Why most martial arts don't work in self defense.

Everybody is in agreement with this statement. Have been the whole thread. But you keep moving the target making 'accountability' unreachable no mater what the method/process is. Argument for the sake of argument.

Show me where I have changed my standard on accountability?

People have accused me of this but they are not telling the truth.
 
Again, nobody is in disagreement with this statement.
You seem to use video like it is your bible. The outliers (the fact that they exist) have to be factored in. When the medium used for sampling is composed of largely outliers, how can the sampling be any where near correct?

People really are in disagreement this is because suffering doesn't pay the bills. Reward for less effort does.

So self defense for example becomes something that can be taught in two weeks. This isn't results based. We can't say in two weeks they are ready to fight off a rapist.

This is based on availability. The customer may only have two weeks that they are prepared to train.

In two weeks their martial arts doesn't work in self defense.

Another factor.
 
Show me where I have changed my standard on accountability?

People have accused me of this but they are not telling the truth.

Now just because Rhonda Rousey and judo experts successfully hit those throws doesn't mean I can or teach others to.
After I watched the UFC fight last night between Zhang Weili and Joanna Jedrzejczyk, by using your logic, since throwing art was not effective last night, should I give up my throwing art and only work on face punching?

face-punch.png
 
Last edited:
After I watched the UFC fight last night between Zhang Weili and Joanna Jedrzejczyk, by using your logic, since throwing art was not effective last night, should I give up my throwing art and only work on face punching?

face-punch.png

You wouldn't be using my logic because I would be looking at consistency over time.

I imagine your logic would be closer to when a martial art is justified by using it once on some random street fight.

I would though suggest from watching that one fight that you stay the hell away from fighting either of those two.
 
If you run you will get fitter.
If you lift heavy things you will get stronger
If you eat less food you will loose weight.

You may never gain talent.

Physicality is one of the guaranteed results from training.
I agree with everything except one part. Itā€™s not guaranteed. You have to work for it. Hard. Some folks train diligently, but at low intensity. They are not guaranteed to gain physicality.
 
If you run you will get fitter.
If you lift heavy things you will get stronger
If you eat less food you will loose weight.

You may never gain talent.

Physicality is one of the guaranteed results from training.
Agree with lines 1-4. But a person either has physicality or they do not. It can be enhanced but naturally created.
Now steroids and such are a different story.
 
And it is very martial arts because because of this culture of mysterious masters giving out this wisdom to hopeful aspirants leads to this dogmatic thinking that doesn't question authority.
You know, you are only about 2 decades with this statement.
I'm tapping out.
 
I feel bad for anyone whoā€™s Martial training didnā€™t help them in a self defense situation.

I donā€™t really know anyone that went through that particular scenario, but I feel bad for anyone who did.
 
I agree with everything except one part. Itā€™s not guaranteed. You have to work for it. Hard. Some folks train diligently, but at low intensity. They are not guaranteed to gain physicality.

Ok. This brings up another very important point. And it overflows to martial arts.

Your body does not respond to rationalization. You can't make deals with it. If you are trying to loose weight and your cat dies. Your body does not give you a day pass to eat chocolate.

It is what I have mentioned as these basically non negotiable elements to training.

So yes if you train diligently but without intensity you will not get as good a result.

And with martial arts if you train diligently but without intensity you will not get as good a result.

When I say there is one method this is exactly my point.

And it is not my fault. It is not because I am mean. I would love to turn up to class once a week and be able to subdue a room full of footballers with standing arm bars. But evidence has shown me that I can't.
 
I feel bad for anyone whoā€™s Martial training didnā€™t help them in a self defense situation.

I donā€™t really know anyone that went through that particular scenario, but I feel bad for anyone who did.

It is not uncommon for people to have the wake up call.

 
You know, you are only about 2 decades with this statement.
I'm tapping out.

Self defense is notorious for a "this is what happens in the street" statement.

And therefore this is why whatever training doesn't work and mine does.

