No, it is not. Do a web search of Peytonn Quinn. Much closer to the reality of combat IMO. You may also look into some of the ways kata training is sometimes done in Japan.
I think this is a very important and constantly overlooked point—point fighting, competitive sparring, may help you with making quick decisions on the fly, but given the rules of point sparring or other kinds of sport MA contests, those decisions will very likely be all wrong on the street, because of the way the scoring system of sport MAs determines rewards and penalties. Look at Olympic style TKD—try to get in as many kicks to the head as you can because it's double points? Keep your hands down?? Most definitely, the deep reflexes that sport TKD develops are going to be absolutely horrible responses in a bar fight or an unprovoked, unlooked-for street attack.
The work of Peyton Quinn, Geoff Thompson and Iain Abernethy (guys who I've chosen for my ideal bodyguards on that thread, so I've put my money where my mouth is!) shows that there is another way: train for the street, not by conventionized sparring, but by all-in fight simulation with minimal protection—touches to the eye count for eye gouges, a minimal impact sick kick to groin or side of the knee counts for a scrotum- or joint-bursting version of the real thing; but apart from that, it's street rules only.
There is a
lot of work along these lines. For example, instead of the kind of conventional attack/defense sequences that the street-useless `official' bunkai for TKD forms advocate, and which a lot of one-step training is based on, why not first make a careful study of the most common kinds of
real street attacks—sucker punches, head butts, grabs from behind with the attacker's mates holding while he moves into position to smash your face in, etc—and then working out counters to those? Bill Burgar's book,
Five Years, One Kata, actually does this, with photos. He's done a fair bit of research on the most common assault patterns—I believe he's relied heavily on Geoff Thompson's work here—and shows, based on his intensive five-year study and practice of
a single kata how well traditional kata supply sequences of fighting techs specifically designed to counter just these attacks, typically before the attacher gets a chance to launch them. Not surprising, when you consider that the early Okinawan, Japanese and Korean MA masters were training themselves, and their students, to know how to keep themselves in one piece in a world which was far harsher than the one most of us in the West have to live in.
I'd like to see more attention given to this approach to structured combat training (a description that I think gives a much better feel for what's involved than the word `sparring' or its Japanese equivalent `kumite' and so on). The one problem with it is that, from what I've seen and the little I've done of it, it is very scary and unpleasant. But the whole point is, it sort of
has to be in order to be effective...
