The Most Dangerous Game

Famous shrink Carl Rogers came up with a skill called "unconditional positive regard" which helps someone do "active listening." It means if you decide to genuinely enjoy listening to the person talking, you can get a lot more out of whatever type of interviewing you are doing. I have some kind of mental health issue which I call "universal positive regard", which is where I like EVERYONE. I could have a lot of fun being with a very rude mass murderer for a few hours, enjoying their company and listening to their unique views on life.

My condition not a good thing. Several weeks ago I found myself halfway through giving a stranger who was much larger than myself a ride home, when he started explaining that he thought I was bisexual and that he and I should experiment together. It was really awkward and a little intimidating until I finally got him out o my car. A week later I found out that he was a violent sex offender and that I had probably been in real danger.

Whether or not "attachment disorder" actually exists, the best explanation I have for my condition is that for the first eight days of my life I was isolated from bonding with any adults because of a health condition I had at birth. My childhood was normal there after with breast feeding etc, so presumably I had attachment disorder as an infant but I have had the treatment for attachment disorder (being forcefully bonded to an adult) as an infant as well. So I may have whatever it is people who have attachment disorder have after they have been cured, maybe "post-attachment-disorder?" 

Part of this post-attachment-disorder isn't just enjoying the company of people who I should not, but also sometimes getting into a habit of bully hunting. Back in the 1970's people had different ideas about raising kids, and an adult who wasn't blood related to me held me out of a 30 story window at age 3 and joked about accidentally dropping me. On the third day he did this, I snapped and bit his hand so hard he had to go to the hospital for stitches. I have had to watch myself carefully that I am not hunting bullies for sport ever since. So on one hand I find everyone such amazing and entertaining specimens to enjoy, but on the other hand if I identify you as a dangerous threat who is coming after me, I will also enjoy hunting you in return.

If you read this blog often you know I have been anti-MLM since the 1990s. Part of that is I study other scams and exploitation, to keep myself and anyone who will listen to me from getting involved. I am recently divorced and said so on Facebook, and overnight a whole new type of account was interested in me, mostly with East Asian profiles with portraits that looked like they were generated by AI. Soon one that was more convincingly human started talking Bitcoin, and I knew I had a new bully to hunt!

She went by the alias "Sophie Martin." She sent me a digital image of a convincing California state driver's license for an address in Beverly Hills. When I was interacting with her she had 5.6 million in USDT (probably stolen from divorcees by way of a fake bitcoin exchange website.) She went so far as to have a video conversation with me to prove she was a real person, and she presented as a Mongolian woman with a Russian accent, and she claimed to be from Kazakhstan living in Portland Oregon working for a Crypto exchange company. 

She never got a dime from me, but we were supposedly exclusive for about 72 hours, at her request. For the first 18 hours and last 18 hours I knew it was a scam, but I really didn't know for the middle 36 hours. Her replies were on point, her story about her x-boyfriend having a gambling problem was really convincing, and she came up with this date for us to go on in Portland that was clearly a bunch of things that SHE wanted to do, that had nothing to do with what I wanted to do (go dancing at night clubs.) 

The reason why I never put my guard down around her completely is she kept trying to shame me for not being wealthy enough. I thought it was a personality or character flaw she had. I am not well off, but I am not destitute either, I live the lifestyle I want, and if I made a million dollars a year my lifestyle would be just about exactly the same as it is now. But eventually I had to follow through with the Bitcoin side of what she was about, because this could have all been an elaborate scheme... and when we went down that road it was this crazy fever-pitch two hour crazy rabbit hole of me sending her screen shots from my phone logging into various crypto exchanges and websites... 

And then I saw it: a website designed for cell phones that was repeating information that was already on the crypto app. I made an excuse and broke off the conversation and hit the books for the next 12 hours figuring out who Sophie really was and how her scam really worked. Also how the hell did she fool ME of all people?

The game she is playing is that she is both simultaneously scamming and dating at the same time. In my case I think she was planning to sleep with me (she had no real chance as I am an LDS Sunday school teacher, but she wouldn't have understood that very well,) and I suspect she has slept with some of her victims. I think she sexually gets of on having relations with dudes she is victimizing, some kind of twisted power fetish. I further suspect that scammers like her have a chip on their shoulder against male divorcees... law enforcement thinks it's because male divorcees are lonely and alone and easily victimized, but the fact is we are all a gym membership and 6 months from being the most eligible bachelors we have ever been, it's physically impossible for us to be cat ladies. I think these scammers are targeting divorcees because these scammers are getting revenge on an ex-husband by going after all x-husbands (or their divorced dad by going after all divorced dads.)

This was really a dangerous situation, and probably came within 30 minutes of losing $200 to her and within weeks of losing many thousands of dollars to her. Who knows what else she was capable of. It was time to have a fake break up with her for our supposedly-exclusive relationship. I don't have the resources to stalk international criminals and I had learned how her scam worked. (Fake website imitates real crypto exchange, fake website takes your bitcoin and tells says you are getting daily compound interest which is of course impossible, and they come up with an excuse as to why you can't withdraw bitcoin but keep encouraging you to send more to them.)

I told her it was not practical for us to have a relationship if she was in Portland while I was in the greater Seattle area. We don't have the same values, I don't believe you can buy happiness and that's all she's trying to do with her life.  This was evident in the date she had planned that ignored dancing. At the end she slipped up and said "I don't like night clubs... but I was hoping you would see me and make me enjoy dancing at one."

Cut back to the Saturday night before. I was at The Forum in Bellevue when as I was waiting in line to get into the club, four tall muscular East-Asian women (aka Mongolians,) one of whom looked like Sophie in our video call, got into line right behind me. All night the Sophie look alike was acting strange near me, smiling at her friends with this huge wolf-like grin, but doing a wall flower type of thing near whatever direction I was facing. THAT WAS NO LOOK-ALIKE!

I have recently been stalked by an international criminal I was online dating. This is what men are dealing with in today's dating world. Understand that when you get on a man's case for not meeting your financial expectations, you are by definition engaged in exploiting him emotionally if not also financially, regardless of your intentions. I will leave you with my last words to Sophie, followed by an inspirational video. "I am looking for dance partners, and maybe a friend I can share the rest of my life with. I am not a communally owned dildo to be passed up and down the I-5 corridor by entitled mean-girl women who should know better." 

