One practice I am particularly critical of is kata (technique) focusing heavily on pain compliance such as pressure points or wrist locks. In the martial arts there is an extraordinary type of foolery where Chi is faked by demonstrating supposed no-touch knock-outs and other very silly no-touch martial arts techniques. In the martial arts there is also a less extreme type of foolery where people are doing martial arts randori (sparring) where one person is easily and effortlessly flinging multiple attackers around. I argue that these two types of foolery are strongly connected, the fake randori leading to the fake Chi, and it all starts with pain compliance kata.
If you spar with wrist locks or pressure points, you learn very quickly that pain compliance techniques have a low chance of success compared to more common techniques such as straight punches, leg kicks or double leg take downs. So some people practice pain compliance through kata instead of sparring:
If you are not sparring, and you are training kata, and someone hits you with a wrist lock or pressure point intended to throw you, the pain will eventually hurt you enough so that you will have to comply with the take down.
Wrist locks and pressure points, like any other martial art technique, take a toll on your body when executed on you.
When practicing pain compliance kata, the best thing for the person to do to protect themselves from damage is to flow with the take down, offering as little resistance as they can get away with.
Over time, the person who the pain compliance is happening to will have a finely developed reflex to immediately comply with the take down.
Over time, the person executing the pain compliance will have to do less and less to get the desired result.
Eventually, the person executing the pain compliance may not even have to make contact in order to get the desired result, since his target will react even when the technique is not executed correctly.
It is easy to see from here how people think they have the ability to knock someone else over with an invisible force. If you are someone that has been conditioned to react this way over time, it's easy to see how you might believe another person has such an invisible force - you don't necessarily realize how you have been conditioned over time.
This following video by a highly regarded martial arts master actually follows this 1-7 progression above (notice that at the beginning of the technique at around 2:40 the techniques are at least trying to appear practical, but by 3:42 they have become distinctly less practical, at 6:35 we have a technique that is completely implausible in any way, and at 7:43-7:44 we have our no-touch throw):
Systema has an interesting take on Chi, which is that Chi is psychic power or mind control of others. That's exactly what I think is going on with these fake Chi martial arts demos, by drilling pain compliance people have been conditioned into cult like, mind-control behavior, "psychic martial arts" if you will. The following video shows a similar progression as the above video, from seemingly well intentioned dodging type of techniques, into pain compliance, and eventually just sitting in a chair and making 4 people fall over with a hand gesture:
George Dillman, who ran the North East Karate Championship for 30 years, became obsessed with pain compliance kata in the form of pressure points, and is now famous for his bizarre no-touch knock out mind-control techniques:
Almost every martial art out there has pain compliance techniques. But the more they emphasize these techniques outside of sparring, the more prone they are to develop delusional ideas about how likely pain compliance techniques are to work. Using pain compliance drills to condition your students to react to your non-sparring movements is what I call "psychic martial arts."
There is a new vocabulary developing on the internet for talking about how effective various martial arts are. The latest development, which I for one agree with, is how much "fantasy" has creeped into any given specific martial art. From my perspective as a consumer advocate, I have a very clear vision of exactly how martial arts get infected with high levels of fantasy. Probably the most classic example of a fantasy-rife technique found in many martial arts styles is countering a punch using a wrist lock:
There is no problem to most of the individual steps this Sensei describes: keeping good posture at close range, grabbing someone's arm, dropping your weight, flanking your opponent as they attack you, etc. Almost every little component of this technique works, yet if you have ever tried to use this whole technique in free sparring, you know that it almost never works. Even though the technique happens in a brief period of time, it is made of numerous little steps that have to be done in exactly the right order. Free Sparring teaches us that the opponent has an agenda as well, so that techniques must be simple in order to actually work.
People have been talking about how "martial arts that do training with resistance or sparring are the best." As this vocabulary has been developing, "training with resistance" used to actually mean free sparring specifically. Now "training with resistance" seems to mean "everything that makes a martial art good, but which is not actually free sparring." Here's the different kinds of martial arts training people are talking about here:
Practicing a technique in a drill while someone resists you. You could be throwing a boxing jab at someone who is practicing head movement. You could be doing a kata while someone times you for speed, pressing you to go faster and faster, kicking a heavy bag in Muay Thai for example. You could be doing stop and go "fighting" like in fencing or stationary push hands. None of this is any kind of "sparring," it's all drills. It's all Kata to teach martial art theory.
Focused sparring is where no one is taking turns, but where only a few techniques are allowed while sparring. Positionals in BJJ is an example. Playing "king of the mountain" in wrestling (trying to get each other out of a circle) is another example. Sparring with only a jab in boxing is another example of this. This is one of the very best way to teach individual techniques and develop a practical understanding of the theory behind the techniques, BUT IT IS NOT FREE SPARRING.
