I don’t know about that. Watch America’s funniest Videos for a while. 
Oh, you said “kicked”.
I’ve been thinking about nut kicking all day. I’m pretty sure that most guys who haven’t trained, or been in a few fights, would be so quick to react to an attack to the balls. I have done the old grab and squeeze, and the guy got the message that I didn’t want to wrestle him.
Never kicked there though. I’m not skilled enough to be secure with getting my foot within easy grabbing range.
I’ve never really fought under “match” conditions like you guys describe.
Again, there’s a difference between fighting and self-defense. An assailant who’s expecting to lay hands on you and expecting you to freeze from intimidation is the guy you’d want to kick in the junk; not the guy who’s squared up, looking for a brawl.
Sparring at my joint includes groin strikes. Very few kicks get through because they’re really easy to defend. When they do get through, the effect is significant, but not devastating. Knees to the groin are better. When your fighting in a clinch, low strikes are tough to spot and defend. Of course, groin attacks have an even more useful effect when the fight goes to the ground.
100% of the time? I doubt it. Please post proof of your statement.
We’re not talking about high jumping, we’re talking about martial arts. Apples and oranges.
This discussion is about martial arts. I don’t know what those people were practicing. It’s quite possible they were all taught by this clown.
I don’t know. Why don’t you ask yourself that question?
Now, you’ll get no argument from me that m. a. has had more than its share of shady practitioners. We’ve got people out there who will train for a year, earn a purple belt, then go open their own school and claim they are a 28th Degree Black Belt in SmellMyFoot-Do or something. Or they will teach the power of the chi like the guy above. Or you’ll get someone who claims to mix magic and martial arts. It makes life hard for those of us who have spent large portions of our lives training in a genuine discipline and who are trying to teach in a quality manner.
But to go back to my original point in this discussion - it’s not the martial art, it’s the martial artist that makes the difference. And Cecil’s post is about martial artists defeating muggers, which is a trained fighter vs. an untrained fighter - a significant advantage for the martial artist, no matter what the discipline is.
I’m aware of two fights that meet these criteria: Genki Sudo [purple belt in BJJ, so probably less than 5 years training] fights Korean OLYMPIC SILVER MEDALIST in TKD. So, not just someone with 20 years experience in TKD, but the second best TKD fighter on the planet. Before watching the video, try to guess who wins.
Next up, high school wrestler Travis Fulton fights TKD black belt. WARNING: video not for the sensitive.
Yes, one athletic endeavor follows the rules of logic and common sense, where the most effective style produces better outcomes, and the other athletic endeavor is the bailiwick of fools and charlatans. Big difference.
Actually, just out of curiosity, could you go ahead and list the athletic endeavors in which style doesn’t make a difference? I’m curious if you only single out martial arts for this special treatment.
They seem to think it’s a martial art. Maybe they’re not TRUE martial artists (or Scotsmen either, for that matter). Shouldn’t make any difference anyway, because the style doesn’t matter. It’s all down to the individual. [<– the previous should be read in a scarcastic tone]
Style makes a difference. Muggers are more likely to be trained than you would guess (fights being better training then you’ll find in 90% of martial arts schools). Also, I can think of martial arts styles that would put the practitioner at a significant disadvantage to not training at all (our Yellow Bamboo friends being only one example).
Wow! It looked like Fulton knew TKD dude was done even before he hit the mat. Ow! Poor guy. 
That is, by the way, the kind of thing WWE “entertainers” train to avoid. Sometimes they screw up, though.
In the Fulton vs Bullock fight (linked to by Evil Economist, above), Fulton at the end, goes back and leans down by Bullock for a moment.
What’s he doing? He didn’t celebrate his victory. At least not visibly.
Evil Economist,
I don’t think I’m quite understanding what you’re trying to communicate in this thread. Is it that some elemental styles are better in competition against other elemental styles? If so, I don’t really see what that has to do with self-defense.
Checking to see if he’s all right, if I understand your question correctly.