5 Stars of Expertise

 I am a huge likert scale fan, and I have found that there are 5 levels of expertise in martial arts, and that this also goes for other subjects, and it applies to the difference in my personal skill levels when it comes to fighting vs. dancing. So let's apply it to fighters first:

1. A one star martial artist is someone who's fighting skills are a result of being athletic, naturally tough, or having taken a few hours of self defense training. There are life long martial artists who are only at this level because the way they train martial arts has little application for fighting.
2. A two star fighter is someone who has trained to fight specifically in the past casually but on a regular basis, or someone who has multiple elements from one star (a weightlifter who has taken a self defense class for example.) It could also be someone who on the job uses a system for manhandling opponents such as police, bouncers, or hospital security.
3. A three star fighter is what popular language calls a "black belt," in other words someone who has studied enough fighting to teach classes on how to fight. People who have trained martial arts in a way that is good for training to fight for multiple years usually fit into this category. This is the category most combat sports coaches fall under.
4. A four star fighter can be identified one of two ways. First they are the best student of a three star fighter/martial arts instructor, identified as being formidable enough to defeat their own instructor in a fight. (If an instructor can NOT produce this kind of fighter, than what kind of fighting instructor are they?) Second, this could be a fighter who fights in higher level tournament competition, or a fighter who fights in public matches.
5. I didn't know 5 star fighters existed until I found myself on the mat with one in a knife fight. People had warned me that there are these really dangerous people out there you will rarely see in competition, but which are feared by 3 and 4 star fighters. Ramsey Dewey describes a Tai Chi fighter like this who the high level Sanda fighters in China sometimes train with. Things I have noticed about them as I have encountered them myself: A. Most of their training time is spent on developing their own skills, not teaching others. B. They are NOT into publicizing their abilities, their skill level is a legal liability to them if they have to use it in a real situation, and since they aren't pro fighters or instructors they are not making money from people knowing what they can do. C. They are all into free sparring, but they don't want to take the injury risk of training in fight camps to prep for matches or tournaments, least bit participating in those fights. As a result, they do NOT accumulate the same career ending combat sports injuries pro fighters do, which allows them to train longer and accumulate more skill than what you would seen in say the UFC. 

How can I say there's a higher level of fighter beyond a UFC champ? There are two factors: 1. UFC fighters are train for the highly specialized rule set of the cage. 2. UFC fighters train for long extended matches, relative to real fights that typically end in less than 30 seconds, they are literally training for a specialized type of fighting that is not most fights. UFC champ BJ Penn learned this the hard way:

Now that was a VERTICAL left hook that knocked out BJ Penn, a highly specialized technique that requires a significant amount of training, but this is not to show that guy BJ Penn was up against was some 5 star fighter (though it's possible,) only that UFC is not the ultimate standard for what constitutes "good fighting" as that skill set can be inadequate for most types of fights.

I classify myself as a 3 star fighter. Most of the keyboard warriors who criticize me would not last 30 seconds against me, that's just the reality. I am however fully aware that an average MMA fighter going at it at a Casino every couple of months, is a level of fighting skill entirely beyond me. I am highly specialized in knife fighting and practical strategy for self defense and in that one area I might be 4 stars, but over all I am very typical 3 star fighter.

What I have come to realize as I have started dancing and exploring different venues and dance cultures, is that I am a 5 star dancer. I show up at clubs where there's something going on I find entertaining, and my biggest concern is that the other good dancers will stop dancing just to observe me. But I don't teach, I am there for my own personal entertainment and frankly to steal other people's dance moves I like and modify them to make them my own.

Why?

When most people go to a dance, they dance a few songs. I dance all night. If 50 songs are played and they dance 5 songs and I dance 50, I got 10x as much practice that evening. Most people who enjoy going to dance venues maybe around twice per month. I prefer to go twice a week. This means I get 50 x 4 (200 times) more experience dancing than most other dancers. The other issue is though I took a very long hiatus from dancing for 25 years, before that I had been to hundreds of dances, always with the intent of getting better at dancing. Then I do something others don't: train at home on my own time. In my senior year of high school, I would practice dance moves to a metronome with a mirror alone in the basement. Then there's the formal training: a year of ballet in grade school, and a year on a ballroom team in High School. And then yes, there's the martial arts thing on top of all that, adding to my over all physical coordination. Finally, I study all forms of dance whenever I can (with a few exceptions for safety reasons (such as daggering or break dancing,) though I enjoy observing those more physically dangerous forms of dance.) I have recently added salsa footwork and some sort of mambo footwork into my repertoire, and I have taken a local Zumba instructor (who was rumored to be an excellent dancer before she got into Zumba) seriously as a dance floor rival. I've been to Country events, Islander events, etc. etc. even thought he main scene in my area right now is really EDM. 

So... I don't even know how to teach my moves to others... I tried to show one young lady at a club a few weeks ago for a move I had done, "it's just a crip walk with a knee roll from Jazz dancing..." and she was just left looking at me wondering what any of those words meant. I think back on the price I paid to learn each element of that technique and realize there's no place she is going to learn it, and as a 5 star dancer I have no incentive to teach it.

I am not the best dancer in the world, I suspect that for example Flint Flossy is probably a better dancer than me. However you have to be at a fairly elite level far beyond the average dance instructor or professional dancer to adequately challenge me on the dance floor.

Dancing Past Midlife Crisis

 

Last week I confessed to a friend of mine and her boyfriend "I don't care if I have to pay a male sex worker to take me dancing at a gay bar, I will be on a dance floor this New Years!" (He was like "well... good luck with that..." but she knew I was 100% not joking.) Then this happened:

My age starting with a 5 has been a huge issue for me - I finally have employment that allows me to live comfortably after a lifetime of keeping my "career" on the back burner in favor of family and personal projects, but my life is over half way done - so what good does this comfort do? Just after I turned 50 I met a 55 year old knife fighter on the mat who taught me to focus on my strength training and to stop pouting (and since then I have become 20 lbs lighter and 10% stronger):

In 2021 I went to Detroit for a wedding. My wife's health issues that keep her in bed most of the day were acting up, so I took her back to our hotel room and with her blessing headed back out to the dance floor. It wasn't very long before cell phones were out and people were recording me. (Same cellphone recording happened more recently at an event for high school seniors I was chaperoning.) That 2021 dance floor in Detroit was the most fun I have had in decades. 

I took a year of ballet in grade school and was a captain of a small ballroom dance team for a year when I was in High School, and when the early 90's changed the dance scene entirely, I would practice in a mirror in a basement to a metronome. Later in my 20's I attended hundreds of dances. Dancing was never a sexual thing for me, but rather a fun way to spend time with friends in a social and healthy activity. But you know my ride-or-die BFF's I used to go dancing with in my teens and 20's? They are old or dead now, mostly from ailments that could have been prevented through cardiovascular exercise!

I haven't been sleeping well latey, partly due to lack of any signficant cardio exercise. When I dance I like to hit the dance floor for about 3 hours straight, 180 minutes... take off 30 minutes for slow dances and water breaks, that's 150 minutes. It says "preferably" above because the American Heart Association has noticed it doesn't actually matter very much if that 150 minutes per week is all at once or in multiple workouts, and I am still going to be doing my martial arts and strength training exercises of course.

The big problem with cardio training is it is highly repetitive and thus more likely to result in injury. Over the last 10 years I have been injured jogging more than once, causing me to miss out on several months of serious training. With casual dancing however you are just doing whatever moves you feel like with the beat of the music setting the pace, making it the safest possible cardiovascular exercise.

