I’ve seen a lot of teenagers fighting - it’s always a punch, and then it’s on the ground like a pile of puppies.
I did see one good fight between a couple of 19 year olds. It was upright and moving over a large area. It was a good 10 minutes of fighting and it was great entertainment. It did not, however, get dirty, there were no nails or biting, just hard punching and blocking. No martial arts involved, though, although at least one of the guys had some old training.
A friend of mine had a black belt in something - I don’t know enough about martial arts to know what he was into. Anyway, he was a skinny, geeky looking guy with black-rimmed glasses and a rather unusual walking gait. It all said “Target!”
One night in a strange city, he wound up in a bad neighborhood. A mugger with a knife blocked his path. According to my friend, he delivered a side-kick (?) to the crotch, the mugger dropped his knife, and my friend walked on.
Yeah, I know it sounds like a “likely story”, but I know him quite well, and for all his faults, he’s not a liar. Take it for what it’s worth.
If you’re going to pay Jackie Chan (or whomever) several million dollars, you’re going to have him do lots of fancy jumps and kicks and punches and such things. That’s why he’s there.
Street fights don’t tend to have the same impetus.
The problem with pressure points though is that they’re very variable - to the point where they are almost functionally useless. Not everybody has the points in exactly the same place and different people have different muscular skeletons so they may have muscle growing over the pressure point.
That brachial strike looks great but you’re taking a risk. What if it doesn’t work because he’s got a really muscular neck? You will probably only get one shot and you might be better going for something a little more “assured” like the genitals or the eyes or the windpipe. Or even a good powerful side kick to the knee of his supporting leg.
This George Dillman site has video clips of some pressure point attacks and they look great - under controlled circumstances. But when you consider that you’re probably only going to get one hit, do you really want to use it up on something that might not work?
It’s highly choreographed Krav Maga… it’s just Krav Maga is so damn ugly to begin with it comes out looking like real fighting.
I was reading that the fight in The Fast and The Furious, between Paul Walker and that other dude at the sandwich shop was entirely improvised. It did look fairly realistic as I recall.
we need an “Ask a street fighter” thread… anyone been in a lot of street fights?
Nope, the Bourne movies are mostly Kali. Matt Damon studied it and did all of his own stunt and fight scenes. Rent the DVD and they show some of the training and scenes close up. And Kali is a beautiful martial art! It’s all about flowing from one thing to another and never stopping until the opponent is down and out.
Sorry, but, cite? I’m from Colorado and studied at 4 different schools and never heard anything like that at all. My first Sensei was an old Denver Police trainer for years and years - I’m sure I would have heard about something like that. Also, if you think about it, informing someone could be seen as evidence that the martial artist was the aggressor, or at least not trying to diffuse a situation. If you are attacked out of the blue, you don’t have time to mention this point. And if you are informing someone, why aren’t you walking away? Sorry, I think you got an urban legend on your hands.
-Tcat
5 years kenpo a long time ago. all fights i ever saw between martial artist ended very fast.
part of our training was how to put someone down hard and fast. one of my few fights, the guy took a kidney punch as i went by, a kick to the groin from behind - and i ran off like a bat outta hell. i’m sure he went down hard but i didn’t even look back as i got away from his group. only a few seconds elapsed from escalating to a threat to me running off.
Clean, solid martial arts blows are devasting. But you very rarely land that clean, solid blow. Two martial arts guys fighting…they block most of the blows.
In the movies, guys take those clean solid blows, punches and kicks, and keep right on fighting for a longass time. I’ve sparred with some guys, while wearing padding on hands and legs and head. One thing I learned very well is that thowing punches and kicks is goddamed tiring. Even if you miss, it’s damned tiring. Another thing I learned is that if you take a solid kick to the midsection or the head, you are going down. And you’re gonna be kinda nauseated when you do get back up. That shit hurts!!!
Nobody can take the kind of punishment guys are supposedly inflicting on each other in movie fights.
Note to self, buy mace
It sure is. I used to end up winded and too worn out to do much, and it didn’t take long.
It hurts like hell, even with the safety gear. Even with the pads, you can get broken toes, jammed fingers, bruised ribs, etc. Been there, done that.
If anyone really took a beating like they show in the movies, he’d be dead.
I was just a 2nd blue belt in Tae Kwon Do, hardly an expert, but I know all about how it feels to get blasted by something you never saw coming. 
But, I did have one “street” fight while training. Several wild punches that I dodged or blocked, one hard side kick to his chest and it was over.
Side of the neck. Remember Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s Creature? Right where the bolts are on his neck.
Click here and scroll down a little bit.
[I will not hijack the thread, I will not hijack the thread, I will not hijack the … ah, screw it]
“The martial arts don’t teach you how to fight”. That’s basically what I hear in threads like this one. While it is preposterous to assume knowledge in any given field will make you a hardcore expert and flawless adversary, it should at least have a point in being. I find it difficult to believe all these styles were created, back in the days in Asia, for the sole purpose of scoring points in front of a judge. I mean, they are martial arts. To me, it’s a kind of bootcamp only those with great mental and physical abilities can accomplish. It’s to create soldiers. That’s what I always thought, that they were created so you could kick ass (basically).
So, what’s the straight dope? What’s (/was) the point of the martial arts?
