Easy Karate?

General Questions
#1

Hello, my first posting. Anyway, my brother collects Karate magazines, and I’ve also seen the ads in muscle and survivalist magazines. Basically, this guy advertises a program that will allow you to physically defend yourself from any one. From mobs or skinheads to gangbangers to black belts, these moves can beat them all, even if they have weapons.
Full-page text-only ads boast that this guy has beaten up Marines and SEALs and has all these flowery credentials. The program is used to train elite military and other groups, but he’s apparently nice enough to share it with us for $80. You learn easy techniques that take minutes to learn and size, age, fitness, experience don’t matter.
Obviously, I look upon this with a healthy dose of skepticism (okay… outright disbelief). Does anyone know the, er, Straight Dope on this?

“It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in an argument” - William McAdoo

#2

All of the most effective martial arts techniques take only a few minutes to learn. Think about it, if a move is so complex that it takes hours or days to learn, do you honestly believe that you’ll be able to pull it off in combat? You might be able to occasionally use complex moves in a sparring match, but then again a sparring match bears little resemblence to a bar brawl.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that you’ll actually be able to effectively use simple techniques without a significant amount of practice. It may not take a long time to get it, but it will take a long time to get it right. Interestingly enough, one of the best ways to get your simple moves down is to combine them into more complex techniques that take hours or days to learn.

Funny how that works, isn’t it?

-Bob

#3

Have to agree with Devilfish. Most moves are simple. However, the training part comes in so that when you are in a pressure situation, the training you’ve done takes over and becomes more instinct. Without the hours/months/years of training, you’d have to stop to think about what you want to do and probably in the process get whipped. It’s like reading: you don’t think about reading anymore, you just do it. That comes from practice and training. Same with martial arts.

…it has never been my way to bother much about things which you can’t cure.

  • A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court-Mark Twain
#4

Actually, I have a hard time believing you can learn how to do a simple move properly in only a few minutes. This is because all of the subtleties of simple move cant be easily explained. It seems (for me anyway) that I just dont learn it perfectly the first time. it takes several rounds of interactive instruction and hours of practice to get fluid execution and optimal power. Thats martial arts though, which is mostly taught for other reasons than simply holding your own in a brawl.
I can think of a couple of problems with you course:

  1. The instruction will be declarative i.e. somebody breaks it down and tells you to do it in parts. And you remember it declaratively, “without thinking” which means you have remember it procedurally and the move becomes atomic. Learning this way is which means you can think yourself though it. But in a fight you have to do it fundamentally difficult.
  2. Stuff happens incredibly quickly in a real fight. It doesn’t matter if you know how to do every move in the book, you have to put them together, spot opportunities and instantly act on them. The only way you can learn that is by sparring A LOT.
  3. If you go into a fight with a black belt, you better hit him when hes not looking. If he gets a good look at what your doing, hes going pick up on it quickly, and your gimmicks are not going to work.
  4. I dont know what kinna master you have to be to fight a mob, but in 2 on 1 sparring you spend most of the time getting out of the middle. I’m not sure what kind of fight Gangbanger is gonna show you his 9. I already went over black belts, and if they have weapons, well from the sparring I have experienced, weapons tend to be a liability, but I haven’t spent nearly as much time credentials you get for shaving your head. A training with them, as without them.
    In summary, if you really want to learn, look for a real class, not a quick fix.
#5

Woa! Spammin into the edit box garbled a few things. Lets try that again:

Actually, I have a hard time believing you can learn how to do a simple move properly in only a few minutes. This is because all of the subtleties of simple move cant be easily explained. It seems (for me anyway) that I just dont learn it perfectly the first time. it takes several rounds of interactive instruction and hours of practice to get fluid execution and optimal power. Thats martial arts though, which is mostly taught for other reasons than simply holding your own in a brawl.
I can think of a couple of problems with you course:

  1. The instruction will be declarative i.e. somebody breaks it down and tells you to do it in parts. And you remember it declaratively, is which means you can think yourself though it. But in a fight you have to do “without thinking” which means you have remember it procedurally and the move becomes atomic. Learning this way is fundamentally difficult.
  2. Stuff happens incredibly quickly in a real fight. It doesn’t matter if you know how to do every move in the book, you have to put them together, spot opportunities and instantly act on them. The only way you can learn that is by sparring A LOT.
  3. If you go into a fight with a black belt, you better hit him when hes not looking. If he gets a good look at what your doing, hes going pick up on it quickly, and your gimmicks are not going to work.
  4. I dont know what kinna master you have to be to fight a mob, but in 2 on 1 sparring you spend most of the time getting out of the middle. I’m not sure what kind of fight credentials you get for shaving your head. A Gangbanger is gonna show you his 9. I already went over black belts, and if they have weapons, well… from the sparring I have experienced, weapons tend to be a liability, but I haven’t spent nearly as much time training with them, as without them.