I don't do break dancing or dirty dancing, but everything else is on the table: swing, hip hop, EDM, goth, square dancing, Latin, ball room, you name it, I am down! The problem is I am going to have to find people to do this with: maybe I know some people already, maybe I don't. Dancing is literally the only thing I want in my life but don't have, and for the sake of my mental and physical health, I have decided to embrace a new adventure of finding dance in my life again.

Good Posture

By "good posture" I mean the practice of while you are standing or moving, keeping your spine in a straight line (usually perpendicular to the ground):

This has numerous advantages for self defense. Naysayers of good posture are generally justifying their own bad posture from overspecialization in some kind of combat sports or fitness training, ignoring 99% of physical therapists everywhere. Here's another view on good posture I agree with:

Recap checklist of that video:

1. Crown of your head stretches for the sky, with a chin tuck as a side effect.
2. Slightly tuck the lower ribs.
3. Keep your hips slightly tilted forward so that your hips are under your shoulders.
4. Shoulders rolled back instead of rolled forward (thumbs facing forward, elbows back.)

The first advantage of being in good posture is having awareness. It requires mindfulness to maintain good posture for most people. You are more likely to defend yourself successfully if you are present rather than when you are distracted.

The second advantage is that you appear stronger and taller. You look like a harder target with good posture. You are less likely to be attacked with good posture.

The third advantage is better posture = better strength. Consider the similarity to dead lifting posture to healthy standing posture as listed above:

The fourth advantage is better posture = less injury. Injury is a poor strategy in a self defense situation:

The fifth advantage is that better posture gives you more lower body flexibility. This is because your nerves and spinal column are a limited length, and slide around inside of your body. When your back is as straight as possible, that uses less of your spinal cord and gives more slack to the nerves in your legs:

Sixth, good posture also gives you more upper body mobility:

Seventh, be it charging or fleeing, running speed is valuable for self defense. Posture improves running speed as well:

Eighth, in grappling we often speak of trying to break the other person's posture in order to dominate them by taking them off of their feet. Part of this is because posture significantly impacts balance, which is valuable for self defense even beyond grappling:

Ninth, good posture helps you keep maximum control over your own head. If your jaw is sticking out forward with your shoulders hunched, your jaw is more exposed to a strike, and it's easier to yank down on your head to control you:

10th, good posture helps our breathing. This helps us heal, but it also helps us get more oxygen into our body when we need that oxygen in an emergency:

11th, good mental health is valuable for making good decisions, and making good decisions is valuable in self defense situations. Good posture helps with mental health:

12th, if you want to verbally de-escalate a situation, which is arguably the most important self defense skill, posture helps with this as well:

In several Chinese martial arts there is an exercise called "standing meditation." One of the most valuable reasons for doing standing meditation in martial arts is simply to consciously work on your posture and postural awareness, for all of the above reasons:

Weaponized Tai Chi

When I was studying MMA in 2018 at Kitsap Combat Sports, I was surprised to discover that light contact continuous sparring had returned to the USA as the preferred form of sparring for training fighters. This picture is a screen shot from their website, the person who's back is facing the camera is me, and the guy with the beard is an amazing instructor:

I was there mostly to learn more about clinch fighting to improve my Tai Chi, but this revelations about light contact was a rude awakening for me. When I had been training in combat sports in my prime in my early 20's (mid 1990s,) we were going beyond full contact, more like daily gym fights, as the only true way to learn how to fight. Even our instructors were telling us back then to take it down a notch, even though they themselves were advocates of full contact training. In retrospect I can see this wasn't healthy, but it did get us to learn the basics of what would now be called Dutch Kickboxing very quickly.

My very first martial art style was Tae Sho Arnis, also known as Tae Sho Karate Do. It was considered "full contact Karate" (similar to "American Kickboxing,") but the regular form of sparring in class had highly controlled contact, basically light contact continuous sparring, which I think originated in the Tae Kwon Do community in the 1970's. We never had matches outside of point fighting tournaments, but the thing is that EVERY SINGLE STUDENT WHO STUDIED THAT ART LATER OR AT THE TIME PROVED TO BE COMPETENT AT DEFENDING THEMSELVES. Was it the strong Arnis influence on the style? Was it some kind of lingering martial benefit from 1960's Shotokan or TKD? Some combination of influences? Who knows, but it worked at the time (late 1980's,) and though I learned later (1990's) mostly through gory full contact slug fests, this new revelation in 2018 helped me connect the dots with that first art I studied.

 

By the time the 2020 pandemic started, I had studied at another martial arts school all together, and realized that I had learned more techniques I wanted to master than I had time left in my life to master, and I wasn't in need of new regular instruction outside of occasional private lessons. I am one of the founders of weapon fight club Tres Espadas, and I do not lack for sparring partners willing to beat on me while I work on my techniques against them.

But in the social abyss of the pandemic, people reached out to me, wanting me to teach them martial arts. The problem was teach them what? Where do you start on something like that? As a martial arts consumer advocate I had strong opinions on what this should entail, but I had no curriculum to go by.

At the same time controversy was erupting about an MMA gym owner in China promoting his line of MMA gyms by beating up cult leaders who thought they knew Tai Chi. It bothered me the state that Tai Chi was in, because in most cases people don't even practice Tai Chi as a martial art, but rather as a much more reliable form of Yoga than mainstream Yoga. Then I got to wondering, what if I applied best practices from a martial arts consumer point of view to Yang style Tai Chi?

My Weaponized Tai Chi project is applying the best practices I have described on my blog to the worlds most common and most controversial martial art: Yang style Tai Chi. Here's the general idea:

1. Every training session or lesson starts with the core Tai Chi exercises, including some minimal posture & strength training, stretching, standing meditation and push hands (including the single hand sensitivity drill, the two hand resistance balance drill, and the moving step free sparring.) 
   
2. I strongly believe that real fights involve weapons. The only way they don't is if YOU are unprepared. I start with the Knife Badge from Tres Espadas, as it teaches evasive movement and a real way to handle multiple attackers if necessary. The knife can easily be substituted with pepper spray which is legally encouraged in my state.
3. Mostly because of popular demand, I then include some Arnis basics for stick fighting. 
4. Once the student understands the basics of knife and stick free sparring, then they are ready to get into real-weight fighting weapons, such as Nihozashi Padded Katanas. This more closely resembles the weight and heft of most improvised weapons, and the Yang style Saber Form (which I have modified mostly to include the same moves practiced on both the left and right sides,) is the perfect way to show how to swing heavier weapon around with precision, power and defense in mind. So yes, the way _I_ teach Tai Chi is the way Kung Fu would have been taught originally to ancient soldiers, Saber (or Spear) first (spear being the less practical option in today's world. The following picture is not me, but it is a picture of the Katana-like Yang style Tai Chi Saber.)


5. Once the student has mastered the long journey (40 or so training sessions) of learning the Tai Chi saber, they are ready for adding controlled contact sparring with punches, kicks and other techniques from an unarmed Tai Chi form. (I use a modified version of the Yang Style 16 movement form, replacing moves I don't like (stork spreads it's wings) with moves I do like (golden rooster, high kick) and again rearranging the form to make sure the same moves are practiced on both sides of the body.)
   
6. Once I am satisfied that the student is prepared to fight with and without weapons, then we explore grappling deeper. Head grabs, chokes and leg grabs are added to the moving step free sparring to form Tai Chi Wrestling. Also an attacker versus defender focused sparring is practiced, where both partners start on the ground in side control; the one on bottom is trying to escape to their feet and the one on top trying to get in a guillotine or RNC, and when one wins, they trade roles and continue.

As for the longer Tai Chi forms or famous Tai Chi straight sword, I don't bother, this curriculum is intentionally brief. It's all limited to 100 lessons. After that 100 lessons, if they want they can keep training with me on the same curriculum, if they want a wider variety of weapon sparring they can participate more fully in Tres Espadas, if they want to learn more about knife and stick there is plenty of Filipino Martial Arts in the area, if they want to perfect their striking they can study Muay Thai at a few different gyms in this area, if they want a wider variety of martial arts knowledge there's plenty of Traditional Martial Arts around here, if they want to work on their grappling I would send them directly to Kitsap Combat Sports for MMA, and if they want to get more serious about Tai Chi there are a few legitimate Tai Chi masters within a few hours of here that I can refer them to. Weaponized Tai Chi is only intended to be for beginners or to augment someone's training if they are not a beginner, it's not meant to be a comprehensive martial art for the life long martial artist, nor is it a catalogue of all the knowledge I have regarding self defense or martial arts.

I Told You So

People talk like martial arts has arrived, and that we have good solutions for teaching every day people with an every day lifestyle effective fighting skills that they can reliably use to protect themselves, and that we can do this without injuring them worse than they would be if they were mugged on the street. But we don't, martial arts has a long ways to go before we have any such training developed.

There are 4 Olympic Sports, 2 striking (Taekwondo and Boxing,) 2 grappling (Judo and Wrestling.)  1 striking and 1 grappling have Gi (martial arts uniforms, Tae Kwon Do and Judo) and there is a striking and grappling art that do not have Gi (boxing and wrestling.) Of these 4 arts, Judo (Gi grappling) is the most injurious and Wrestling (no-Gi grappling)  is the least injurious: https://combatsportslaw.com/2020/11/23/study-judo-has-highest-injury-rate-among-olympic-combat-sports/

I have been concerned for a while now that the more over-specialized a martial art gets, the more disconnected it gets from applicable self defense technique, and the more there is a risk of repetitive stress injury. My personal experience is that grappling in a Gi is far more injurious than grappling in regular exercise clothes, and that fits well with the Judo rate of injury vs Wrestling rate of injury listed above. I have been particularly concerned about Brazillian Jiu-Jitsu becoming both more dangerous and less applicable to self defense the more disconnected it gets from MMA.

I told you so in 2023 in regards to my own experiences and observations, in regards to Icy Mike seeing huge mobility problems from long term practice of BJJ, and based on Joe of Fight Bible getting his neck broken in BJJ practice. One study found that 2 out of 3 BJJ practitioners are injured in their first 3 years of training: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8721390/

Now BJJ advocate Rokas has gotten a taste of how much BJJ improves your ability to defend yourself:

Fighting Style vs Open Fighting

The term "Martial Arts" is vague and could mean anything from doing Tai Chi line dancing in a park to fighting in a Sumo tournament. But usually when people say "martial art," what they usually mean is training in a specific fighting style. This is complicated by people not understanding the difference between training in a fighting style vs training for open fighting. While fighting styles have self defense applications outside of open fighting, open fighting is any competition where different fighting styles can be used against each other. 

Here are examples of different martial arts to help you distinguish between fighting styles and open fighting in the future:

• MMA
• Wrestling
• Judo
• Submission Grappling
• Boxing
• Muay Thai
• Savate
• Dutch Kickboxing
• Karate
• Kung Fu
• Sumo
• Moving Step Push Hands
• Tai Chi
• San Shou

MMA

MMA is the most obvious example of open fighting. One of the most famous MMA matches of all time was Holly Holm vs Ronda Rousey. Ronda Rousey had a winning streak of 10 undefeated MMA fights using primarily her background as an Olympian level Judo player, and she primarily relied on Judo inside of the cage. Holy Holm trained with the same Gym and coach as notorious MMA dirty boxer Jon Jones, with coach Michael Winkeljon, who learned to fight from Kenpo master Bill Packer. What proceeded was a classic Kenpo vs Judo MMA match, with Holm using Kenpo style low kicks ("oblique kicks") instead of Thai kicks to weaken Rousey's legs before knocking out Rousey with a classic traditional high kick, and during the fight used the "just stand up" strategy traditional martial artists insist fighters should use in MMA when entangled on the ground: 

Wrestling

Wrestling is an example of fighting styles that are clumped together to be mistakenly referred to as a type of open fighting, when in fact these individual wrestling fighting styles aren't employed against eachother (outside of some other form of open fighting like MMA.) American Folkstyle is the most serious Get Up Grappling, Greco Roman studies how to grapple without using your weaker arms against the opponent's stronger legs, and Freestyle is what people typically think of as Olympic Wrestling. A wrestler in the USA might practice all three types of wrestling, but they will be the first to tell you that these three wrestling styles are strategically different from each other, and different approaches have to be trained to succeed in each one.

Judo

Judo is a good example of a fighting style that is often mistaken for open fighting. It is very rare that a non-Judo practitioner will try to participate in a Judo competition. Even though each individual Judo practitioner specializes in their own personal subset of techniques, all Judo blackbelts are expected to be able to competently execute the same curriculum of techniques.

Submission Grappling

Submission Grappling is actually a collection of different open fighting rule sets. Examples of fighting styles that compete in Submission Grappling competitions are Sambo, Catch Wrestling, Gracie Jiu Jitsu, 10th Planet BJJ, various styles of Japanese Jujitsu, etc.

Boxing & Muay Thai

Boxing is probably the open fighting most often mistaken for a fighting style. If you compare Floyd Mayweather Jr.'s "Philly Shell" fighting style to Mike Tyson's "Peekaboo" fighting style, both have practitioners who are famous and competent boxers, but everything about the fighting styles are different: stance, structure of their strikes, internal vocabulary for describing techniques, footwork, head movement, training methodologies, etc. This is also true of Muay Thai were many people mistakenly believe that all Muay Thai gyms share the same exact set of strategies, techniques, and training methodologies, which is not the case at all.

French & Dutch Kickboxing

French kickboxing, known as Savate, generally has a the same set of techniques, strategies and training methodologies from gym to gym, and is thus a cohesive fighting style which other styles generally do not compete in. Same is true of Dutch Kickboxing, notorious for their brain damaging hard sparring practices, a hybrid of a Dutch style of boxing and Kyokushin Karate. Note that practitioners of the fighting styles of both Savate and Dutch Kickboxing have competed in Muay Thai open fighting.

Karate & Kung Fu

Karate is an example of how many different fighting styles get confused with each other because they were put in a category together, even if they were never part of the same fighting style at any point in known history. This is also true of Kung Fu, but to a much greater degree because Kung Fu is much older.

Sumo

Sumo is a classic example of a highly competitive fighting style, that though highly regarded as a sport in and of itself, is not regarded as open fighting precisely because only Sumo trainees fight in Sumo tournaments.

Moving Step Push Hands

Moving Step Push Hands is open fighting similar to the fighting style of Sumo, but without palm strikes allowed and a more technical scoring system. A wide variety of martial artists from different fighting styles, often practicing different fighting styles from Tai Chi, test to see who is best at staying in the ring and on their feet. 

Tai Chi

Tai Chi is an example of a family of related martial arts that is way too vast of a topic to be considered a form of open fighting or a specific fighting style..

San Shou

San Shou is an example of how different nearly identical practices can be confusingly similar but refer to totally different martial arts, yet be called the same thing:

1. "Wushu San Shou" is the type of Wushu focused purely on fighting. This is the type of San Shou people earn degrees in at Universities in China. These fighters mostly fight only other Wushu San Shou fighters, and is thus a fighting style with best practices for specific techniques and strategies.
2. Tournament Lei Tai Fighting that uses a rule set similar the Wushu San Shou rule set, but which is used at tournaments for fighters from very different Kung Fu systems to compete against each other, is also sometimes called San Shou. This is is some of the oldest open fighting around today, with numerous fighters trained in different fighting styles participating. This is what was meant by "San Shou" before "Wushu San Shou" ever existed:

Ranking Martial Arts

Ranking Martial Arts videos are extremely shallow and uninformative. First they are nowhere near specific enough. Second they have poorly considered critieria. Third the scales they use on YouTube are pure trash.

Specificity

A classic example of how these "ranking" videos are not specific enough to be meaningful, is they tend to put all Chinese Martial Arts into one or two categories, typically called "Kung Fu." Tai Chi, just one family of Kung Fu systems, is so vast that more people do Tai Chi than all other martial arts and combat sports combined.

So how specific would you have to get for these ranks to be meaningful? Even Kung Fu critic channel Fight Commentary Breakdowns has come to acknowledge that Choy Li Fut (CLF) is one of the premier fighting systems in traditional Chinese Martial Arts. But not all CLF schools are into free sparring, because of the vast encyclopedia of techniques within the system, there are hundreds of forms to the point were you either have to sacrifice forms practice time for free sparring, or free sparring time for forms practice time. 

In the late 90's, the Twin Tigers CLF school in Bremerton WA produced various combat sports fighters including Margaret McGregor. Meanwhile an hour away, the White Snake CLF school in Seattle WA didn't believe in free sparring because it created "sloppy technique," and sulked about not being invited to perform at Chinese cultural events. About 5 minutes away from White Snake, a Mak Fai CLF club dedicated Friday evenings to free sparring, even though they were more recognized for their Lion Dancing.

All quality control issues within Kung Fu aside, these Ranking Martial Arts videos have similar problems when describing other martial arts. They frequently consider Boxing to be a cohesive fighting system when in fact we see drastically different training methodologies, techniques, strategies and definitions from gym to gym within the same cities* (for example Bumble Bee's Boxing [side stance, jab-centric, everyone fights orthodox, spastic hard free sparring] vs Cappy's Boxing [more front stance, safer free sparring] in Seattle.) Another common mistake is considering "wrestling" to be a cohesive martial art without specifying weather they are talking about American Folkstyle, Greco Roman, or Freestyle, which all have very different implications for self defense strategy. This failure to specify continues as they consider Aikido, Karate, "kickboxing," etc.

Criteria

Typically what they are ranking, regardless of what they say they are ranking, is how effective these martial arts are in MMA. However MMA is not very appropriate for self defense because it doesn't address self defense issues outside of the cage or defending yourself with legally viable options. MMA is a horrible lens for evaluating martial arts when MMA strategy is so different from what you need for self defense training.  

Very little consideration is given to the types of grappling that is useful for self defense. The Internal Skill is taking people down while you remain standing and able to maneuver under hostile conditions. Escape Grappling is getting out of an entanglement on the ground if you get taken down or end up on the ground on accident. Most people making these Ranking videos do not even understand these self defense grappling issues in the first place.

Little consideration is given to the health aspects of how these martial arts impact the practitioner. Is being a brown belt in BJJ better than no training at all for self defense, if in your BJJ training you have earned yourself various back and joint problems? Is boxing helping you defend yourself if your speech is becoming slurred and you are developing potentially fatal neurological problems?

I have said this before, but more consideration needs to be given to weather or not the martial art teaches physical and practical skills of value in the first 100 lessons. Most of these Ranking Martial Arts videos are being made by life long martial artists who can devote a large amount of time to training. This makes it harder for them to see things from the average martial art consumer's view, who has considerably less time to devote to training. Judo can make you deadly in 5 years. Cool story, most do not want to do anything close to as dangerous as Judo, nor do they want to devote all of their spare time to learning any martial art for 5 years.

Scales

There is only so much of YOUR personal opinion that OTHERS find meaningful, and only so much precision actually matters. The scale they have been using in these videos is trash: S = Super, A = top grade, B = Good, C = mediocre, D = bad, F = total waste time. Some also include an "E" in there, being generally unfamiliar with the American grading system, though there's no "S" in that grading system either. Notice how they just can't settle with an A, they just have to have that extra special higher-than-A. That is the level of intellectual discipline these childish videos adhere to.

A Likert scale would be the appropriate way to scale in videos like this. Likert puts things on a 1 to 5 star scale, where agreement is what is being measured. Agreement is key because it is literally what is being evaluated (the opinion of the creator.) 1 to 5 is appropriate because any more precision then that (say "5++") is not actually meaningful to anyone besides the creator. 1 = I can't agree with this in any way. 2 = I think this is incorrect. 3 = This could be correct, but I am not convinced. 4 = This appears to be correct. 5 = I know this is correct.

When multiple authors come together, their scores can be averaged to give us a familiar 1 to 4 scale rating. Let's say I do a Ranking Martial Arts video on grappling styles, and include BJJ, Freestyle Wrestling, Judo, american Folkstyle and Greco Roman. Let's say I rate American Folkstyle at 5 stars, but the other person making the video ranks it at 4 stars. Now we have a shared ranking of 4.5 stars. This then translates to the following comprehensible evaluations: less than 2 stars = trash. 2+ stars = mediocre. 3+ stars = Good. 4+ stars = Amazing.