Free sparring is continuous, and has the least possible outside interference. No one is dictating which moves you can do within your over all ruleset you are sparring with. Though it can have varying levels of contact and intensity, free sparring is where you learn to react against unscripted attacks, and where you find out exactly what works for you want what doesn't. The elite quality of both BJJ and Muay Thai has everything to do with their culture around Free Sparring.
In other words there is a Yin/Yang balance to martial arts training: theory vs. practice. Everything that is not Free Sparring is Theory, and the ONLY way to build solid practical skill is by complementing that Theory with Practice aka Free Sparring. The Yin is the Theory/Kata/drills/focused sparring, while the Yang is the Free Sparring.
But here's where the FANTASY comes from: while Theory/Kata informs Free Sparring, the Free Sparring in turn informs the Kata/Theory! What happened in Aikido that made it mostly fantasy based, is that the founder of Aikido was a pacifist, and this pacifism discourages Free Sparring. Aikido's practical side is largely neglected because the people practicing Aikido do not realize which techniques are the most important, because they do not do Free Sparring. All Martial Arts Change over time: All techniques are always becoming better or worse in their effectiveness, so that if a martial art is not sufficiently investing time in free sparring, that arts Kata/Theory will become less valuable over time.
I started working in paper routes in the 80's and have had dozens of employers since then, in addition to getting a bachelor's degree in Human Services and a Master's Degree in Management. The least competent leadership style I have ever encountered is where Human Resources requirements for firing personnel are mistaken for being a leadership strategy. I call this "Disciplinary Leadership."
According to the theory called French and Raven's Power Bases, "coercive power" is the least effective type of power to wield. Threatening to fire someone is clearly coercive power:
So IF someone understands and is competent at using bases of power, they will avoid using coercive power when possible. In the case of today's workplaces, this Disciplinary Leadership style takes the form of jumping straight to the company policy on how many verbal or written warnings are required to terminate an employee. A typical policy would be:
Informal verbal warning - without documenting anything, if an employee needs correction, a supervisor should ask the employee to correct what they are doing.
Formal verbal warning - when the informal verbal warning has not worked, speak to the wayward employee and ask them again, and this time document in their employee file that you have been talking to them about this issue.
Written warning - after the formal verbal warning has not worked, write up the employee's sin in a document that lets the employee know they will be terminated if the sin continues, and put that document in the employee's employee file.
Termination - after the written warning has failed, fire the employee if the unwanted performance continues.
But these policies are for the express purpose of meeting government regulations and avoiding lawsuits. These policies are NOT a leadership system or adult education method promoted by any competent or qualified experts! Think about it: you need the employee to do a certain job, right? So why then are you going to take steps to FIRE them? That is the very worst route you can take in order to get them to do the job you hired them to do in the first place! Whenever this disciplinary leadership style is used as one of the main ways to train or motivate employees at an organization, that organization is having a leadership crisis. I have seen it before.
I was in a supervisory position over more than a dozen employees, with a manager who had much less training in leadership than I did ruling over me. My team did our job and did our job well, as I used a dialogue-based strategy to negotiate workloads, interpersonal disputes and schedules. My manager had a military background and believed strongly in a more disciplinary approach. Over a year later when I was discussing with an employee a serious problem that she needed to correct, my manager barged in with this angry Disciplinary Leadership "you will get a write up!" nonsense.
His Disciplinary Leadership, which I had resisted for months, backfired. Within six months I was no longer working there. About a year later he was no longer working there. A few years after that, the company was put out of business by a competitor and bought out. What was going on at this doomed business was that the business owner had delegated literally all of his leadership responsibilities to the HR department, who was led by an HR person with a 1 year HR certification, and no other formal training in leadership.
WHY this happens is simple. Instead of using a democratic process for determining who a team WANTS to have as a leader, we tend to instead depend on the Peter Principle for deciding who should lead a team. Without formal leadership training, all we have to go with is life experience, personal leadership talent, and the company policies around how many warnings are required in order to fire someone:
Most of my disagreements with people over technique have boiled down to fighting stance. I prefer a short stance with my hips facing my opponent, but originally in the karate of my youth I was taught a longer stance, where I stood more sideways. When it comes to kicking, on one hand standing in my more "square" stance lead to the kicks I prefer - round kicks and front kicks with an occasional back/side kick. On the other hand standing sideways leads to the kicking practices I am critical of, such as the "snapping roundhouse" kick, heavy reliance on the stepping side kick, and relying on a hook kick as a basic KO strategy.