The late Alexis Arguello was known for doing this as well. It was a real show of sportsmanship on his part, IMHO, that today’s fighters would do well to emulate. Specifically, don’t celebrate when the guy may well be badly injured. Stop, make sure he’s all right, then smile and get your hand raised. If you act like an ass in the ring when you win, they’ll be quick to get rid of you when you lose.
Competition is the best available proxy for self-defense, so the style that does best in competition will do the best in a self-defense situation.
The styles that do best in competition are a small subset of the martial arts; they’re the styles that are trained full-strength against resisting opponents, NOT the styles that sell themselves as self-defense techniques.
So if you’re concerned about defending youself in a real fight, you should train one of the following martial arts: MMA, boxing, wrestling, judo, BJJ, Muay Thai.
Furthermore, of my recommended styles, the grappling styles generally give better results than the striking styles.
Evil Economist,
MMA is the only thing that I see on your list that’s really practical for self-defense training. Grappling styles are great, until you’re faced with multiple attackers, at which point they’re worse than useless. Similarly, all of your MT or boxing training will fail when you’re surprised in a grappling attack. No single elemental style is going to be reliably effective in self-defense. Cross-training is the best way to go.
I can’t agree with you that grappling is preferable to striking for self-defense. Grappling forces you attacker to stay and fight you when there’s a fair chance he’ll want to disengage to find another target as soon as you show that you’re willing and able to fight. BJJ in particular, I think is very ill-suited for street fighting, unless you’re accustomed to training on asphalt, gravel, ice, broken glass and other hazards likely to be found in the environment in which one is likely to be attacked. Also, I don’t know of many BJJ schools where one person is expected to fight another while others stand around kicking him in the head and kidneys. Generally speaking, BJJ training is focused very narrowly on fighting one person, without interference, on a mat.
Regardless of the elemental martial arts styles one pursues, self-defense training should include striking, wrestling, ground fighting, aggression training, multiple attacker strategies, close-quarters weapons tactics, third-party defense and physical conditioning. All aspects of training should be tested with resistance, under stress and from a position of disadvantage as often as possible. Which elemental style could beat another is a tiresome debate, the outcome of which is irrelevant if that style is trained as a sport in isolation, neglecting the practical realities of street fighting.
I will add the codicil that it is better to cross-train than to devote oneself wholly to one discipline (though MMA may be considered cross-training in and of itself). Most gyms in larger cities that offer the above disciplines acknowledge this and either offer other disciplines or affiliate with gyms that do.
On the other hand, Cro Cop did KO Sapp and made him cry.
Yes, that’s what I’m asking. I should have said “He didn’t even celebrate his victory”. Fulton certainly didn’t act like an ass.
I’m not sure Bullock’s shoulder will ever be okay.
No matter the skills of the attacker?
Not that you’d actually have a lot of time to figure that out.
But, I’ve only been in one fight where the other guy had any skill at all. and he quickly put me on my back.
Like I’ve said, my experiences were many years ago, and things have changed.
I’ve addressed all these points already.
By the way, the “BJJ won’t work because of broken glass” trope is one that’s inevitably pulled out by the martial arts woo-woo crowd. So much so that I get sick of responding to it, the way people get sick of insisting that yes, man really did walk on the moon.
BJJ is one of the most effective combat styles in the world and BJJ practitioners are famous for the street fights they’ve been involved in; the family that developed BJJ were basically a bunch of thugs who liked to fight, and there are plenty of videos of them winning street fights, despite the mountains of broken glass that make the streets such a terror. Lots of BJJ practitioners are the sort of people who get in fights (actually, the quality of some of the people who study BJJ is one of the things that keeps me from recommending it wholeheartedly), and there are plenty of verified stories out there about using BJJ in street fights. I would link to a long thread on another forum where professional fighters talk about street fights they’ve been in, but I’m not sure that’s allowed; one of the things that stands out is how effective BJJ was in their fights.