Conclusion

*If you are going to make a martial arts ranking video, use a Likert scale, use meaningful criteria, and be specific:

Why Not Combat Sports?

All martial arts have blind spots. As a martial arts consumer advocate, it think it is important to look at the reasons why people do NOT train, and then look at issues with specific popular "combat sports" that are popularly recommended because of their practical hands on fighting skills they teach. In general combat sports provide built in training motivation and quality control as the next match or tournament is always approaching. Far more importantly combat sports always incorporate the most important aspect of martial arts training, free sparring.

Why Not MMA?

However there are universal problems with virtually all combat sports:

1. Risk of Injury: As Penn & Teller described in 2010, virtually all martial arts, though I would add especially combat sports, come with a much higher risk of injury from participating in them than not participating in them. Without any self defense training at all, you probably won't have an encounter in a self defense situation that will injure you as badly as participating in combat sports probably would.

2. Sacrificing long term health for short term performance: training in a health practice like Tai Chi or Weight Lifting usually keeps longevity in mind, but when training for sports your top priority for training is doing whatever it takes to be victorious in your next competition. You might be surprised at how bad that actually can be for you:

3. Huge time commitment: when you are training for sport, you are in an arms race with other athletes, and the main personal resource you are spending that can give you a competitive advantage is how much time you spend training.

4. Basic self defense questions unanswered: there are three basic self defense problems that have to be answered by any self defense system. First there is getting attacked by someone with a knife. Second there is being attacked by someone much larger than you are. Third there is getting attacked by more than one person. Combat sports generally disregards these questions because these questions are not important for the next upcoming competition.

Now lets look at individual combat sports we see frequently referenced in Mixed Martial Arts (MMA,) and why not:

• Wrestling?
• Boxing?
• Muay Thai?
• BJJ?

Why Not Wrestling?

American Folkstyle Wrestling is probably the best martial art for someone who has to fight another person where you are both unarmed, and there is no possibility of other people interfering, because it is one of the few and rare martial arts that competitively train Get Up Grappling. But aside from the universal problems with combat sports: 

• Good luck finding wrestling clubs that train adults. 
• Wrestling is even more injury prone than most other combat sports, because of the high emphasis on landing on top of the person whom you are throwing. 
• While most of the wrestling in the USA is American Folkstyle, some is not American Folkstyle nor is most wrestling outside of the USA, and as such does not train Get Up Grappling, while being just as injury prone as American Folkstyle, including: Greco Roman, Free Style Wrestling, Judo, etc.

Why Not Boxing?

Boxing is one of the best martial arts of all time for self defense against multiple attackers, because of its high level footwork and practical, potent strikes. But aside from the universal problems with combat sports: 

• Most boxing gyms prefer "hard sparring" which is the least safe type of free sparring, and training boxing casually long term can lead to neurological health problems. 
• Boxing has more blind spots than most martial arts, with no strikes allowed besides your fists and virtually no grappling or take down defense. 
• Third boxing relies heavily on closed fist strikes to the head, which puts you in danger of boxer's fractures and infections from teeth lacerations on your hand.

Why Not Muay Thai?

Muay Thai is probably the best martial art for most martial arts consumers, because of it's high emphasis on practical techniques like low kicks, tripping throws, knee strikes and elbow strikes, as well as it's high emphasis on very safe free sparring. However, besides the universal problems with combat sports: 

• There is a high level of pressure on people who are getting good at Muay Thai to compete, and the intense training for that fight and the fight itself is far more injury prone than casual Muay Thai training. 
• Muay Thai has some reliance on closed fist strikes to the head, which puts you in danger of boxer's fractures and infections from teeth lacerations on your hand.

Why not BJJ?

BJJ has the best quality control of any martial art because of their ranking standards being tied to tournament performance: if you are a higher belt, you are expected to win against any lower belt in a BJJ tournament. However, besides the universal problems with combat sports: 

• BJJ is highly specialized and seriously lacks relevance to self defense situations: most of the submission holds can easily accidentally kill someone (potentially creating worse problems for you than getting attacked in the first place) OR trades injuring the attackers limb for you being down on the ground with the attacker being angry with you. 
• BJJ is even more time consuming than other combat sports over the long term: to reach black belt you can expect to train 10 hours a week for 10 years. 
• Though BJJ is better at avoiding the big injuries found in Wrestling styles like Judo and Greco Roman, BJJ's free sparring doesn't have the same longevity benefits as the safer free sparring in Muay Thai, and usually BJJ practitioners are experiencing joint or back problems long before they reach black belt. For self defense, is it better to be a black belt with back and joint problems or to have no self defense training at all?
• BJJ is somewhat socially destructive because it discourages the practice of other martial arts. Two popular MMA gyms within 90 minutes of where I live were started when BJJ organizations forbade the practice of Muay Thai and/or FMA at locations that were already teaching multiple martial arts. The whole point of UFCs 1-3 was to try to show that there was no reason to practice any other martial art besides BJJ.

So with this all said, even though combat sports for the most part have good free sparring practices and quality control, they are insufficient for the needs of the average martial arts consumer as explained above. This is why it's important for us reconsider older options and construct new options as we move into the future.

Participation

A brutal lesson I learned early on in my martial arts training as a young teenager, is that ALL training opportunities are temporary. On of the quality control problems in Tai Chi is instructors continuing to teach after they are too old to do free sparring, so that their students fail to fully grasp the applications of the forms. Besides aging out, instructors move, financial circumstances or life priorities change, facilities and other infrastructure deteriorate, etc. so that it is very rare to find a martial arts training opportunity that lasts for more than one generation. Most great martial arts training opportunities with the right people in the right place at the right time are very temporary indeed.

The upside of this for me is that I have been able to train and cross train in a wide variety of martial arts. However I remember when I was young and naive and thought the world would generally more or less stay the same, only to have three instructors move away in 4 years. Now that I have gotten to the point where I have more techniques I have learned that I want to perfect than I will ever have time to perfect, I have a number of people claiming they want to train with me. The question I have though is are they willing to make the kinds of sacrifices I had to make to learn what I have learned?

In Be The Shoulin! 5 years ago I explained that good martial arts training primarily comes for a like minded group of people coming together to train and spar. These kind of groups are only possible when people make sacrifices, especially of time. These groups are almost always very temporary, in my view they typically last less than 5 years on average.

In general, you can't just "wait until you retire" to enjoy life. In the case of martial arts, waiting around for some more convenient opportunity is particularly stuipid because you are getting older, and martial arts is best learned young. If you are 20, you are kidding yourself if you think you will get around to training when you are 25 instead, and by the time 25 gets there you'll have better things to do until you are pushing 40 and your best years for training will be gone. Better to learn at 40 than 50, 50 than 60, and 60 than 70, but procrastination will always be lurking, leaching away your opportunities.