[/and so I did]
Absolutely, because I have yet to see them not work. There is a reason we teach this sort of stuff to the police: it’s effective.
And it’s not a one-hit sort of thing. Any self defense situation calls for a multiple strategy approach. If I’m going to depend on just one hit, I might as well lie down on the ground and let the other guy kick on me for a while, because that’s probably going to happen anyway. In the video clip that I linked to, one hit was all it took, but if you watch the clip closely, you’ll see that the guy was ready to follow it up if needed.
The point is to learn how to not fight unless you absolutely have to, and to learn how to fight and win when you do. It’s all about self-control and self-discipline.
Sun Tzu says it best: The skilled warrior is one who defeats his enemy without fighting him.
It’s a large topic.
Basically, many martial arts develop in the same way that Japanese martial arts did.
They start off almost completely combat oriented. Jujutsu, one of the arts with which I am most familiar, began as supplemental training for samurai as an add-on to the primary weapon, which was the sword. Karate started as a fighting art for Okinawan peasants, who were disarmed by the conquering Japanese. Jojutsu was the art of the stick. Iai-jutsu is the art of sword drawing. So-jutsu is the spear.
Then times change. As the need for fighting diminishes, the art changes from a “jutsu” form to a “do” form. “Jutsu” means “art”, “do” means something more like “way”. The martial art, with the focus on combat efficiency, changes its aims to self-development. Kenjutsu becomes kendo, iai-jutsu becomes iai-do. The goal becomes self-perfection thru the repetition of certain, stylized skills.
There is often a sporting element in the “do” forms as well. We see this particularly in jujutsu, which developed into judo, and is now almost entirely a sport. Same with kendo. We see it also in the UFC and other MMA events. It started very close to a street fight, and has now developed into a sport, with rules and weight divisions and gloves and time limits and spectators.
As the focus changes, so does the training. Aikido, which developed mostly from Daito-ryu aiki-jujutsu, now has relatively little to do with real combat. That is not their aim. Much karate training is focussed on point sparring and other non-contact forms of competition.
This is not universally true, of course - some karate dojo focus completely on hard training for the street. And a lot of sport training is good practice for self-defense.
But self-defense is not their sole focus.
As always, you need to identify your goals. If you want to kick ass in the street, and you live where I do and the street is likely to be covered in ice a good part of the time, a school that focuses on high kicking may not be your best bet. If you are worried that someone might try a tackle, aikido or tai-chi doesn’t do much practicing against that.
YMMV.
Regards,
Shodan
To add just a little bit. You DO learn how to fight. It is not just a “historical exercise”. With practice, you get better balance, a big increase in coordination, and an equally big increase in strength. Just that will make a difference. You learn how to hit hard, how to mix up various combinations, and you learn how to take a fall or take a hit. You also learn how to get the heck out of the way when you get charged by someone. However, there are some people in the world with no training, who will still stomp you - they just have a natural ability to fight. Getting out of the way helps a lot with them
Martial arts probably started long ago as just a collection of “things that work”. They were meant to smash or subdue an enemy. Over the years they became more refined and more formalized, but it is still basically the same. All striking arts use the same basic punches and kicks, all the grappling styles use the same basic locks and throws. There are stylistic differences - do you face full on or at an angle, do you use hard straight line motions or circular - but a straight punch is still a straight punch, a roundhouse kick is still a roundhouse kick. Physics still applies. Some people will be mediocre (me) and some will become grandmasters (not me).
Judo was consciously designed as a sport, so to speak. Jujutsu was dangerous to practice and involved a lot of injuries and practicing in less-than-full contact conditions. These were perceived as problems and judo was created as a way to solve them. The rules were designed to allow participants to perform the moves with full force without getting hurt. The result, some argue, is a more effective way of fighting because one applies full force in a fight as one would in practice. Wrestling makes a good analogy: wrestlers train to fight all-out; while one could claim that they aren’t learning a martial art, I’ve never really heard of a wrestler losing a fist fight, except to a better wrestler.
When you practice judo you’ll get cracked in the head and the nuts; you’ll get slammed to the ground; you’ll be choked. It may not be the full-bore close quarters combat training that some self-defense schools teach, but the image of it being a mere sport is a little misleading.
I don’t know the stories or history behind other martial arts turned sport, or what motivated them to become so. But people seem to dismiss them because they aren’t a panacea: there’s always some big, tough guy with a granite jaw who could beat up anybody. But that doesn’t mean that martial arts training doesn’t improve your odds.
[/hijack]
One of the most surprising fights I’ve ever seen involved one bloke who was known as a local “hardman”, massively built, broken nose and scarred face, got into fights regularly. Basically a bit of a local bully who everyone was afraid off. Never ever lost, even when he was outnumbered.
Contestant number two was an average bloke, not particularly big or well-built and very very quiet, wouldn’t say boo to a goose. Nice guy who everyone liked, nobody had ever seen him get into so much as a heated verbal argument.
Bully decided to pick on the second bloke while standing outside the local pub to show off to his girlfriend. Big mistake!
Fight ended with the quiet guy holding the bully by the shirt collar while walking him down the street and punching him repeatadly in the face. Ever hear a grown man screaming for help? Not a pleasant sound. It took several people to pull the quiet man off the first guy.
Just goes to show, you never can tell. :eek: