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what are your favourite Martial Arts books?
I really enjoyed
Pyjama Game: Journey into Judo by Mark Law. Lots of history and backstory of judo written by a guy who took up the sport in middle age.
Angry white pyjamas by Robert Twigger is similar- a Brit enrols in the Japanese Police Aikido course & details his experience.
I personally think that any system that promotes simple blocks/strikes or low kicks (anything about groin/knee makes you too unstable in a proper tussle), some ground work, proper sparring etc over "chi", "qi", mystical mumbo jumbo or other flowery non-sense should do fine... with one proviso: sparring in any form has a tendency to have a lack of authenticity in many ways (look at the tai chi master/student thing with little old guys flinging students twice their size about - it's often the student doing most of the flinging... or Aikido where people throw themselves into the throw a little/lot more than a real opponent would)... which is my personal take on why sport martial artists do SO well against any more traditional one (even though on the streets across the world there are countless stories of the same arts saving someone's life against multiple attackers..) - sports people have that drive to win at all times, they train not to get a belt/improve themselves, but to destroy/annihilate/win. ... personal theory based on my own experience, not empirical evidence or comprehensive study
The only two martial arts books I have read / am reading are;
Zen Jui Jitsu (White to Blue) by Oliver Staark - really useful guide to what Jui Jitsu is for beginners.
Saulo Ribiero's Jui Jitsu University. Excellent technical guide to positions.
A LOT of my class mates were bouncers in City Centre Manchester- they specifically asked for more knife/bottle training as that’s what they dealt with on a daily basis.
I think that’s why we had such a “practical” approach- if you pulled your punches the bouncers would laugh at you (& the instructor was ex-army too so didn’t mind blasting us a bit).
There IS a lot to be said for keeping things simple- that’s part of what Krav (& any other good self defence classes)are based on gross movements rather than “this is the Wushi finger hold- place your pinkie here, and extend your index finger here...” in stressful situations “grip, rip and hit” are more likely to work.
Its one of the things I love about BJJ, I train full strength against a fully resisting opponent regularly. I KNOW my technique works as I’ve used it against someone who usually also knows what I’m trying for.
I've only done boxing in my youth, no Martian arts currently.
I follow professional martial arts and my ex did MMA so been to the fair few shows here in UK.
Having only rolled to date with more or equally experienced guys it was a revelation, but very quickly became unsatisfying.
Far more enjoyable was taking stock and trying to help him understand what he was trying to achieve and how he might do it.
Reflecting now with a little satisfaction on what a few months of sold training has achieved.
I got Tai Chi. Bollocks.
Tai Chi for me too.
Silk PJ's all round.
I can't help about the shape I'm in, I can't sing I ain't pretty and my legs are thin
But don't ask me what I think of you, I might not give the answer that you want me to
Then one day I fenced another intermediate person like myself and it was like I had super powers. I could see every move, block and strike at will. It was freaky. Like they were moving in slow motion and I could see their intentions in advance. Didn’t happen very often, but when it did it felt amazing.
Never really happened with kickboxing. I was fine. Neither terrible or really good. I did fine in sparring. But I never had that sense of total superiority.
For me any martial art isn’t really about fighting, and if that’s the mindset a practitioner has when studying whatever style they do, then for the most part I’d be inclined to say they’ve got it wrong.
A martial art is indeed an art form. Although they are designed with combat and self-defence in mind, I personally don’t believe those aspects should be at the forefront. These systems should be honoured and kept pure. In studying and practicing a style it gives rise to a whole host of positives, which are then available to the person practicing it. Respect, discipline, problem solving, good health, and all round good character to name a few. If all a student gets after a class is “I learned such and such a move and it would totally destroy someone” then that shouldn’t be the case. I’m exaggerating for effect but you get the point.
