Neat, footage of Matt Thornton and the Straight Blast gym. A lot of Matt’s aliveness stuff is great, but the footage the compilers used of the UFC and Pride fights showing the KM and military combative guys losing is a little unfair. “Why didn’t they use those groin, larynx, back of the head or other special forces techniques?” Because they didn’t want to get disqualified for using illegal techniques, or maybe kill someone?
I was a Kuk Sool Won student for bout 6 years, and have sprinkled other arts in there since then, including a year at a McDojo teaching TKD/Hapkido.
After about 2 years of intensive training, I thought I was pretty bad-ass. I didn’t go looking for fights, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to avoid them.
Then I watched my best friend get choked out on the mat. I started to question the ability that we had learned. Now, don’t get me wrong, I made that kid tap out, using better technique. But I started to wonder how effective what I had learned would be in the Real World.
My advantage over someone else with no “training” is that I knew how to hit (and for me, more importantly, kick) correctly, and how to move. That’s it.
If I came up against someone with the same experience, I was not going to rely on Ki Bon Soo 10, I was going to be ass defensive as possible, or try to go to the ground, where the ground fighting techniques might give me an advantage.
Now that MMA schools are a dime a dozen, and most “tough guys” are going to have had at least a friend who has shown them the basics… well, I would probably get my head kicked in.
Of course, if I’m going out into a new place, or to a place with a bad rep, I carry a knife. I’ve been shown the basics of knife fighting, and I’m willing to bet the other guy hasn’t. Hopefully, it’ll never come up.
Martial arts is helpful in several ways:
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you get used to being hit, and to the feeling of hitting someone (if you full-contact spar). This means there’s less of a chance that you’ll turn into a whimpering mass the first time someone takes a swing at you.
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You improve your balance. This is not just useful in a fight, but in life in general. But it also helps you in a fight situation.
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You gain strength and power. I could always tell the difference between a black belt or a white belt when holding a heavy bag for someone, even with my eyes closed. And having seen lots of people start up in the dojo and progress through the ranks, it’s amazing how much more powerful their technique becomes.
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Physical conditioning. If you do have to get in an extended fight, Karate training will help you stay in it longer before running out of gas.
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You learn, through endless repetition of blocks and counters, to train your muscle memory to do the right thing when startled. The reason you practice 100 blocks a night for years on end is so that when the day comes that someone takes a swing at you, your natural reaction will switch from blindly trying to cover your face to actually blocking with some skill. Because if you have to think about it, it’s too late.
However, none of this lasts. There’s an old saying in karate - “to keep water boiling, you must maintain a fire under it.” It’s amazing how fast these skills deteriorate once you stop training daily.
Given all that, it’s true that Karate will not make you a good street fighter. And if you aren’t already someone with the temperament of a street fighter, it probably won’t give you the ability to consistently win against someone with little training but with the meanness and toughness of character that goes along with street fighting.
I’ve seen black belts completely crumble under the onslaught of a real street fighter. It’s one thing to square off with a sparring partner and try to outdo the other’s technique - it’s quite another to fend of a charging maniac who’s spitting in your face and attempting to bite your nose and gouge your eyes.
I studied Karate for years, and have a black belt in Goju Ryu. My brother never studied Karate at all, or any other kind of martial art, but he could kick my ass any time he wanted to. Because he’s got a meanness that I lack. I saw him get in scraps when we were younger, and it was just scary to watch. Some guy would get in his face, and my brother would catch him off guard by saying, 'hey man, I don’t want to fight, so let’s just…WHAM!" he’d hit him fast, hit him again, charge him into a wall or a car or anything else handy, get his head, elbows, knees, whatever into the guy’s face and groin, then he’d have him on the ground and be kicking or kneeing him in the face like a jackhammer. Fight over in about 5 seconds. He never, ever lost. He was a bouncer in all the toughest bars in town, and got into scraps almost every night. I don’t think I ever even saw him with so much as a cut lip or a black eye. But he sent other guys to the hospital. Routinely. Without an ounce of formal training. And btw, he actually enjoyed fighting black belts - he found them to be more predictable. It was the other crazy street fighters he was scared of.
If you run into a guy like that, your black belt isn’t going to help you much. He’s just way meaner than you are, and willing to do a lot of things instantly that you probably have natural reticence towards that will slow you down. And he’s smart enough to not let you get into a stance and get yourself mentally prepared. Street fights rarely start with two people squaring off against each other. They start unexpectedly, and since the street fighter starts it, he gets to start it on his terms. He’ll have some dodge to catch you off-guard and sucker punch you. Or he’ll start the fight when he’s already in grappling range so you don’t have a chance to use your stuff. He’ll also manover you into a situation where he’s got an advantage, like getting you back up against a short fence so he can bowl you into it and cause you to go ass-over-teakettle so he can jump on your head.
Interesting. Me too.
What I learned was that the basic of knife fighting is that you are going to cut or stabbed with you attackers knife pretty much 100% of the time, and that the best thing you could do is decide where that’s going to be.
