No. I had heard of sais being able to break swords many times before and that's why I started the thread. I found the video way after starting the thread.My sarcasm still stands. All of the video is crap. The sai sword breaking technique cannot be martial arts "gold" while the double sai choke defense complete crap. Is this video is why you started the thread? Next time link the video first, that way we can realize the kind of delusion were dealing with.
Edit: haha dirty dog just said the same thing whike I was typing this
Sai breaking sword
- Thread starter PhotonGuy
- Start date
Well the guy that runs the place has been teaching for over forty five years and is well renowned in the area. And there are multiple instructors who do teach different styles.
Where?
It usually is made from solid steel. Sometime it's square shape.
Yeah, bet they are a little heavy. Nice balance?
Seriously PG, you got to start using citations with this stuff. Saying I had heard is like saying. "I was as the bus stop the other day, and this dude started talking about breaking swords man. Dude pass me the blunt!"
From all sorts of sources, books, magazine articles, martial arts discussions. I've always been a bit skeptical about it that's why I started the thread.
That is not a citation.
Xue Sheng
All weight is underside
For what it's worth, I've also heard and read the same story on more than one occasion, although I couldn't tell you from memory who was making the claims. I have enough background knowledge to know that the story is bogus, but not everyone has that background.
I'll go so far as to say that anyone who has earned a black belt in any art ought to have the background to know silliness when they hear it.
That would be nice, but a huge amount of the martial arts-based silliness I've heard over the years has come from black belt ranked practitioners. Sometimes it comes from actual instructors.
That in itself is a silliness right there.
Amen.
That's why it's important to get actual hands-on experience when it comes to learning a martial art.
Books and other such literary sources are best used as supplements for those who already have a goodly amount of actual experience. When used as such, they can help someone sharpen up technique that is already at a decent level.
Someone who is already at that level where he can benefit from the above mentioned media, has a much better chance of understanding what is mechanically correct, and what is not. Furthermore, he can also discard information that he knows is incorrect.
The newbie to the art will not benefit from such things, and could very well ignorantly end up taking garbage information as gospel.
When teaching someone how to use the sai, it's probably a good idea to forbid the new student from looking at videos, books, etc., until after he's had a good bit of live basic training, and is able to show that he can perform the techniques with proper mechanics.
It's also important that someone learning to use the sai start with a pair of sai that have at least a decent measure of balance to them. This is something that the newbie will probably not understand.
Otherwise, it's all too easy to end up with someone who tries to flip a sai by raising his elbow, or scrunching his shoulder, or cocking his wrist, instead of simply letting the sai flip out and back on its own with a simple, straightforward movement of the arm. Or, the above mentioned would-be practitioner might end up with poor synchronicity between the lower body and the upper body, leading to his use of only his upper body to perform his strikes.
To make things worse, the above mentioned hypothetical newbie might be trying to learn using a pair of junk sai like the ones in the video you linked. There are many times that someone found the "Daredevil / Elektra Sai Set" or the "Raphael Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Sai Set" on E-bay or at an Asian grocery store (yes, there are quite a few of them), and finds out that what his instructor told him won't work with horribly unbalanced pieces of junk, leading to his use of the above mentioned incorrect mechanics.
This usually ends up in having a difficult task of making someone unlearn bad mechanics in order to learn the proper ones, which will usually take more time than someone learning proper ones from the start.
To put it another way:
It's no different than a neophyte attempting to learn judo by watching a video, and trying to throw someone just using his hands and arms, while ignoring the critical use of the lower body in such techniques, and finding out that in an actual fight, his improvised judo mechanics are worthless. He might be thinking "but I grabbed the opponent in the same place where that guy on the video did, and I moved my arms in the exact same way he did too! Why doesn't it work?!?" without realizing that he missed many a critically important aspect of the basic, fundamental mechanics that would have easily been there with proper live training.
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I've heard from all sorts of 'sources' that you can't get pregnant if you have sex standing up does that mean it's true?
I myself have never gotten pregnant while standing up. It must be true!
I myself have never gotten pregnant while standing up. It must be true!
There you go, perfect proof!
Xue Sheng
All weight is underside
You know....now that I think about it...I've never gotten pregnant while standing up either.... must be true
What you say makes sense but there's some things that should be realized. For one thing, hands on training has its limitations too. For one thing you can't always go full speed or full force while training. For somebody to swing a katana full speed and for you to attempt to catch it with a sai you can't do in training, simply for safety reasons. Sometimes a good way to know what a weapon was used for is by researching history, which is often done through books provided that you've got a good source. For instance, the jitte, a weapon that's similar to the sai except it has only one hook as opposed to two was apparently used by Japanese police and was used to catch and immobilize sword blades. My source for that claim is from the Martial Arts Encyclopedia by Larry Winderbaum although I wouldn't recommend trying to back that up by getting a jitte and having somebody swing at you full speed with a katana. As you said, somebody should get proper training to understand the mechanics of an art including a weapon used in that art, but as I said before, I was skeptical about what I heard about being able to catch and break swords with sais, and so that's why I started this thread.
Xue Sheng
All weight is underside
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