When the kata is applied to self defense

[now disabled]

Actually I can. I've observed how they train, and I've observed the results of practitioners who have tested their art against other systems, and I've formed a hypothesis with a predicted result. It's simple science really. Granted the sample size of the latter is small, but thus far the results are arriving at their logical conclusion.

You missed a bit out again lol

You say you have observed how they train ... ok is that in reality as in being there or is that by the wonderful You tube videos ? ...

 

[Hanzou]

It does not and I never said it did solely apply to TMA (again we can discuss what you are deeming to be TMA), And again your saying that the vast majority understand, I would add to that depending on what stage they are at

We are talking about advanced students/instructors here. I have yet to run across instructors or advanced students in those MAs I mentioned who don't understand their martial art on a functional level. The Tai Chi guys who fought in those challenge matches and got throttled were instructors or advanced practitioners.

Before I say more about TMA what is your definition of same as that might differ from mine

Any martial art that adheres to a traditional methodology and refuses to adapt to changing methodologies.

 

[now disabled]

We are talking about advanced students/instructors here. I have yet to run across instructors or advanced students in those MAs I mentioned who don't understand their martial art on a functional level. The Tai Chi guys who fought in those challenge matches and got throttled were instructors or advanced practitioners.



Any martial art that adheres to a traditional methodology and refuses to adapt to changing methodologies.

Ok we you didn't say you were talking instructors etc ...you said the vast majority

Anyway again if they want to do that and fight then that is their own choice ....It has zero to do with if they understand it or not .... Just because you fully understand does not mean your a good fighter,


That statement is very wide ranging about TMA and can cover nearly everything ...If you are going to in my opinion say TMA your going to have to be a tad more specific

 

[now disabled]

We are talking about advanced students/instructors here. I have yet to run across instructors or advanced students in those MAs I mentioned who don't understand their martial art on a functional level. The Tai Chi guys who fought in those challenge matches and got throttled were instructors or advanced practitioners.



Any martial art that adheres to a traditional methodology and refuses to adapt to changing methodologies.

Actually name the arts you think in your opinion are TMA and fit into what you stated

 

[Hanzou]

Ok we you didn't say you were talking instructors etc ...you said the vast majority

Yes, in response to your notion that somehow people who fight in challenge matches don't understand their art. And yeah, I'll happily extend the notion that the vast majority of people who practice Judo, Kyokyushin, or Bjj for a decent amount of time understand their arts on a functional level.

Anyway again if they want to do that and fight then that is their own choice ....It has zero to do with if they understand it or not .... Just because you fully understand does not mean your a good fighter,

Why not? Shouldn't something like Tai Chi or Wing Chun give you the tools to become a good fighter?

That statement is very wide ranging about TMA and can cover nearly everything ...If you are going to in my opinion say TMA your going to have to be a tad more specific

Nah, that's my definition and I'm sticking to it.

BTW, please stop dividing my posts in your responses. You're cluttering the thread.

Actually name the arts you think in your opinion are TMA and fit into what you stated

Aikido, Wing Chun, Tang Soo Do, Jow Ga, Shotokan, Tai Chi, Hung Gar, Ninjutsu, Daito-Ryu, etc. Frankly too many to name.

 

[Steve]

Your dumb ideas are worthless, not ma training.

You were trying to argue that training not directly following the form used in combat is of little value. You were given a great example of this being rubbish so you threw up the Steven Seagal defence.

At the point that you dismissed an inconvenient fact you lost what little credibility you had with me.

And lastly, the vast majority of life is not on video.
If you can't work out why a few YouTube clips do not constitute proof of anything beyond the existence of YouTube, then my advice is to forget martial arts and work on your critical thinking skills. You will need them far more than you'll need to know how to fight.

Personally, I think many ancillary activities can contribute to being better at something . for example, a lot of guys feel yoga is very synergistic with BJJ.

But I also think the proof is in tje pudding. Dancing helped your boxer be a better boxer. We can't say it didn't because he was an excellent boxer. There is evidence.

The converse is when a person declares that something (kata) helps them to fight better, when the assertion that they fight well is still in question.

Said another way, we can see from lyoto machida that kata wasn't the thing that helped him apply his considerable karate skills against other, well trained opponents. In order to bring his karate skill to bear, he added a competitive training model to his karate and also crosstrained in other, complementary styles.

Did kata help or hinder? Who knows . If he says it helps, who am I to say? But I think there is evidence that kata wasn't the difference because the things that did clearly help machida are the same things that produce predictable, reliable, repeatable, and demonstrable results in literally any person who trains in the same way, who do not do kata.

Edit to add an analogy, just because. If I weigh 400 lbs when you see me and then 2 years later I weight 185 lbs, you might say, "hey man. Congrats! How'd you do it?" I could say, "dude, I owe it all to meditation. 100%. Oh, I also started eating clean and training BJJ." Was it really the meditation? Maybe that helped me stay committed to training and eating healthy but the diet and exercise probably had a more direct influence on the weight loss.

 

[now disabled]

Aikido, Wing Chun, Tang Soo Do, Jow Ga, Shotokan, Tai Chi, Hung Gar, Ninjutsu, Daito-Ryu, etc. Frankly too many to name

I will only comment on arts I know about

Daito-ryu ..... that is Koryu, Aikido ...developed from the former (along with other bits) so explain what you mean by they have not developed and refuse to do so ..... or is this another of your opinions? (fair enough if is)

Ninjutsu .......is there anyone actually teaching that?.........and well do you know what that is or is it just another thing that has randomly popped into your head ?

 

[Gerry Seymour]

The evidence shows otherwise. We're still waiting for that Tai Chi master to emerge and wipe the floor with the Muay Thai champ, but it still hasn't happened yet.

Let's look beyond the extremes, shall we? What if we looked at Shotokan and Hapkido. One has forms, the other doesn't. Is there a glaring difference in ability if they spar together (assuming we stay within areas both arts cover)?

I don't think the kata is the major difference. You're exercising confirmation bias.

 

[Gerry Seymour]

This got me to thinking....

I like shadow boxing, been doing it like forever. But just had the thought that to make it an exercise more like actual fighting, maybe one should emulate getting hit. Because you're going to get hit while boxing, no matter what.

Maybe the next time I shadow box I'll play with that. But I'll probably forget.

Every time I emulate getting hit, I fall down and lay there for a while. Y'know, for realism. I can shadow box much longer that way.

 

[Gerry Seymour]

Whose opinion is that on the Gracies ? and why yet again bring them into it they are a respected family and deserve to be given tat respect and not given your treatment

Secondly where did I say any TMA standards have dropped ? again that seems to be your sole opinion

again what do you know that means you say Seagal didn't teach him that do you have a hotline somewhere

Any other art you want to tell the world that is wrong and give your expert opinion on

Actually I never would ask this but I will to you

What ranks do you hold that gives you the right to be the expert and be careful what you pick to say as well jsut be careful as to date you haven't shown that you really understand things at all so pray do tell what ranks do you hold

Respected martial artists are not above critique. They are human, and are good, commonly-known, figures for discussion. Discussing their ability levels, marketing tactics, personal failing, etc. doesn't diminish their MA accomplishments.

 

[Gerry Seymour]

Hardly. You can strip the forms away from traditional arts, and they will be just fine. In fact, I would argue that they would be better off, because you would streamline the curriculum, dump the nonsense saved only by tradition, and focus on the most effective techniques.

Here you seem to be making a different argument, Hanzou. So, if the forms (and art) were regularly updated, then the forms wouldn't be an issue? Or, if we dumped the forms, but kept the superfluous techniques, the problem remains largely the same?

 

[Gerry Seymour]

Dropping in to funky stances help train stability and movement.

That is why people do animal walks.

When I start thinking there is a secret move hidden within a frog jump. Then I might need some reality injected in to my training.

Of course there isn't. You hide the secret moves in the sloth crawl. Nobody will think to look there.

 

[Gerry Seymour]

It’s just, you should be ashamed. It’s not elegant. It’s like when someone says, “Don’t do that. What you do do is this.” Do do? Come on. We are better than this.

 

[Hanzou]

I will only comment on arts I know about

Daito-ryu ..... that is Koryu, Aikido ...developed from the former (along with other bits) so explain what you mean by they have not developed and refuse to do so ..... or is this another of your opinions? (fair enough if is)

While Aikido is a fairly new art, it adheres to its traditions over incorporating new techniques or pushing the evolution of the style. They believe that O'Sensei had it right and was an amazing martial artist (in some cases even deifying the man), so the goal is to reach his level, instead of attempting to surpass it. Meanwhile in Judo, there's plenty of Judoka who have surpassed Kano's skill level. That occurred even while Kano was still alive. He is respected as a genius who created the system, but no one believes that he was the pinnacle of the art itself, and to this day, Judo will incorporate new techniques to make it a better system.

Ninjutsu .......is there anyone actually teaching that?.........and well do you know what that is or is it just another thing that has randomly popped into your head ?

Whatever Masaaki Hatsumi teaches. Those guys believe that they're practicing Koryu art and they're pretty staunch traditionalists in my experience. I just call it Ninjutsu because I don't feel like typing out the full name.