And people eat that up without ever thinking about what was said. From the Gracies 90% of fighting goes to the ground to fighting on the ground gets you sucker punched by multiples.

People are literally picking these stories out of thin air and spouting them as truth.

I mean let's take this really popular statement.

"This has been tested on the battlefield for centuries"

It is quite simply a statement that means nothing. We don't know who tested it or on who or how effective it was or how it could have been done better.

But people say it and just sort of nod to themselves as if they actually said anything. When they haven't.

It is literally this conversation.
 
"This has been tested on the battlefield for centuries"
When people say that, they are talking about "weapon fight" and not open hand fight.

ancient-fight.jpg


When I swing my stick, I don't care whether if you are Maham Ali or Mike Tyson, you better move out of my way.

my-stick-swing.gif
 
Last edited:
It is not uncommon for people to have the wake up call.


I know all too well. Heard my wake up call as a young man. One hell of a beating a bunch of us got. Changed everything we did from that point forward. It was a long road....but a really great road.
 
@drop bear semi related question to what you've been arguing. Basically your argument is that if something X teaches works for the street, the proof is that it works in competition, right?

So let's take me. I trained under professional kickboxers. They taught me with the assumption that I would be engaging in competition, just as they did. But my first 3 fights fell through, then I had concerns about CTE so I never competed. I learned from people who did prove that what they did and taught worked, so if I were to teach what they taught me/what I trained, despite never being in a formal competition,

1. would you consider what I taught valid or invalid?

If you'd consider it valid, let's say I taught my future son how to fight, using the techniques taught to me. However, he also never competed.

2. Would he be able to teach, despite the techniques that I taught him that were taught to me were used in the ring by professional kickboxers? Or would you argue telephone rules and discount his teachings?

3. What if he used what I taught him in the ring, and one some fights?

4. What if he used what i taught him in the ring and lost some fights?

Now let's say you knew some additional information about me. I have been in many fights-in the double digits but I'm not sure the exact number. Of those, at least one trained in kempo, idk about the rest. I won all of them. Even though I had never been in a ring fight, would that give me the ability to teach others for self defense? At 10+ fights, I feel like that would develop consistency for self defense, but I don't think I used the same moves in any of those fights for consistency of those moves.

5. With the knowledge that I've been in that many street fights, and won them all, would you consider what I taught valid? And would that change your answers to 2-4?
 
@drop bear semi related question to what you've been arguing. Basically your argument is that if something X teaches works for the street, the proof is that it works in competition, right?

So let's take me. I trained under professional kickboxers. They taught me with the assumption that I would be engaging in competition, just as they did. But my first 3 fights fell through, then I had concerns about CTE so I never competed. I learned from people who did prove that what they did and taught worked, so if I were to teach what they taught me/what I trained, despite never being in a formal competition,

1. would you consider what I taught valid or invalid?

If you'd consider it valid, let's say I taught my future son how to fight, using the techniques taught to me. However, he also never competed.

2. Would he be able to teach, despite the techniques that I taught him that were taught to me were used in the ring by professional kickboxers? Or would you argue telephone rules and discount his teachings?

3. What if he used what I taught him in the ring, and one some fights?

4. What if he used what i taught him in the ring and lost some fights?

Now let's say you knew some additional information about me. I have been in many fights-in the double digits but I'm not sure the exact number. Of those, at least one trained in kempo, idk about the rest. I won all of them. Even though I had never been in a ring fight, would that give me the ability to teach others for self defense? At 10+ fights, I feel like that would develop consistency for self defense, but I don't think I used the same moves in any of those fights for consistency of those moves.

5. With the knowledge that I've been in that many street fights, and won them all, would you consider what I taught valid? And would that change your answers to 2-4?

You are over cooking it.

Just make it work somewhere consistently and be able to show that.

This at the very least separates you from people who cannot show their technique working anywhere.

I would be happy at this point with some quality sparring success to be honest.

