaide as the typical 16 year old brain washed kid who wants to believe that his teacher is superman. Guess what? When the rules are eliminated for your Kung Fu master they also go out the window for the mma fighter. You don’t think that these guys are capable of groin shots, throat strikes, eye gouges and a number of other techniques currently barred from mma? You need a dose of reality my friend. Not only can they do them but because of their superior athleticism, strength and conditioning they can do them better, faster and with far more (shall we call it) gusto!
[/quote]

So here is the scenario for you: You have one of these super tough fighters in your living room, pissed off as Hell at your wife and threatening to beat the shit out of her in front of your kids. (This was pretty much an actual situation that occurred, btw.) You are also convinced he really means it. If he is invincible, then what? Are you helpless to come up with something? Seriously. What would you (as in any of you) do?

Brown nosing him until he can’t walk, is, of course, one option…

– jj[/quote]

Ha ha I did literally laugh out loud at your brown nose comment. Um, let’s see what would I do? Well, it’s obvious and also what you want to hear (reach for my gun). But it does not negate the argument that many (should I say most?) traditional martial arts (specifically kung Fu and some forms of karate) are pretty much a fraud when they’re faced with almost any other fighting style from boxing to wrestling and most in between.

Perhaps this sounds overly harsh to post on a combat forum. Not at all how we’re supposed to respond in an age when “everything is cool man.” But it’s the hard truth. And one that more people should accept.

37

Oh man. What an invigorating argument, the likes of which has never been seen on this forum before!

Be still my heart…

There are many good TMA’s that work just fine. There are many modern martial arts that work just fine. How well they work is dependent TOTALLY on how they are taught, and by whom.

Why is this such a hard concept to understand?

38

[quote]jj-dude wrote:

First off, I have paid my dues and have busted damn near everything twice to prove it. Fought hard full contact for many years. I have nothing at all against “fun” which in my book includes broken bones and the occasional concussion.

But…

Self defense is 90% context. Those times I have had to actually defend myself, the physical aspect of it was fairly negligible by the time push came to shove. The complaint with over the top training is that I thought I was actually doing something realistic, but while war games are good fun and can be a useful training adjunct, they also are a complete artifice. You do not learn how to judge earnestly hostile intent, look for being set up or figure out when people are getting ready to deploy a weapon. Having someone well and truly committed to hurting you with a baseball bat (btdt, barely managed to get out of that one) is a world apart from having some guy trying to “fight” you. As a good buddy of mine said so memorably, “punching or kicking someone who is trying to beat you doesn’t work so well”. He was a semi-pro boxer and worked in the rougher barrios of South Texas doing security.

Oh and the answer you don’t expect out of this: A martial art is a reference book for how things don’t work in the body and busting people. They involve pedagogy (how to teach it) and training information. A good martial art should give you a lot of tactical and strategic information, virtually all of which is useless in a ring. As are most of the techniques, since they can’t be done with a glove on, or rely on sissy moves (like kneecapping someone). It is the training and the accumulated wisdom of the art that makes it work. Bad MMA analysis is to assume that only what works in the ring is real, toss out everything else from a traditional MA, then declare that there really isn’t much to one.

You think something else is the ueber ultimate martial art? Prove it. Take some 80 year old granny and show me how you’d make her kick butt. Pretty much all the challenges to traditional MA I’ve seen (yeah, and a lot of old MAs, I admit, suck too) rely on being an athletic male in your late teens/early 20’s. A lot of the best MMAers are also some of the best conditioned people on the planet. Georges St. Pierre doesn’t need martial arts to kick most people’s asses. So what aside from straight athletic ability makes any MMA or variants superior? Take their techniques and teach them to someone small and frail and you will quickly see that they are no better than a lot of traditional martial arts techniques. If its superiority requires 3 - 4 hours a day at the gym, then it is elitist in nature and all you’ve shown is that someone who could probably win gold at the Olympics is a really awesome athlete. Not quite an amazing statement. (Yeah, I’ve heard lots of people tell me something or other is the greatest then toe the carpet while they mumble about how they really don’t have the time to do it, but they’ll get back to it one of these days.)

– jj[/quote]

This is a great post.

39

[quote]Airtruth wrote:
You’re talking out your ass

[/quote]

He sure is. That’s his habit. And he’ll keep doing it unless you ignore him. Which I highly, highly advise you to do.

ZEB cannot, and will never, understand that streetfighting and ringfighting are two totally different games, and being good in one doesn’t automatically make you good at the other.

Let it go though. He is not worth your time.

40

[quote]jj-dude wrote:

Here’s a good one for you to read up on: http://www.wimsblog.com Wim is a really good guy that kicks butt with the Muy Thai folks, was heavy weight champion in Sanshou and does … traditional Tai Chi Chuan. He’s also just frikkin scary if you ever get a chance to play with him. Nice guy.

His blog talks a lot about his views on TMA, MMA and self defense and all of it is level-headed, clearly reasoned and totally no nonsense. TMA done right.

– jj[/quote]

I agree. Wim is excellent. Completely excellent.