Then why did Leonard Nimoy pass away when Spock died. Huh, answer that one!
Spock is not dead.
OK, that makes sense.
Right. Well, that’s part of what I was asking about: According to you, and I don’t doubt you for a second, a martial arts class can take a kid up from knowing nothing to knowing enough to win a fight against kids who know nothing. That can be very useful in some circumstances.
However, it’s hardly how they’re sold, is it? They probably never explicitly say anything which could end up in court, but there are implications that the complex stuff is complex for a reason, and that reason ain’t dancing with another dude on a padded mat.
You never need it until you really, really need it.
My concern is decay: As you said, all these schools have focused on sparring and tournaments for practically a generation now, and stuff which isn’t tested in a specific way might lose nuances over time.
If you get all Sun Tzu on me, I swear I’ll dig up Clausewitz right back. 
More to the point, what you just said is exactly what I had in mind. It’s a species of bait-and-switch: They say they teach you a fighting art, but when you realize that this stuff is focused on tournaments, they drag out the self-confidence concept and say that you’re becoming a better person by learning how not to fight.
Well, false confidence is dangerous. Being confident in a skill you do not possess is dangerous.
I felt a lot of the very basics was, as above, just learning to move, to throw a punch, and most importantly over all - the ability to handle someone throwing a blow at you without straight out going into shock.
I watched a lot of people come through the school I attended (mid-late 90’s) and saw a lot of people, especially women, just start flinching and freezing up even when practice punches and kicks were being thrown at a pad they were holding. So even if they never stayed around to get their black belts, the basic lesson of “Don’t fold up and die when someone hits you” was very very important.
Comes down to learning that "Yes, you’re going to get hit. Yes, it is going to hurt. If you want to learn to defend yourself, you have to get past that and learn how to take the blow and hit back."
But sparring, for American Karate (black belt here), TKD, etc is just a glorified version of tag. It isn’t a real fight. Why? Because pretty much everyone would be injured in any real kind of sparring, let alone in a tournament.
There are generally two real thresholds. One for black belt and one for master level black belt (I think 4th degree).
The first degree black belt which requires that your master, and two other third degree black belt masters from other dojongs all agree that you have meet the requirements for a black belt. There also used to be an age requirement (subject to exceptions for exceptional circumstances) for black belt that apparently has evaporated. If you are an 8 year old black belt, you should be able to kick me in the head without a running start. These kids couldn’t hit a board with a spinning side kick.
The fourth degree black belt has to be approved by headquarters and entitles you to open a tae kwon do studio (you are a master). 4th degree and higher is really for people that intend to make tae kwon do a central part of their life.
I was a tiny bit relieved to see that the one second degree black belt seemed to be qualified for that promotion. But I fear that the second degree black belt will one day become as cheap as the first.
Second degree at the place I went was more ‘real’ than first, and you were required to do a lot of stuff for it. Unfortunately, I have hip and back issues and I’d torn my left hip* up so much doing the 1st dan that I couldn’t manage all the jumping spinning stuff required for 2nd dan.
In that org, 5th dan was ‘Master’. You were not required to have a dojo, as all promotions above 3rd were really ‘what are you doing for the sport’ promotions.
- Same left hip currently in pain from inflamed Sciatic nerve right now - I’m on a z-pack and pain meds.
Who says they don’t possess it? In the years that I have been teaching, I have had three students get attacked. All three successfully defended themselves. All three attackers went to the hospital before going to jail. In all three cases, it was a sudden blitz attack; one of them was an attempted abduction.
In the long run, no martial art will make you invincible. It will simply make you more aware of your surroundings and it will give you skills with which to defend yourself. AS I’m fond of telling my beginners: forget what you see on TV. This is the real thing, and it requires hours of hard work and gallons of sweat.
No, but they are made of pine and held along the grain so that a reasonably accurate hit in the center of the board will split the board along the grain.