For example, what you are supposed to do is keep your free arm crossed in front of you and try to make him stick you. While that knife is sheathed in your arm it doesn’t represent a danger to your vitals. Chances are he will still be holding on to it, and it you’re lucky it’s lodged in there so he needs to expend some effort pulling it out. While he’s working on this you can slit his throat or open up his gut.
Is that the same thing you’ve learned?
Yeesh. Guys, leave the knives at home. Knife fighting is a good way to turn a brawl into someone-is-dead. It’s probably the most common form of homicide round these parts.
The way I look at it, if the other guy has a knife I’d rather have both my hand free to try to fend him off. If he doesn’t, I sure as hell am not going to pull a knife. All it’s going to do is make the other guy realize he’s fighting for his life, and make him that much harder to deal with.
Taking a knife into a bar with the intention of using it for self-defense is insane. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone successfully defending themselves against a knife attack with another knife. But I’ve heard of lots of people being stabbed with their own knife when they foolishly pull it out in a fight. And far too many people who think they are going to deter a fight by pulling a knife and scaring the other guy, only to find that the guy either isn’t scared at all, or that you just made him wait and decide to jump you when you’re getting in your car. And now he knows you’re willing to use lethal force, so that good beating he was originally going to lay on you has turned into, “Now you’re gonna die.”
Sam, you left one thing off your list that many martial arts teach you, which is probably the most valuable skill I learned from aikido:
- Learn how to live the sort of life where you don’t get into fights in the first place.
Now that is the ultimate in “the best way to not get punched is to not be there when it lands.”
But, if you just gotta get into fights, study muay thai. Thai boxers are tough mofos, not because of superior technique, but because of brutal body conditioning. They live beyond pain. I doubt the craftiest streetfighter could hit a thai boxer with something he’s never been hit with before (short of an iron pipe, that is).
Pretty much. Also, if you can, wrap a coat or something around your shield arm.
But also, the best way to win a knife fight is if the guy doesn’t know you’ve got a knife until he’s bleeding out from the corotid or Femoral artery.
But yeah, you’re gonna get cut, and possibly cut pretty badly.
Awesome! That takedown was a Judo Tani Otoshi, “valley drop,” beautifully executed.
That’s like the counter for someone grabbing your wrists. When does that ever happen in anything other than a “no! you’re too drunk to drive! give me your keys!” scenario?
My GF and her freinds took some self defense course. I thought it was a waste of time as any of the moves they learned could easily be countered by my grabbing her and allowing my 200 lb mass to just settle.
I have long held the oppinion that martial arts are for nerds, Asian kids and wannabe psychos. The exception is the 1% who train for years, conditioning themselves like real boxers or wrestlers.
How do real street brawls play out? Well, unless one of the participants is hard core, it usually plays with two guys shoving each other and calling each other “pussy” and “gaylord” until bouncers, cops or some real tough guy tells them to cut the shit.
If one of the guys is hard core, he will punch the other guy in the face one or more times and that is that.
If you go someplace where you feel a need to bring a knife, maybe you should revisit how badly you need to be there.
Personally if I feel I need a knife, I bring a freakin gun. And as I don’t own a gun, I tend not to go to those places.
Although it is a paradox, I believe every fighter is a pacifist… or at least I hope that is their realization. Because every warrior knows the horror and weight of combat, win or lose, destiny and peace entangled.
You forget the key piece of information here. It was a woman you were dating. This is called “confidence-building”. The effects of which are not useless to her later, in… other situations. 
I’m female and have one male cousin my age and one a year older (brothers). Being more vicious, although still less vicious than most girls (I don’t go for the eyes or the nuts), I used to be able to beat them when we were little. I’d just grab them and pin them down.
Then they started judo (and later karate and one of them later taekwondo) and forgetaboutit: any grab I got, they broke.
Years later… I must have been 12… some guys came to our school to give us some talk/demo about judo and self-defense classes during PhysEd. They picked me as one of the “volunteers” (everybody does, I must have a volunteery face). So, one of them is talking to me, telling me to put my right foot ahead (I’m lefty trained as righty and the foot that feels natural ahead is the left), and the other one comes from behind and grabs me.
Uhm.
Do NOT scare me. It’s bad for YOUR health.
I’m reasonably sure that what my elbows, hipbone and nails did to him before my brain registered is not any official kata, but judging from the look on his face it hurt a lot :o
I see in this thread the same false dichotomy that I saw in the other. It’s keeps coming back to the “tournament bred sparer” vs “experienced, vicious, crazy street brawler.”
I would fully agree that a healthy dose of all out vicious combined with years of experience being all vicious in all out vicious street fights [even with no formal training] will generally kick the shit out of the “learned good technique and wins matches but doesn’t really want to hurt anybody” martial artist.
I don’t see why the assumption is “skill and training” on one side with “experience and bloody thristy” on the other. “Skilled and trained” and “experienced and bloody thirsty” are not mutally exclusive. You can be skilled and blood thristy without being experienced, you can be trained without being skilled but have plenty of experience, or you can just be trained and blood thirsty but without much skill.