When you see an awesome group you want to train with, and you have that impulse to start training with them, the thing to remember is what you are seeing is NOW, not LATER. Your opportunity to participate is only right now, that exact group is not going to be there a few years from now, and the most knowledgeable people in the group could be gone long before that. The key to learning martial arts is to realize that your only training opportunity is right now.

Casual Sustainability

In my 2019 blog post 100 Lessons I emphasized the need for martial arts instructors to consider the importance of delivering self defense value to beginners quickly. In my one of my last blog posts Risk of Injury I reminded you that martial arts training isn't worth it if it injures you worse than being attacked on the street would. In this blog post I am calling out the very problematic difference in perspective between many martial arts instructors and their students.

Most serious martial artists - people who intend to use martial arts in self defense if they need to defend themselves - are "casual" martial artists, meaning they train martial arts without intention to compete in martial arts competitions or matches, nor do they study martial arts like it was a part-time (least bit full time) job. Casual martial artists do not train for long hours every day, and though they may be able to practice or train on their own a little each day, martial arts is not a primary focus of their lives. Such individuals include people with low risk jobs as well as police, security, bouncers, etc. and it makes no sense for them to risk injury through formal competition or rigorous daily training, nor do most of them want or need a high level of accomplisment in martial arts.

This means that martial arts instructor's expectations need to fit the lifestyle that their casual students actually have, and the best example is POSTURE. Most martial arts students make a living by sitting at a desk all day in front of a computer, and most of those that don't spend a lot of their time looking at a cell phone. If you dump a bunch of push ups and sit ups (or bench press for personal fitness coaches) on top of someone who already has compromised posture, you will further contract the muscles on the front side of their boddies and lead to worse posture, leading to a worse long-term ability to defend themselves than when they started training with you in the first place!

If you teach fitness or martial arts for a living, you are not spending most of your day wrecking your own posture. Your students are. You can't ask them to quit their jobs or they can't support you financially. Therefore you have to help them correct their posture as a very high priority in your training. Physical therapists I have talked to have emphasized what THEY call chin tucks, straight arm push ups, and chest stretches as an important part of correcting that posture.

I am sure this applies to numerous other things besides posture. I trained martial arts for 20 hours a week for about 18 months during my failed attempt at becoming a professional kick boxer and Choy Li Fut instructor in the 90s. To this day I still do 30 minutes of Tai Chi standing meditation every day (another exercise that helped me prevent damage from bad posture, and helped me recover from bad posture after two shoulder impingement since 2019,) but I have to keep in mind that people coming to me to learn Tai Chi didn't come expecting to have to engage with Tai Chi on that level in order to learn some useful amount of Tai Chi, and that they are never going to put in the kind of hours that I put in to learn how to fight.

I do the full splits every time I work out. I don't expect others I am working out with to do the full splits with me, that's crazy. What I do have to consider is "what is going to help them like the splits help me, considering their casual commitment to this training?" What opened my eyes to this issue of Casual Sustainability was recovering from my own injuries and talking to physical therapists while doing so. I highly recommend that professional fitness and martial arts instructors make a casual study of physical therapy, so that they can apply their knowledge to the challenges their students are facing from having a sedentary professional lifestyle.

Get Up Grappling

 The "Grappling Gap" is what I call a problem that martial arts consumers have been facing for as long as martial arts training has been available to consumers in the USA. Where can a martial arts consumer go to learn the ground grappling that they REALLY need? Let's look first at what they do NOT need:

1. Most martial arts consumers don't need choke holds. In a real life emergency situation they are just about as likely to kill someone on accident by applying one of these as they are to successfully resolve a violent confrontation with one. Chokes are more curse than blessing.
2. Most martial arts consumers don't need submission holds. The average attacker on the street isn't going to know that they should tap once  you have them in a submission. The submission may or may not do enough damage to stop them, and most submission holds leave you on the ground in a compromised position.

What ground grappling every martial artist needs to understand is how to get off the ground when someone is trying to hold them down on the ground. 

This obviously means that they then need to learn to hold others down on the ground, which can be handy in some self defense situations when police are expected and the person you are holding on the ground is someone the police are looking for. This then means American Folkstyle wrestling right? NO. American Folkstyle covers much more than this, much of which is highly injurious to the martial arts consumer. If it's too injurious practice it is of no value at all. Picking someone up off the ground and throwing them back down while falling on top of them as hard as you can with all of your body weight is an extremely dangerous thing to do. 

Though Judo is more common for Adults, it's NOT recommended for casual self defense training for the same reason as American Folkstyle wrestling. Also Judo does NOT have the same focus on escaping to their feet that American Folkstyle has. So then we must want a more traditional grappling art like Glima, Bokh, Sumo or Tai Chi, where the focus is getting the opponent on the ground while remaining on your feet, right?

That's what I call the Internal Skill, and it's much more useful for self defense than going to the ground with your opponent.  But the Internal Skill does not fill the Grappling Gap! The Grappling Gap is: what do you need to get back on  your feet when you are on the ground? Even though this is practiced in Combat Glima, still most of the focus of that training isn't getting up from the ground as much as it is on the Internal Skill.

The most popular grappling alternative to Judo or Wrestling is Brazillian Jujitsu (BJJ.)  BJJ doesn't want to get up to their feet, and BJJ is completely focused on 1 and 2 above which can do more harm than good for self defense. Also for long term lower back health and speed of learning, it's best to avoid BJJ's main strategy for being on the bottom, which is to pull the attacker into your "guard" (between your legs.)

So far the only way I have personally addressed the grappling gap is through one-on-one instruction from MMA fighters. Though I love MMA and Muay Thai, finding coaches that will take you seriously as a student when you yourself specifically intend to never compete (as getting into a public fight intentionally is the opposite of self defense,) is easier said than done. However, it is interesting to me that when the Karate Nerd resorted to the same remedy that I did (seeking one-on-one instruction from an MMA fighter,) the Karate Nerd ended up learning exactly the same techniques I did:

Hypothetically what then we need now is a new type of focused sparring to learn this kind of grappling, which I have been calling "Get Up Grappling." It should NOT start on your feet, because we all have answers for what to be doing when you are on your feet. Get Up Grappling should start on the ground: 

1. They should start in side control with the "attacker" on top and the "defender" on the bottom. 
2. The attacker should then try to choke the defender. 
3. The defender should try to get to their feet. 
4. Once the attacker gets lands a choke, or once the defender gets to their feet, they switch roles and start over.

Here's an example of the kind of technique this type of practice may result in:

Risk of Injury

 In 2010 Penn & Teller claimed the entire martial arts industry was a sham. They offered many arguments that were convincing, but the most convincing one was essentially "you are far more likely to get seriously injured practicing martial arts than you are to be seriously injured by an attacker that you could protect yourself from using martial arts." As a martial arts consumer advocate, risk of injury is one of my primary concerns.

