On Self "Training" In Martial Arts

[Monkey Turned Wolf]

Don't be jealous,. Finally the insults come

A) nothing in there suggests he's jealous.
B) nothing in there is an insult.

 

[skribs]

I will answer your question. ,. With a question,. If you are creating your own system,. What would be your goals.

You're not answering my question with a question. You're avoiding the question. You're saying you've met your goals with the Kung Fu you've created. What are your goals that you've met?

However, to answer your question, if I was creating my own system, then my goal would be to create a curriculum which progressively teaches techniques from high percentage and easy to learn, to low percentage and easy -or- high percentage and difficult, to low percentage and difficult. However, in creating my system, my plan would be first to make sure I fully understand my primary art, and to cross-train in other martial arts in order to learn the required skills.

There's alot of self satisfaction learning through trial and error,. Vs the easier route of someone telling you the error. Also it solidifies your original intention that you can make wonderful progress, but you inevitably will hit walls, that's when you search and seek and research as many styles as possible through all available mediums.

The concept you're looking for is "reinventing the wheel."

Also, without feedback, you might not realize you're making errors, or you may go through a lot more trials to figure something out.

 

[skribs]

I guess the whole nonsense part

It doubles as both an insult and accurate assessment of what you said.

 

[Monkey Turned Wolf]

I guess the whole nonsense part

I don't view that as an insult. He's not saying you're nonsense, he's saying you're statements were nonsense, and they really don't make much sense. But he wasn't saying it in an insulting way.

 

[skribs]

Your recipe is flawed. , You will just create an eclectic martial art

I want to create an art built on the shoulders of giants. You want to create an art based on your own assumptions.

 

[Headhunter]

Don't be jealous,. Finally the insults come

No one is jealous trust me on that

 

[Headhunter]

When my system is ready, and I have my school I will hold private friendly challenges so anyone can test the weakness in my style.

Why do they have to be private

 

[Cynik75]

I don't challenge for ego

Or you do not want many people see your fail. It is pure ego.

 

[skribs]

Gotta love waking up to 6 notifications, and it's a bunch of dislikes and disagrees from someone rambling nonsense and avoiding questions.

 

[jobo]

Gotta love waking up to 6 notifications, and it's a bunch of dislikes and disagrees from someone rambling nonsense and avoiding questions.

thats very much my experience on here as well, welcome to my world

ive given you a like for pointing it out, now some sense of irony that thats what you do would be good

 

[Flying Crane]

What system do you train

Tibetan White Crane.

 

[Deleted member 39746]

The issue with self defense instruction is that the depth of experience of the instructor is quite often about the same as everyone else.

And that they are probably just making stuff up as they go.

A martial art with some sort of quality control is a different beast.

I think the issue is you are comparing your self training to the lowest bar of regular martial arts instruction. Which is a cop out.

Yes you are on par with instruction. But you could if you wanted to get a better result for your time.

Martial arts isn't really a case that if you are as good as all the other chumps out there training then it is ok. This is personal development and you want the best for yourself that you can get because you are important.

So say for example you self train and become better than this guy.

The question is who cares?

No comment for the first sentence, it would be down to opinion and i disagree on said matter.

Second sentence, that is argubly what fighting is.

Third: In which manner are you using you? As this is entirely detached from personal experinces etc and isnt really based on anything I do. If you mean it in the other way, i support a statement and agree about one made earlier about you can self teach yourself up to a certain level, that level would vary on person. And going back to earlier where i made the statement its on a scale, you self study in formal training as well, as they expect you to go home and practice. (i have another rant on that, but for another time and place)

Fourth: In my view and focus, that is suffcient. Given i would be in it for learning how to fgiht to defend myself, being better at that than any other chum, would be meeting my goals and suffcient for me. By such criteria it would be good if it met my goals.


And if he is the guy who is assaling me, and he is deemed to be above average for the area. Then it would be suffcient to be better than him.

