Kevin,
If you scroll up, you can see how we got here. You argued that a one inch punch was a useful technique, and that the evidence for this was that someone with no full-contact unarmed experience (you) got it to work on someone else with no full-contact unarmed experience (that you mentioned) in a non-full-contact arena.
First of all, what I
claimed was that I had an exaple of it working on an uncooperative opponent. Nothing more and nothing less.
My point was that unless someone can pull it off in a full-contact environment, there's no evidence it is a useful fighting technique as opposed to a party trick.
What does that have to do with anything I said?
Your first response was to say "Well, my experience differs", and I responded by pointing out that pre-UFC all sorts of people claimed to have different experiences but it now seems overwhelmingly likely they were just wrong.
That is incorrect. I siad that in response to the claim that anything which isn't particularly useful in an MMA competition ring, is useless. I never disagreed with the claim that something which has not been shown to work in a real fight, has not been proven to be anything more than a neat trick.
Then you shifted ground to something of a non sequitur and attempted to refute this point with the rhetorical question "So let me get this straight. All those people throughout history whose skills were proven in real combat don't amount to jack squat?". Exactly how you meant this to be relevant was not clear. If you were defending your original claim it had to mean something like "Lots of people throughout history trained like I do and proved their skills in real combat", and that was the interpretation I was criticising.
I meant this as a challenge to your claim that anything which is not useful in an MMA competition is just plain useless.
If I have misinterpreted you, I can say in my defence that you were terribly unclear about what you meant, and that the argument you seemed to be making is one I've seen many times before from people who want to believe non-contact training does something.
I don't see how I could possibly have been clearer. I am afraid that what has happened here is the classical problem of somebody simply assuming that somebody who disagrees with him on some point must hold a diametrically opposed position. I think you read into my posts what you
expected to hear, based on all of those prior arguments which you refer to.
That said, I
do think that non-contact training does something useful. It does several useful things. It helps to prepare you for contact training (learn to walk before you run). It allows you to refine your technique in ways which you can't effectively do in full-contact training (by allowing you to go slowly and focus on specific details). It improves coordination, timing, and balance. But of course non-contact training isn't enough, and the people who think that it is are just fooling themselves. On that point I completely agree. That is why I do not train in a system which uses that approach. The
only reason I have not done full-contact unarmed sparring in Inayan Escrima
yet, is because I have not yet reached that point in my training.
I never claimed otherwise. I do not consider myself to be a good unarmed fighter. And while I do think that my experience (both in terms of my non-sparring training in unarmed combat, and in terms of my full-contact training with weapons) would benefit me in an unarmed fight, I do not pretend that it would be a good substitute for actually doing full-contact unarmed training. Again, I have no idea where you got the idea that I was claiming otherwise.
I got the idea from the way you claimed your personal anecdote as an authoritative source.
I never made any such claim.
The issue at hand is whether someone with full-contact experience with sticks and armour can speak authoritatively about unarmed combat on the basis of their own experience.
I have not attempted to do so.
I don't know the answer for sure, but I don't think the armchair opinion of a hockey player about what works in rugby counts for a lot. Especially if it totally contradicts what we see happen in filmed rugby matches.
This analogy hardly seems appropriate.
Police. Military. Bouncers. People I know personally, including some of my teachers. I never claimed to have video. Real fights are not typically video-taped.
Well in that case my information comes from pirates, ninjas, Shaolin monks and robots, some of whom I know personally or have trained under.
The obvious difference being that I am talking about real people, and you are being silly.
Unfortunately their epic battles have not been recorded on video, however you can take my word for it that they know all there is to know about unarmed combat, they are totally honest and they are infallible.
Why can't you at least pretend to take this discussion seriously? You are not even presenting arguments. You are just misrepresenting my arguments as something ridiculous, and then dismissing them.
Thank you for conceding my point. Like I said, some techniques which are not useful in MMA competitions are still useful for fighting. I rest my case.