To me this seems like setting a talented target shooter up against a less talented people-shooter in a people shooting match [where each other are the people]. Most of the time the people shooter will win because, though he may know nothing about breath control and bullet drop he does know how to shoot people. It may take him a few extra bullets to hit the target but he’ll have the time because the other guy will panic. Either way, it’s a setup because you haven’t shown that marksmenship isn’t useful in a gunfight.
To put it another way, a talented marksmen people-shooter will frequently kill an untalented people shooter.
Enough with the analogy, back to the OP. Let me pose the question a different way. Who would win?
A vicious bloody thirsty fighter who has ample training and experience or a vicious bloody thirsty fighter with just experience? Martial arts training isn’t the end all be all to unarmed combat, it’s simply an amplifier. It makes you better, it doesn’t make you automatically win. At the same time, it’s foolish to discount martial arts for that reason. The “I don’t really want to hurt anyone” guy is still going to do better in a fight with training then he would without. Likewise, vicious though untrained street brawler would be even more dangerous as a vicious trained street brawler.
What Dubious Weasel said about the false dicotomy.
When I first started doing Kenpo in 1978, one of the first degree brown belts was a big old muscle head. He was fast and really strong. Nice guy, really helpful to the beginners. He fought every tournament he could enter, and he fought hard. We drilled on dojo techniques and street techniques. He was a couple years older than I, from a neighboring high school (he had graduated), was sleeping with a couple of the really skanky ho’s at my high school and I knew a lot of people that knew him outside the dojo.
He was also a hard core biker that spent his weekends brawling bikers.
Net net, he was a very accomplished martial artist that did get his black belt after 5 hard years of training, and he “practiced” all the time in real life against very accomplished biker street fighters. You did not want to fuck with him on the street.
Second is that Kenpo, Kaja-kenpo and several other styles came out of Hawaii. Ed Parker and the other dudes from different disciplines would train together and then go to the slums of Hileah to “practice.” This is where the whole defense against multple simultaneous attacks was developed. They were rough and tumble martial artists out honing their techniques in the real world. Ed Parker at 60 could still punch like you would not believe.
Third, the deadliest mistake any martial artist can do is train only in their dojo and only in their style. Open tournements have a great way to teaching one what works and doesn’t work - at least in a tournement setting. Ditto with a good wrestler or judo artist. If you’re not used to getting taken down, then you’re dead meat the first time a college level wrestler puts you in a chicken wing. Ditto with a Glasgow kiss afficianado. Man, if you don’t know the disarming bar talk patsy set up and then the crushing headbutt, you’re gonna crumple on the ground.
If you train against different fighting styles be it other martial arts, wrestlers or bar fighters, then you’re in a better position when real life intrudes.
A lot of martial art training is for friendly fighting competition, so they learn how to fight in a way that just stops short of serious injury - they are not really trained to complete the manuver. This is for the obvious reason that during competition it’s not a good thing to cripple your opponent. I’m not saying that they don’t know how to do that, but their training is not the fluid movement, it is to stop short of that, so the total movement is not practiced, which puts him at a disadvantage. But if someone was trained to complete such moves, I can easially see people with broken arms, elbows and knees going again someone trained in martial arts, as opposed to ending is a painful ‘pinning’ position.
Well stated. All martial arts training really does is give you an edge in making your strikes/kicks/blocks more effective and powerful, as well as sharpening your reaction time. However, Sun Tzu said it best:
In other words, defeat your enemy without fighting him.
IMNSHO, a properly trained martial artists develops self-confidence to a degree that, when the bad guy is profiling for a victim, 999 times out of 1000, the martial artist will be passed over in favor of someone else that fits the bad guy’s working profile of a potential victim. That ties straight back to Sun Tzu. If I get passed over by the bad guy, I have won the conflict.
Only a fool would think that m. a. training makes them invincible, so they go out and look for fights.
A marine friend of mine told me the marines taught him to stick his knife in the guy’s taint, if he could.
Not only would having a long knife shoved through your taint hurt really bad, I’d imagine if the guy missed by a couple inches either way, that would be slightly unpleasant too.
This guy has some interesting views on the subject. Marc MacYoung
Great explanation, ChinaGuy.
I’ve heard that Al Tracy (student of Parker who then developed his own Kenpo system, which is what I study) doesn’t like sparring because it turns you into a bad real-life fighter. That is, when you’re sparring in your dojo or even in a lot of tournaments you’re not supposed to hurt the other person. You’re not supposed to kick them in the groin, punch them in the kidneys or face, or take their knee out. You’re supposed to get into the “points” area (front side, belt to neck and any covered part of the head), get a quick hit in and pull back.
In essence, sparring is not really MEANT to be akin to real fighting. It’s a sport which has technique and rules. You should know when you spar that you’re not fighting.
The only “real” fighting experience I ever get when sparring is when I spar against a newbie and they punch me in the nose, or aren’t thinking when they throw a punch and just lunge right through (instead of popping in and pulling back). If nothing else this helps you learn how to keep your nose out of a guy’s fist.
Sparring with idiots is a good way to learn how to take a punch. Sparring in general is a good way to lean how ot keep your balance and analyze the other fighter, looking for “ins.” It’s also an incredible way to build up stamina. There’s a world of difference between friendly competitive sparring with gear and un-protected UFC-style fighting.