The big difference that I have seen is that what used to be 1" think boards has now become 1/2" think boards (WTF!?!?!). An adult holding the boards can snap the board in half with his hands so what you frequently see is a board that is bent almost to the point of breaking and then a light tap by the kid is enough to snap the board in half.
Promotion before black is entirely at the discretion of the master of the dojong but the common practice in the old days was, you had to break a 1" board for your yellow belt (almost any kid can achieve this). 2 boards for green, 3 boards for blue, 4 boards for red, and 5 boards for black. If you couldn’t break the board you could still get promoted (except for black) based on other factors but you got a white stripe on your belt that could no be removed until you broke those boards (or reached a threshold age by the time of the next test (e.g. first grade for yellow 3rd grade for green, 5th grade for blue, 7th grade for red) and you couldn’t test for the next higher level until you got rid of the white stripe.
I like to use the analogy that making 1st Degree Black Belt is like graduating from high school. Now you know the basics - it’s time to start learning the art.
As far as rank advancement, it depends upon the organization. In mine, you are not considered for mastership until you make 6th Degree. Everyone tests for their rank at all levels; there are no honorary promotions.
After your rank promotion, and if you meet the additional requirements imposed, you are invited to join the next Master’s training class. You spend a year doing extra training, over and above your regular training in learning the new form, etc, and at the end of that year, you are inducted as a Master Instructor.
And sadly, there are still people who take lessons for a year, then promote themselves to 28th Degree Grand Poobah, open a school and bilk their students. It’s a continuing problem in the martial arts world. Fortunately, it’s on the decline - it was rampant back in the 60s and 70s.
Perhaps its not universal. I am told that there are dojongs in other countries and in Korean ghettos that don’t have this problem but in my neck of suburbia there are perhaps a dozen tae kwon do studios within 5 miles and they ALL seem to have the same issue with grade inflation. There is a race to the bottom that seems to have occurred years ago in Tae Kwon Do and those that didn’t water down their belts lost their students to McDojos or to MMA studios.
Tae Kwon Do was a conglomeration of several martial arts styles being practiced throughout Korea after the Korean War. It was really not all that different than other martial arts styles that didn’t involve grappling except for the focus on kicking.
One on one, I’d say grappling is better and things like Judo and Juijitsu are probably superior to primarily striking styles like Tae kwon Do. But striking styles are probably superior in melees where grappling leaves you open to attacks from others.
I agree. Physical confidence is one of the primary benefits of any martial art. You get hit a lot and you don’t cower from the prospect of physical conflict. You learn to hit others and any instinctive reluctance you may have to hit others when necessary is removed.
Tournaments are different now. You didn’t get a point for just touching your opponent. You had to really hit them and we didn’t used to have all the padding we have these days.
Rant: I can’t believe they are actually padding shins in TKD. wtf?!?!
Yeah, lots of people who would get a black belt, move to a new city and declare themselves the 10th degree black belt of their new school system. :smack:
I can’t remember where, but I read something about someone doing this fairly recently - getting only their Brown belt :dubious: before moving and declaring themselves a 9th or 10th degree black belt. By now you’d think their local neighborhood competitors would walk over and have a chat with them about earned ranks.
Maybe something like the testing scene in Ip Man 2. 
Well I think we can all agree that kids are pretty stupid no matter what they do.
There was a time when legitimacy had to be earned by having your students win tournaments, etc. but my impression is that these McDojo studios now get together with other McDojo studios and form a tournament amongst themselves. They come up with a fancy name for the tournament and let their incompetent students compete with other incompetent students to determine who wins the nerf slapfest.
I agree with your point about movies, but as a chess FIDE Master (2 ranks below Grandmaster), I’d just like to say that these titles are awarded for performances in international tournaments. You don’t need to be a professional player (though it helps!) - e.g. see Jonathan Mestel, who is a University Lecturer.