 
Self defense is notorious for a "this is what happens in the street" statement.

And therefore this is why whatever training doesn't work and mine does.

And people eat that up without ever thinking about what was said. From the Gracies 90% of fighting goes to the ground to fighting on the ground gets you sucker punched by multiples.

People are literally picking these stories out of thin air and spouting them as truth.

I mean let's take this really popular statement.

"This has been tested on the battlefield for centuries"

It is quite simply a statement that means nothing. We don't know who tested it or on who or how effective it was or how it could have been done better.

But people say it and just sort of nod to themselves as if they actually said anything. When they haven't.

It is literally this conversation.
True enough. But this is literally what you have been doing the whole thread.
 
Ok. This brings up another very important point. And it overflows to martial arts.

Your body does not respond to rationalization. You can't make deals with it. If you are trying to loose weight and your cat dies. Your body does not give you a day pass to eat chocolate.

It is what I have mentioned as these basically non negotiable elements to training.

So yes if you train diligently but without intensity you will not get as good a result.

And with martial arts if you train diligently but without intensity you will not get as good a result.

When I say there is one method this is exactly my point.

And it is not my fault. It is not because I am mean. I would love to turn up to class once a week and be able to subdue a room full of footballers with standing arm bars. But evidence has shown me that I can't.

Yeah, now you fell off the cliff and now you are just sounding absolutely silly.

I am going to take a swing at your rationalization comment.
When I went through the trials it was a three day event. On the second day, I made a bad move, exposed my ribs and stepped into a spinning side kick. While I did not know it at the time, it fully broke one rib and cracked another, and this was while wearing a chest protector (so yea, those wimpy TKD kicks are pretty hard). The pain was tremendous. I took my allowed 1-minute medical time out and finished the match. I was already ahead on points and finished with a win by playing stay-away the rest of the last round.

If you know anything about broken ribs you know there is not much that can be done for them. I am not certain if this is where you were going with the rationalization comment, but , after only a 1-minute break, I was able to will my body through about 2 more minutes of moving around and blocking (never threw another offensive move) because I was determined to win and advance.
I do think of it in the inverse however; I was able to ignore the pain to do what I needed to do.

I had advanced to the next day so I had to win 3 more matches to be a finalist.
I had previously had cracked a rib and had soft tissue damage (which is worse IMO) but never had rib pain like I did that night. Hardly slept at all. Also, a black eye I had received had completely swollen closed over night and it took a good bit of icing to get it opened enough to see out of it. I will never forget waking up the next morning. Honestly, the worst I had ever felt in my life. I had about 4 hours to get up, get moving, assess myself and decide if I was going to keep going.
Smeared a tone of lidocaine/analgesic cream on, wrapped my rib cage up tight and put on a chest protector a size smaller than I usually wore. I won the first match pretty easily. The second match was against Jay Warwick. In the second round he got a hard mid-section kick in and I was done. Just could not breathe any more.
So I left the trials, 2 matches from advancing.

How can you say I did not force my body to 'rationalize' and do what I forced it to do to go through what I went through?

To me this is battlefield mentality.
 
Physicality is definitely a factor. And as a trained skill physicality is a martial technique.

It is not whether you get beaten by the better man it is if you figure out why.
your simultaneously accepting my point and dismissing it as largely irrelevant.

physicality isnt another martial skill, its the frame work on which the tapestry of martial skills are built

the chances of you being able to use your '' skills effectively in self defence increase as your physicality increases and clearly decrease if you let yourself go. in the definition of fitter im including strength endurance reactions, co ordination balance etc

if your dramatically fitter than your attacker then just about anything will work, if that is reversed they very little will

if its more or less even Stevens then, your relying on good technique to make the difference

now its my believe that studying ma SHOULD result in you being fitter than average , if it doesn't and my dojo is a bit light on fitness to be honest, then you need to augment it yourself if you want to be able to put up a reasonable defence against average people or hold your own against above average people
 
Back
Top