A good choke can put a man unconscious literally in seconds. And if you’ve ever been choked you know that you lose strength well before you pass out, and if it gets released you have no desire to fight for a while; you just want to sit there and contemplate your mortality.
The broken glass, needles, and all the other dangers of the street that only seem to exist in the fervent imaginations of the woo-woo crowd–they work in the BJJ practitioner’s favor, because he won’t be the one having his face ground into the asphalt.
Among people who are actually likely to get into a fight; bouncers, police officers, etc., BJJ is a heavily practiced style. In fact, Frank Mir, the UFC heavy weight champ, is a BJJ black belt and a bouncer. Plenty of police officers in my classes, who study BJJ because it works.
As for the “multiple attacker” theory; the common response is; you haven’t demonstrated that your style can beat even one person in a fight, but you think you can beat a bunch of people?
Oh, and grapplers don’t have to stick around. You can just throw the guy face-first into the mound of broken glass and syringes that litter the street, and walk away.
The downside of getting in fights is that you might lose; that’s true regardless of the style you study. Something like BJJ or Judo puts the odds on your side, but they’re never 100%.
Evil Economist,
I’d suggest that, in facing multiple attackers, “beating” them is a less useful intention than making a safe escape.
I know quite well how quickly one can be choked out. I also know how much quicker one can be knocked out. In either case, there are a lot of variables at play that make for less than optimal circumstances. I presume that you train with resistance on the assumption that you’ll likely face a struggle, rather than that you’ll be able to choke out any and every enemy in six seconds, right?
Your position regarding ground hazards seems to be that they are irrelevant because BJJ always wins. Surely you’ve thought it through more than that, right? I mean, when you’re training, do you differentiate between which techniques are effective on the mat and which are more reliable off the mat? Is your talk of throwing a guy’s face into the ground as realistic for a 50kg woman as it is for you?
I cross-train BJJ, and my training system borrows heavily from BJJ. It’s essential for what I do, but I don’t kid myself that it’s all I’ll ever need.
My experience with boxing is that it’s much easier to choke someone out than it is to knock them out. I’ve choked-out hundreds of trained martial artists (mostly making them tap rather than pass out), but in two years of boxing I never knocked someone out, and I’m a big strong guy who can punch pretty hard.
OK, I’m no Jack Dempsey, but my experience is that anyone who trains for a fight expecting to knock their opponent out is deluding themselves.
Maybe if you cold-cocked someone who wasn’t expecting it you could rely on a knock-out, but that doen’t sound like the scenario someone who was trying to defend a mugging would care about.
Of course.
Anyone who can put a trained Judoka on his back could do the same to someone from any other style, so your discussion of ground hazards is irrelevant. In fact, if you’re worried about being thrown down, then that’s more incentive to train grappling, because a trained grappler is least likely to be thrown down. The more “ground hazards” there are, the more important it is to train grappling. And if you’re going to learn grappling, then wrestling, judo and BJJ are the preeminent grappling styles.
So, what do you suggest your 50kg woman do? Should she strike with them? She’s likely to be at a much bigger disadvantage striking than she is attempting a judo throw. A 50kg woman is unlikely to knock an opponent out, however a Judo throw will leave them on the ground, making it much easier to run away.
Should she just run to begin with? Well, knowing judo doesn’t make you less able to run away!
If you have a job, so you probably only have the time to learn one style, then BJJ is a damn good choice. If you’re unemployed and have the time to learn multiple styles, of course that’ll give you better results (assuming you don’t neglect your BJJ at the expense of something stupid, like YB), but if you’re that worried about being attacked, try:
- Moving; 2. Stop going into bad neighborhoods; 3. stop getting drunk or hanging out with drunks; or 4.Buy a gun.
Regarding the hypothetical 50kg woman, I think that striking is effective for creating and maintaining space from an attacker, allowing for greater mobility and more opportunities for escape than grappling. That said, I think that take-down defenses and ground fighting skills are even more critical for women than they are for men.
Query: YB?