If the Internet counts you know at least one - me. I started judo (almost fifty years ago) in order to learn to fight. Not character development, not spiritual enlightenment - how to kick ass. And the dojo(s) in which I trained, and later taught, had much more of an emphasis on street defense than seems to be the case nowadays, where sport rules the day. I did the sport aspect, more than a little, but the idea was to test your technique against a resisting opponent. Especially an opponent you didn’t know and hadn’t randori-ed with a hundred times before.
Judo and jujitsu, the arts with which I am most familiar, did the same development as most martial arts seemed to encounter. Jujitsu started out as a battlefield art based entirely on combat realism. Then the feudal period ended, and it became a “do” form. “Jitsu/jutsu” is Japanese for “art” - "do’ means more of a way of life. Thus jujitsu developed into judo, which was supposed to encompass sport, self-defense, and physical development, and Daito-ryu aiki-jujitsu developed into aikido, which (with the exception of a style called Yoshinkai, and somewhat with Tomiki) are almost entirely divorced from combat. Judo has continued along until it is now almost entirely a sport.
Depends entirely on the dojo and the instructor. Any school or style that concentrates on self-defense is going to turn out students who are better at self-defense than if they spent any of their time on anything else.
With an additional caveat - some kinds of apparently non-self-defense oriented training can have crossover effects on the ability to kick ass and take names in the street. Jigoro Kano invented judo. Before he came along, jujitsu sparring involved all kinds of techniques, including dangerous techniques, like full contact strikes and kicks. People get injured when you spar like that a lot, and so the tendency is to spar less and depend on forms training more. Otherwise, you run out of students.
Kano’s idea was to allow all-out sparring, but limit the techniques allowed. This, paradoxically enough, allowed better, more street-realistic training, than just rote form training. His ideas were borne out in a famous tournament in Tokyo in 1888, matching fifteen judo fighters against fifteen jujitsu-ka who had been trained more in the older, more static way. Reports of the results vary - as I heard it, judo won twelve of the fifteen matches, with two losses and one draw.
That having been said, judo has (IMO) gone way too far in the direction of sport only, and has lost nearly all of its focus on the self-defense aspect of the art. In my day (grumbled the crochety oldster) we did a lot more street-oriented training, even if it detracted from our tournament prep - things like wrist locks, kicks and strikes, sparring against strikes, no-gi training, etc. I liked that, and I taught like that, because that is what I liked about judo, which is/can be a highly effective fighting system.
But then again, I am an old stick-in-the-mud. And grade inflation is nearly the problem in judo as in tae kwon do. I checked once - I have enough promotion points/tournament points/time in grade/kata points that I could be a fourth-degree. I’m not - I am a shodan, the first and lowest level of black belt. Shodan was explained to me as “a working knowledge of the basics”. Shodan means “first step”, not “master”. But my beloved instructor Tom was a sandan (third degree black belt) when he died. I will not outrank him.
Regards,
Shodan
Hrmm. For ten years, I though shodan was some sort of Godzilla reference.
My wife just commented that the reason I am perturbed by the dilution of the first degree black belt is the fact that I was a first degree black belt back when it meant something.
She notes how irritated I am by the dilution of the SATs as an example of me being irritated by things that used to be harder when I was younger.
She thinks I am turning into an old man.
There was a woman in my school who half-assed it through everything. Somehow she got her black belt. Please note that I didn’t say ‘earned’. At one of the panels after I got mine, she decided to come over to me, hang her dead weight off my shoulder (:mad:) and continuously badmouth all of the people testing for their black belts. I ended up telling her off (quietly) and walking away.
I saw a lot of the same even before that. People always whining about people junior to them not being any good, or somehow deserving some form of ‘hazing’ because they were beneath them. :rolleyes: In that respect not all that different from other sports, frats, and altogether too many other organizations.
Let’s face it though, you are largely correct. Black Belt has been dummied down and simplified to make it easier to obtain and, here’s the important bit - easier to sell ‘get your black belt’ packages which are much like gym memberships in that they make more of their money off the people who stop showing up.