This is personal for me. Since 2019 I have had to recover from two shoulder impingements, one on each side of my body. One was from a car accident, the other was a martial arts injury. Beyond this I learned talking to my various physical therapists that it is common for weight lifters and martial artists in the USA to develop shoulder impingements from over training muscles on their front like chest and abs, while under training muscles between their shoulder blades. This combined with the fact most martial artists make their living by sitting in chairs in front of computers, is bad news for their posture in general.

Some of the Katas I look down on from some styles of Southern Kung Fu and Karate have a strong emphasis on holding tension on those very muscles between their shoulder blades. Thinking back on my own traditional training in Tai Chi and Choy Li Fut if I had listened to my instructors better I would have put more focus on maintaining good posture and spent less time doing high reps of push ups. Standing Meditation (Zhuan Zhuang) and Tai Chi forms have helped me greatly in rehabilitating my shoulders and correcting my posture. However there is one exercise I would like to point out that all chair dwelling martial artists should consider, and that is the straight arm push up:

But I got one shoulder impingement from doing a grappling drill. Specifically we were practicing double leg take downs on a mat, and I got turned sideways with one of my arms isolated, slamming my shoulder and face into the mat, compressing my shoulder and collarbone. And this a drill wasn't even necessary as it wasn't free sparring.

But when it comes to free sparring injuries, the worst martial art I have studied is BJJ. In one year I had 3 injuries that prevented me from free sparring for more than one week (about a month in two cases.) I have done full contact 1990's (today would be called Dutch-style) kickboxing, full contact stick fighting, full contact karate, a lot of dangerous stuff, and BJJ on paper shouldn't have been the worst, but it was. Icy Mike reports more serious long term problems here at 4:40 :

Joe of Fight Bible (the not-pro-fighter on the channel) reports numerous injuries, including even a broken neck, from doing BJJ. Now let me ask you a question: are you better off doing martial arts that give you a broken neck, or doing no martial arts at all?

Many people love to dismiss some forms of Tai Chi sparring as useless, because they don't include strikes and try to remain standing on their feet instead of going to the ground when they execute take downs:

But not only does this help people develop some stand up grappling skill without getting a shoulder impingement or more serious injury (it helps that they aren't landing on top of each other when executing a throw,) it helps to build balance to prevent injuries outside of fighting. But we need to know how to fight on the ground or we have a big missing piece from our self defense training, right?

Well what exactly do we need to know about ground fighting? We need to know how to get up to our feet. It then follows we need to know how to hold someone down on the ground. That's it, that's all most martial artists need out of ground grappling, is one person holding on the ground and the other getting back up. Which grappling arts commonly available to martial arts consumers commonly teach this? Not BJJ or any other Judo lineage martial arts, because they are obsessed with smashing the other guy on the ground and getting a submission, and dedicate less than 1% of their training getting back to their feet.

Fight camps for striking sports such as MMA, Boxing and various forms of kick boxing are notoriously injury prone. The biggest problem with Muay Thai from a consumer perspective is the culture of having matches: you don't have to be good at Muay Thai for very long before you will feel pressure to take a public fight. The punishment you will take in that fight, and the punishment you will take prepping for that fight that you wouldn't get in regular training, will likely be far more dangerous to you than any injury you would have avoided by beating up an attacker on the street with your Muay Thai. Consider the injuries from fight camps endured by both fighters from one of the most important boxing matches of all time:

Traditional martial arts seem to have a clear advantage over combat sports when it comes to risk of serous injury. However these arts are also not without their safety challenges, and almost useless if they do not include free sparring (free sparring is often done safely in both combat sports and traditional martial arts.) Risk of injury should be a top priority for anyone to consider when evaluating a martial arts school, trainer, or technique.

Knife First

When people train with me they learn knife sparring first. There are many reasons for this: unlike firearms knives are found in every home that needs defending, knife sparring teaches evasive footwork that translates well to many situations outside of employing a knife, knife sparring makes you understand the various ways you can be attacked by a knife, etc.

And knives are somewhat unique in their ability to intimidate an attacker...

I very often see YouTubers suggesting that if someone has a knife, there's nothing you can do but run. However it turns out that may not a be a reliable solution.

 The reality is having a knife pulled on you is a very common self defense situation, and one of the few that justifies spending a lot of time studying self defense in the first place. Every martial art has to be considered in this context: what if they have a Knife?

People think of sparring oriented stick fighting styles like Arnis and Kendo as bladed fighting arts. However were they really shine is for using sticks to knock a knife out of the hand of someone causing problems. This is true of virtually all sparring oriented stick, cane and staff fighting systems: they are great for dealing with a knife attacker.

Brazillian Jiu Jitsu compared to stick fighting does not fair well. If you don't spar with any strikes, defending against a force multiplier like a knife is nearly impossible. If you pull guard on a knife attacker, you just made his job of killing you much easier as now you can not evade him with footwork.

Wrestling does much better than BJJ in the context of a knife, because Wrestling has tools used in sparring for getting back to their feet. Wrestling's raw explosive aggression is more appropriate for a situation with a knife than BJJ's chilled laid back mentality. Wrestling is more focused on takedowns that will make a knife attacker far less dangerous. However not handling strikes in wrestling makes them generally unfamiliar with how to handle a weapon swinging or stabbing at them.

Some think Western Boxing changed drastically when the USA got involved with the Philippines. Filipino Boxing is more or less that square style of boxing with your hands up and forearms facing your opponent like you see with Manny Pacquiao or Mike Tyson. If you are going to be struck with a knife, you want it to be on the outside of your forearms. Having clever head movement and defensive footwork focused on KO strikes is a viable option for defending against a knife.

Tae Kwon Do and Capoiera have been mocked for being impractical. However in the context of a knife, on the street someone has shoes on, the bottom of those shoes is probably the best striking weapon they have against a blade. Jumping back and managing distance while looking for a chance to KO the attacker with a kick is not a bad option to have compared to grappling.

This is another place Muay Thai shines. With the aggression of wrestling and most of the same tools as both boxing and Tae Kwon Do, if someone must take on a knife wielder unarmed, Muay Thai is one of your better training backgrounds to have. Muay Thai has footwork and potent kicks to keep the enemy at bay, while also having practical sweeps and takedowns with which they may be able to get the knife attacker on the ground.

As Christopher Hein has pointed out, Aikido theory makes the most sense when a knife is in play. I would add that Aikido's defensive footwork and courage to use practice knives frequently in Randori actually teach the Aikidoka a lot more about knife fighting than they would like to admit.

There are too many Karate styles to analyze here one by one how effective they are against a knife. However all Karate styles seem to have some kind of clue about where a person could start with knife defense as well as practical kicks. 

There are at least 10 times as many Kung Fu systems as Karate styles. In general Kung Fu systems are more comfortable with using bladed weapons for self defense, train in variety of weapons so that they can use any improvised weapons available to them should they have to face someone with a knife, and they have more answers for defending against bladed weapons while unarmed than most other martial arts.

Next time you are evaluating a martial art, don't forget to ask how it would work against a knife.