 

[Deleted member 39746]

I didn't read all of this; I couldn't. But @Rat you can teach yourself and be oh so good. I'm not sure at what other than self hypnosis. You made a statement on kata having no value. That alone shows how little you have learned from your self study. Do you not see techniques in kata in those MA that use kata? Do you see any multiple attacker defense in the kata of arts that use them? If you study an art that has any, or mostly grappling, you will be very lucky to learn any good grappling techniques; even in a formal class with good instructors you will often need help from others to get it right. Even the simplest looking technique can be more complicated than you can imagine.

I applaud your desire to learn a MA. Especially if you have focused in on learning an art that isn't taught close to you. I would recommend you take what local art that is closest to you and to the art you prefer. Try to pick a school that seems to teach well. It will stand you in good stead when you get to study the art you prefer.

But don't delude yourself that you can learn even partially as well by self teaching as you can in a good school with a good instructor and good students.

I never made the statement "i can teach myself and be oh so good", nor have i made any that were meant to come off as that. If i have made said statements, it would next to certainly be in a joking manner. In this thread as far as memory serves, i have only spoken in the third person and in regards to self study, not mentioned my own persuits or ability in said area unless it was for example or eleboration purposes.


I have made many statements on kata. I dont belive you have read all of them, but to detail my view in greater detail and more accurately: The fighting value of kata is dubious at best and it factually has no fighting value on its own. The spirtual/fitness value can be argued on a case by case basis, but the former is down to the beholder. If you are not a spirtual person it would be useless. You can safely erase it and not loose any fighting effectiveness. (as has been proven by combat sports and martial arts that dont have kata in it)



For the final point, i fundementally disagree. Self study can be comparative to a certain level of formal training, which is one of the points i have made in this thread. To what level can be left to argument until somone does a proper study on the matter. The entire thread is about the last point made. Pros and cons to self study, its abilities and why it gets a bad reputation all things considered.

 

[O'Malley]

I have made many statements on kata. I dont belive you have read all of them, but to detail my view in greater detail and more accurately: The fighting value of kata is dubious at best and it factually has no fighting value on its own. The spirtual/fitness value can be argued on a case by case basis, but the former is down to the beholder. If you are not a spirtual person it would be useless. You can safely erase it and not loose any fighting effectiveness. (as has been proven by combat sports and martial arts that dont have kata in it)

Could you please share your training history in arts that use kata (style+duration+instructor) so that we can understand how much of these very strong statements is grounded in real world experience?

For the final point, i fundementally disagree. Self study can be comparative to a certain level of formal training, which is one of the points i have made in this thread. To what level can be left to argument until somone does a proper study on the matter. The entire thread is about the last point made. Pros and cons to self study, its abilities and why it gets a bad reputation all things considered.

On what experience are you basing these affirmations? How did you measure and compare the effectiveness of self study vs formal training?

I believe that elaborating in that way would help you communicate your point.

 

[skribs]

Second sentence, that is argubly what fighting is.

It absolutely is not. Fighting is about adapting and improvising, yes. But adapting and improvising using skills and concepts that you already know and understand from drilling them thousands of times over. It's like playing guitar. Most writing or improvising is not based on randomness or making it up as you go. It's based on knowing techniques, scales, chords, and arpeggios, and what works well together or doesn't. You can play random notes at random times and it will sound horrible (unless that's the sound you're going for). When I'm improvising, I'm playing patterns I already know and connecting them in different ways.

Fourth: In my view and focus, that is suffcient. Given i would be in it for learning how to fgiht to defend myself, being better at that than any other chum, would be meeting my goals and suffcient for me. By such criteria it would be good if it met my goals.

So @drop bear is correct. Your goals are to be better than the lowest common denominator. You set the bar at the lowest quality of instruction, and as long as you're better than that, you're happy. You may very well get better by yourself than you would going to a school where the instructor spends more time on his phone than he does on the mat. But that's because you're basically teaching yourself in a class of people who all taught themselves. To put it into tier terms, if you only compare yourself to F tier schools, then you're going to be happy being a D tier fighter. But you're still probably F tier. For 99.99% of would-be fighters, I think D tier is the ceiling for self training, especially if you do so without prior experience.