 

[Hanzou]

Let's look beyond the extremes, shall we? What if we looked at Shotokan and Hapkido. One has forms, the other doesn't. Is there a glaring difference in ability if they spar together (assuming we stay within areas both arts cover)?

I don't think the kata is the major difference. You're exercising confirmation bias.

I was under the impression that Hapkido does have forms. What system of Hapkido doesn't have forms?

Here you seem to be making a different argument, Hanzou. So, if the forms (and art) were regularly updated, then the forms wouldn't be an issue? Or, if we dumped the forms, but kept the superfluous techniques, the problem remains largely the same?

If the forms were updated to include the techniques actually utilized while fighting, then yes the forms wouldn't be an issue.

I do believe that there is a descendant style of Kyokushin karate that removed all kata from the system, and it remains a highly effective style.

 

[now disabled]

While Aikido is a fairly new art, it adheres to its traditions over incorporating new techniques or pushing the evolution of the style. They believe that O'Sensei had it right and was an amazing martial artist (in some cases even deifying the man), so the goal is to reach his level, instead of attempting to surpass it. Meanwhile in Judo, there's plenty of Judoka who have surpassed Kano's skill level. That occurred even while Kano was still alive. He is respected as a genius who created the system, but no one believes that he was the pinnacle of the art itself, and to this day, Judo will incorporate new techniques to make it a better system.



Whatever Masaaki Hatsumi teaches. Those guys believe that they're practicing Koryu art and they're pretty staunch traditionalists in my experience. I just call it Ninjutsu because I don't feel like typing out the full name.

You just have a loathing of Aikido pure and simple ....umm you said Daito-ryu so where is the response to that? or are we cherry picking again

Well if you can't type it out then best not state what you think it is

 

[Gerry Seymour]

The problem of form first and application later is you may train something that's totally worthless.

This short clip contains the first 2 move of the 1st long fist form Lien Bu Chuan.

1. Your opponent punches you, you use your palm to push up on his elbow joint.
2. You then palm strike back on his waist.

I'll never use a vertical palm block to deal with a straight punch. I'll also never strike on my opponent's waist with a side palm like that. If I repeat that form 10,000 times in my life, I'll have wasted a lot of training time that I can do something more useful.

If I use the application first approach, I probably will never want to learn that form in the first place.

As a teacher, you (general YOU) don't want to force your students to learm something that he will never use for the rest of his life.

I'd argue that's a problem with a specific form, rather than a problem with teaching the form first. If I pulled together the 8 moves I use most in sparring, combined them into a form, then taught that form before anything else, it wouldn't have that problem.

I don't like form-first for an entirely different reason. Adults learn best when they understand context. Forms lack natural context, so people don't really understand (unless they are given copious descriptions) what the movement is meant to do, and cannot use good intent with it. If they learn the technique (with application) first, then they can get closer to useful intent right away in the form.

 

[Hanzou]

You just have a loathing of Aikido pure and simple ....umm you said Daito-ryu so where is the response to that? or are we cherry picking again

I have no loathing towards Aikido. The exact opposite in fact.

You can take what I said about Aikido and apply it to Daito-Ryu as well.

Well if you can't type it out then best not state what you think it is

Except everyone knows what Ninjutsu is.

 

[Gerry Seymour]

But I also think the proof is in tje pudding. Dancing helped your boxer be a better boxer. We can't say it didn't because he was an excellent boxer. There is evidence.

I love this post, just one quick point. We actually don't have evidence the dancing helped. We have a correlation (only a single point, but still a correlation), and an assumed causality. I don't think that actually rises to the level of evidence. I get nit-picky about that because I see people in the business world all the time telling exactly what made them successful at something (easiest to find in sales), but they don't really know. Sometimes you get two guys giving entirely contradictory conclusions ("I sell a lot because I give my customers lots of information up front" vs. "I sell a lot because I stay away from giving information that might confuse them into not buying"). Both might be correct, or both might be wrong. Not enough data to really know.

Okay, I'm done picking nits. Keep up the good posts!

 

[Steve]

Let's look beyond the extremes, shall we? What if we looked at Shotokan and Hapkido. One has forms, the other doesn't. Is there a glaring difference in ability if they spar together (assuming we stay within areas both arts cover)?

I don't think the kata is the major difference. You're exercising confirmation bias.

Well, it's also possible that forms arent the problem, where two styles have similar problems with the training model . What I mean is, if a yoga instructor and a tai chi instruxtor fight, their lack of martial skill isn't because one does yoga. It's because neither are developing martial skill .