I guess you have to take "victories" where you can find them.
If your point was only ever that MMA training methods and techniques are not the last word when it comes to medieval swordsmanship, duelling with sixguns or tank warfare then you could have stated that much more clearly much earlier. No one would have argued with you either.
I
did state it clearly, and you
did argue with me about it. Apperantly you were so eager to jump back into your anti-dojo-potatoe crusade that you did not even recognize that we are on the same side of that battle.
What would be illegitimate would be if you tried to generalise from this "victory" that all the techniques taught in woo-MA work, just not when video cameras are watching.
I would never attempt such a thing. If you knew me better, you would realize that I am almost as disgusted as you are with much of what passes for martial arts out there. I cannot tell you how many times I have met black belts who think they are expert fighters, but who fall to pieces even in
light contact sparring, because they simply haven't done
any sparring at all, much less full contact training.
My problem with the things you have been saying is the way you seem to equate this pseudo-martial-arts garbage with "traditional martial arts", as though MMA competitors were the only people who didn't train that way.
That is exactly my point. What is relevant for MMA competitions is not necessarily relevant for all types of fighting, and what is relevant for some particular type of fighting may not be relevant for MMA competitions. Different types of fighting call for different types of training, and different techniques.
Evidence?
Are you serious? How about the Dog Brother's video that was linked before? Are you actually going to claim that no techniques were used there which differ from what is used in MMA competitions? Or that the any differing techniques were useless?
Well, it should not be surprising at all. You already saw some examples with the Dog Bros. And several other examples which should be painfully obvious, have also been raised. When you can't be sure that your opponent doesn't have a knife, your tactics have to change. When you have to worry about multiple attackers, your tactics have to change. When there are obstruction and/or uneven terrain, your tactics have to change. You can dismissively poo-poo these things all you want, but the fact remains that these are real situations which fighters throughout history have had to deal with, and martial arts training reflects this. It would be extremely naive to think that the subset of techniques and skills which are optimal for the very specific type of fighting you do, would be optimal for everything.
Actually you would have to be very naive to think that techniques that simply do not work with ideal footing and a single unarmed opponent are going to work against multiple armed ninjas .
This has absolutely no relevance to what I said. Who said anything about the techniques not working with ideal footing and a single unarmed opponent?
Let's go back to what you said earlier about the one-inch punch example I gave. You said that while it might work under the conditions I mentioned, that you thought it likely that the majority of the time grappling techniques would work
better.
That is the whole key. For any given situation there will typically be a number of different solutions which
work, but some work better than others. When the conditions change, the solution that worked best in the previous situation may no longer be the
best solution. Whipping strikes are another example of this. When fighting unarmed against a trained martial artist, they can still work. You can still hit your opponent with them, and inflict damage. But they are not as useful as other types of strikes would be, so they are not particularly useful. But in weapon fighting, there are many situations where a whipping strike really is the best solution. So to simply discard them as useless because they are not helpful in MMA competitions, is naive.
It seems eminently logical that the techniques that work in the most difficult cases would be a subset of the the techniques that work on a lone, unarmed target, not some entirely different set of techniques
Like I said, they
do work on a lone unarmed target. But just because a technique
works in a particular situation, does not mean that it is the optimal solution for that situation. And those techniques which are not optimal for ring fighting get culled right along with all of the techniques which simply don't work at all.
Most importantly, we have video evidence that woo-MA utterly fails to work as advertised against the clueful and the clueless alike. We have no proper evidence woo-MA works as advertised on anyone at any time. The people defending woo-MA are, surprisingly enough, woo-MAers. Join the dots here.
As far as I can see, nobody here is defending woo-MA. Even if the one-inch punch and whipping strikes are completely useless in real fights (and I know for a fact that at least the latter are not), there is absolutely nothing woo about them. At worst, they are just inferior to other, more effective techniques.
Dr. Stupid