I never made the statement "i can teach myself and be oh so good", nor have i made any that were meant to come off as that.

You write articles. You give advice. You argue with highly experienced martial artists about what works and what doesn't. You definitely come across as someone who thinks he knows everything and has all the answers. You present yourself as an authoritative source on martial arts information. And when people point out the holes in your advice, or point out how your logic doesn't match with actual experience, you get defensive and try and prove why you're smarter than everyone in the thread. This happens in pretty much every thread I've seen you in.

Could you please share your training history in arts that use kata (style+duration+instructor) so that we can understand how much of these very strong statements is grounded in real world experience?

From previous threads, I think he has around 3 months in ITF Taekwondo. He learned the exercises (mini forms) but hadn't learned any of the patterns (official forms) yet.

 

[Deleted member 39746]

Ok, to bring some of my points back to here as i think some may have been lost:

1. All martial arts systems came from nothing but human instincts and experience. In the modern age you would more than likely not start with nothing as the internet exists.
   
2. If you access said material, pending on yourself, you could self teach yourself enough to be compartible with a certain level of formal training. For arguments sake, the media in question is good.
   
3. Some skills are inhernetly easier to learn than others.
4. For self defence purposes you only need to be as good as the average populace of your area.

Thats not extensive but the high notes.

 

[skribs]

Ok, to bring some of my points back to here as i think some may have been lost:

1. All martial arts systems came from nothing but human instincts and experience. In the modern age you would more than likely not start with nothing as the internet exists.
   
2. If you access said material, pending on yourself, you could self teach yourself enough to be compartible with a certain level of formal training. For arguments sake, the media in question is good.
   
3. Some skills are inhernetly easier to learn than others.
4. For self defence purposes you only need to be as good as the average populace of your area.

Thats not extensive but the high notes.

1. Are we talking about creating your own martial art or about learning one that already exists? If you're talking about learning one that already exists, this point is irrelevant, because we're talking about learning something and not about creating something. If you're talking about creating something, then what you want to do is called reinventing the wheel. You can start with the internet and get vague ideas you don't fully understand, or you can start with formal classes and actually learn the arts. Most martial arts today are not created out of a vacuum. They are created by people who have a lot of experience in an art, but either want to focus on a specific aspect or want to remove stuff they didn't find as useful. But these are people who have enough experience in their art to know what works and what doesn't work when done by high-level fighters.
2. It's easier to make your argument look good when you're comparing the best of one thing against the worst of another. It's easy to write a better TV episode than the Chicago episode of Stranger Things. It doesn't mean Stranger Things is bad or that it's easy to write a better show than Stranger Things. If you have the absolute best media available, and you and your best friend are both highly motivated and capable of introspection, you're still going to miss so much of what goes into the art and it's going to be slower paced learning than if you were at a competent school. Not even a good school or the best school. A merely competent school is going to be better. You get instant feedback, you get continuous feedback while you're improving a technique, and you get the wealth of experience from all of the fighters there.
3. True, but irrelevant. Some skills are easier to learn than others. You still learn those skills faster in class than you do figuring it out on your own.
4. If that's your goal, you're not going to get there training at home.

 

[Deleted member 39746]

Could you please share your training history in arts that use kata (style+duration+instructor) so that we can understand how much of these very strong statements is grounded in real world experience?



On what experience are you basing these affirmations? How did you measure and compare the effectiveness of self study vs formal training?

I believe that elaborating in that way would help you communicate your point.

Apologies for the double post.


Common sense and observation is the stem for this. If you only do kata, you will not beat somone who has only fought. They are not better or a prerequisite to "normal" exercise, and S&C commonly done might even surpass them. the Spirtual side of them is useless to somone who isnt spirtual or doesnt express it that way.

