FMAT: an honest question

[Clark Kent]

an honest question
By jao - Tue, 29 Apr 2008 08:31:40 GMT
Originally Posted at: FMATalk
====================

As a total outsider who is considering PTK I must ask a question that I haven't seen asked on this board, hopefully I won't offend all of you because that is not my intention. I want to know if any of you have had to use your PTK training in real life on the street at full speed. Mainly can the system work for the average person who trains hard. I respect PTK and the heritage of all FMA but if you all think back before you started your training trying to figure out what you wanted to study you know as well as I do that almost all of the martial arts in a training setting being done at half speed looks fairly effective. I am not asking anyone to bragg about themselves, or trying to offend anyone. I have just seen other people I know personally train for years in other systems breaking boards and doing spinning kicks that couldn't even do light sparring with an untrained person who knows very basic boxing and can throw a few low kicks. These were brown and black belts and seeing how ineffective they were when I was a teenager it has always had me hessitant about seekng out a trully effective martial art to train in and a good instructor. thank you


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[pesilat]

I don't train specifically in PTK but my training in Kali and Silat have served me very well.

When I met my wife, her son, Michael, was 15 and already as tall as I was. At 18, he was taller than me and weighed the same or more. He lived with us until he was about 20. Michael has a chemical imbalance in his brain which causes, among other problems, occasional bouts of paranoia and schizophrenia and sometimes he gets violent.

Over the years that he lived with us, I had to restrain him on a dozen or so occasions and I disarmed him once when he was holding a metal rod while arguing with my wife. My training enabled me to (a) restrain him without hurting him and (b) prevent him from hurting me or himself.

I also bounced at a local bar for about a year. What I used there was mostly the subtle and non-violent stuff like axis control and balance disruption. I did use wrist locks on a couple of people. The closest I ever came to using any of the really nasty stuff from my training was a fight that I had to break up. The fight was 4 on 2 and had some racial tension involved (4 hispanics vs. a black guy and a white guy). When I stepped in to break it up it had just gone from verbal to physical (one of the hispanics had grabbed the black guy by the shirt and had cocked back his fist to punch). I knew there was a high probability that when I intervened they would all turn on me and I'd be in a 6-on-1 fight. I also figured there was, statistically speaking, a better than average chance that at least one of the guys would have a blade (or something worse). But, in my estimation, 6-on-1 is plenty dangerous enough. In that moment I decided that if anyone even looked like they were going to swing on me or draw a weapon I was going to start killing them as quickly as I could drop them. That was literally my mindset.

Fortunately, no one had to die. As soon as I stepped in and told them, in no uncertain terms, to go their separate ways it deescalated. I am pretty sure that it is because I was in a "kill-or-be-killed" mindset that it did deescalate. I don't think any of them were really ready for that level of confrontation and, at least on some level, they sensed that I was. The doorman - who witnessed the whole thing and would have tried to help (don't know how much help he'd have been but I know he would have tried) - said later, "That was some scary $#!@" I said, "Yeah. It got a little hairy there for a minute." He said, "No. I'm talking about you. You looked positively homicidal."

The reason I was able to handle all of those (and other) situations was my training.

Will it work for you? No one but you can make that call. Every person is different - different physical attributes, different mindset, different attitudes, etc. What works for one person may or may not work for another.

I do believe, though, that Kali and Silat (either/or/both) in general provide a solid body of material that is inherently "reality ready." How well it works for you - or how well a specific system's approach works for you - is something you have to work out for yourself.

Mike