And who'd want to be in a fight situation let alone fight someone anyway? Even if that were the case, the likelihood of performing a drill or technique as done in class would be pretty slim. You’d hope that after training regularly that the odds would be in your favour and muscle memory would kick in thus preventing you from getting decked. Maybe, just maybe. But with all the chemicals pumping around your body in this fight or flight situation, losing fine motor skills as result, let alone the unpredictability of how the situation will ensue, even if you did perform some wing chun or whatever, it would most probably lack grace and be a far cry from what you see in the movies. The reality is it won't look like martial arts at all. Seriously, if I smelt a whiff of trouble, I would want to get away. If someone pulled out a knife I would give them what they want and definitely do a runner if I could.
This all sounds pessimistic but it shouldn’t. For me, having a martial art keeps me upright and provides me with a sense of balance. It’s like Sisyphus' daily occurrence of have to push that bloody boulder up the hill for it to only roll back down again. There is a certain pointlessness in training regularly; however, the purpose of doing so provides meaning. Like I said, it keeps me upright in more ways than one.
I did hard rolls on Saturday / Monday / Thursday and got another class this morning plus yoga every day this week and felt pretty tired on Thursday night.
One more this morning then a glass of wine tonight and a couple of days off.
I'd have thought that it would also make you a little less likely to really throw a partner for fear of actually damage them, so you wind up training muscle memory to be less than fully aggressive... at least to some extent. Aikido is also a good example of partners throwing themselves into throws... so some wont get techniques perfectly right - a resistant opponent might not want to be thrown and may prove harder to move than expected.
That said, as someone who's rotator cuff was torn by a bad kimura and lots of brute force (during a non-competitive training session) not all techniques need to be perfect.
You know the system you're doing has been massively changed at least twice - Ip Man scrapped all the stuff seen as useless or pretty non-sense (It was after all a traditional Chinese martial art complete with long-form arm movements), then each and every one of his students got a different version that they then teach. That's assuming none else changed it after either a woman or a whole travelling circus invented the martial art
Keeping systems "pure" seems an unlikely attitude for a Wing Chun practitioner - just ask the people who participated in the so called "Wing Chun Wars" fights and arguments over what was proper wing chun, with organisations slating each other: We're real, everything else is crap just to steal your money... (which is entirely Ip Man's fault for teaching everyone different things).
This is not to have a go... most martial arts have changed and evolved - and that's a good thing.
As for the paragraph 4 question. No one wants to get into a proper fight the point of learning a martial art is so that if it happens you're slightly less likely to be dead/maimed/injured than if you didn't learn. As for fine motor skills, you're not threading needles you're hitting someone in the face/groin/solar plexus with a fist/elbow/knee... practice enough and muscle memory does do what it's supposed to. No need for grace, just make the other person's nose look like a Jackson Pollock painting - ideally more than once. But you're right, the best option is still to flee, and in the case of knives, give them what they want... but sometimes there isn't the option, so train so hard that in the no-option scenario you get to go home in as few pieces as possible and they go in as many pieces as possible.
my school also does fight sims (one partner has gloves on the other a gum shield) and you quickly learn the difference between sports jiu jitsu and self defence.
However, I suspect most of those people won't stick with it. Personally, it's developed into more of a passion / hobby and the threat turned out to be idle.
When I started BJJ my professor told me he has 5 university lecturers training under him. He said "the meatheads don't stick at it".
But when I came to savate in my late 20s, I had no desire to learn something to make me bad ass, or to give me better self-defence skills. I wanted to do something that was fun and difficult. I'd also done other nominally combat sports -- like fencing -- that have no claims to self-defence skills, and enjoyed the technique and competitive side of it.
As it happens, training hard in a martial art that does a lot of sparring (and exactly no kata or forms), and which has a pretty small technique set -- it's more like boxing (western or Thai) than it's like karate or kung fu -- probably had some decent carry over into basic self defence. If nothing else, I got used to being hit, and kicking properly with shoes on (lots of low kicking techniques).
But I'd never recommend it to someone looking to learn self-defence. That's just not, normally, what those classes are set up to teach.