The only 2 things that i think they stand up to on their own merits without anything else added, is they are a form of spirtuality and calisthenics. So thats the only thing i will agree they can stand up to on their own merits. And plenty of other fighting systems and sports dont include them and do plenty fine without them. So they can indeed be effectively eliminated for fighting purposes, exercise purposes and spirtuality purposes.

Example of a few combat sports: Boxing, Kickboxing, Judo.


Second: The main issue here is that, there isnt a study or many studies done on training methods and the like. And several places claim to have done personal study, but i dont think many of them publish any proper papers etc on the matter, so effectively worthless.

But with that in mind, some skills are factually easier to pick up than others. and you do have some fighting instints built into you. So, if you have access to some material (more than what the first humans who codified systems had) you could learn some of the skills in it. the amount would be individual.

My personal expereince in such a matter is picking up a few things fairly easily and following defendu and other things like it. Basically the concept and thoughtl ine you only need X amount of techniques to cover the most common issues you will find. And said techniques being easy to pick up, retain and use under stress. My secondary experience is watching HEMA be resurected mainly from books by a variety of people, some of which havent had any fencing experience. And as no martial systems exist (or many) to apply any of the principles etc to it, they just studied the material they could find and sparred.

You arent going to be technically perfect and we can dipsute if you can call yourself "good", but you only need to know enough to essentially put your fist into the person until they stop being a threat to you.

Addendum: I for some reason thought, you were the same person as the person i orginally quoted, so some of the wording might be off, didnt catch it until a read read.

 

[skribs]

Common sense and observation is the stem for this.

What observation? You haven't even learned a full kata!

Second: The main issue here is that, there isnt a study or many studies done on training methods and the like. And several places claim to have done personal study, but i dont think many of them publish any proper papers etc on the matter, so effectively worthless.

This is the problem. Your "training" relies on studies and articles. You can't even base your opinion on your experience because you don't have much. Without that experience, you don't even know how to read those articles and studies.

My personal expereince in such a matter is picking up a few things fairly easily and following defendu and other things like it. Basically the concept and thoughtl ine you only need X amount of techniques to cover the most common issues you will find. And said techniques being easy to pick up, retain and use under stress.

How do you know you haven't just learned the gross motion? How do you know you fully understand the technique? How do you know what the common issues you will find are? How do you know you can retain those techniques at a proficient level, instead of slipping back to the gross motion? How do you know you can use them under stress?

The roundhouse kick is fairly easy for most people to do. But to really understand the nuances of it, and to have the technique done at a high enough level to effectively use it in stressful conditions, it takes years of practice. And when you drill in those stressful situations, you need someone else watching you to see your mistakes, because you're too busy worrying about your opponent to notice your technical issues.

My secondary experience is watching HEMA be resurected mainly from books by a variety of people, some of which havent had any fencing experience. And as no martial systems exist (or many) to apply any of the principles etc to it, they just studied the material they could find and sparred.

This isn't experience that you can claim as your own. This is you living vicariously through someone else, through their videos and articles. I think we have found the root of the problem here. You're considering your experience to be what you've read. You need to actually experience it. To see it first person, real time, with your own eyes. Only then will you truly be able to learn. Otherwise, it's all just guesswork.

 

[frank raud]

Apologies for the double post.


. the Spirtual side of them is useless to somone who isnt spirtual or doesnt express it that way.
What exactly is the spiritual side of a kata? Are you thinking of moving meditation, or that if I do kata everyday it will make me a better Buddhist?






Example of a few combat sports: Boxing, Kickboxing, Judo.
Judo has no kata? Some guy named Jigoro

Kano said something to the effect that 1/3 of your judo should be kata. But you say there is none, so he probably doesn't know what he is talking about. It could be argued that shadowboxing is a form of kata, in the same way wrestling drills could be looked at as two man kata. Of course, kata is an Eastern concept, so in Western arts when you repeat a sequence of movements to ingrain the pattern, they are referred to as drills.