Something I have been acutely aware of for some time is that many styles of martial arts have BOTH sets of techniques. In fact, both strategies are used in Boxing:
And two of the biggest household names in Boxing epitomize these rival strategies. Mike Tyson was the ultimate square stance fist fighter, and Floyd Mayweather the ultimate long stance fist fighter. And Mayweather remains undefeated. In Full Contact Karate/American Kickboxing, Bill Wallace pulled off an similar undefeated status using a very similar strategy. So that means since this stance works to win matches in Combat Sports, we should use it to defend ourselves on the street, right?
In the above video it makes it clear: Square stance for power, long stance to score points. But what strategy should you be using for self defense on the street, a Tyson strategy or a Mayweather strategy? Every time you throw a punch, you take a significant risk on the street:
You could injure your hand in some horrible fight ending way.
You take one step closer towards being legally liable for the injuries in the fight.
If you are going to hit on the street, you need to make those risky punches count. But isn't the long stance better for moving in and out of range? Maybe, but if it is the square stance is much better for moving around the opponent to the left and right, which is considerably more important in self defense (since if the opponent is bigger, stronger or faster than you they will run you over if you can't move sideways around their charge, and because moving backwards away from your opponent in a street fight is moving blindly outside of your own field of vision.)
My question for you: why would you want to throw strikes with less power in a self defense situation? Your answer: you wouldn't. This is the difference between sport and the street, there are hacks in sport that score points but which are less effective on the street. Muay Thai is the most self defense related striking sport because it allows most of the strikes the human body can deliver. There are no rules against the long stance in Muay Thai, yet the long stance has never caught on in that sport.
"There's more to self defense than fighting skills" we hear constantly from the self defense industry, and that is so true. Useful non-fighting self defense skills include:
Situational awareness: staying alert and being aware of your surroundings, actively changing your plans when something doesn't look right.
Confident appearance: don't look like an easy target; stand up straight, keep your head up, look where you are going, and move swiftly. Don't make your whole neighborhood more dangerous by making it look like a neighborhood full of easy victims.
Safety oriented commute: choosing to walk through safe (well populated and well lit) areas. Randomizing your commute, being harder to predict what route you will take.
Exodus 12 v 20: Actively avoid problematic situations. Don't hang out at place where people like to get drunk and get into fights. In those situations you aren't defending yourself, you are just being a dick.
Surveillance Detection: 1. Take a look around and make a list of what spots would be best to spy on you from. 2. Look around and make second list of list of spots that would be best to spy on that first list. 3. Use the second list of spots to spy on the first list of spots to see who's spying on you or others.
Then we have self defense fighting tactics that are different from sport tactics:
The ultimate goal is escape, not knock out, not submission, not judge's decision and not points. Escaping with your life is priority 1.
The secondary goal is to avoid legal consequences to yourself from having the encounter. You want to minimize how much hostility you demonstrate in front of witnesses to the encounter.
A final third goal is justice: when you are attacked it is nice if you can make the world a safer place by in some way making it harder for the attacker to try the same thing again in the future.
The basic fundamental strategy is to use highly active footwork, so that you A) have to make physical contact with as few attackers as possible at any one moment and B) maximize your opportunities to escape. I don't know of anyone who is good at this that doesn't occasionally spar multiple opponents. It's not good enough to talk about the strategy, you must spar with the strategy.
Weapon deployment: so many people carry this or that self defense tool, and never practice deploying it while others are attacking them. Again you must spar multiple opponents, trying to deploy your weapon in order to get good at really deploying your weapon.
Weapon retention: there seems to be a very poor understanding of how easy it is to get disarmed. To avoid this you must spar with people trying to grab your weapon or knock it out of your hand.
Fighting techniques: the fact is most eye gouges and groin shots are not reliable enough to land in a fight. So what moves ARE you going to do? You need to figure this out in advance, and spar with those moves. They need to be practical movements you can do without warming up first. This IS were combat sports are important, because the best unarmed self defense fighting techniques ARE seen in the MMA ring! Until you get your weapon deployed, assuming you even have one, these techniques are all you will have.
There is a dangerous myth out there that to defend yourself, you need to have nerves of steel, and a killer instinct mindset that you will "do whatever it takes" to protect yourself, in order to avoid a "fight, flight or freeze" reaction. In my experience this is 100% wrong.
When you are attacked, you don't have time to get scared. All that happens is you do whatever it is you do when you are attacked in sparring. I once heard a story by a Muay Thai instructor about a female student who was attacked in the parking lot. They both lamented that she did not beat the attacker into oblivion. However she was not seriously hurt, she was not killed, she was not raped, the attacker who was larger than her didn't even manage to knock her down. Her Muay Thai training served her well indeed!
I personally have found myself dodging head buts or punches before I even realized I was being attacked, sometimes continuing a conversation with the attacker before I realized the conversation was very over. The one time I had a knife pulled on me, it took a few days for me to internalize how dangerous the situation had actually been.
Nothing messes with your nerves more than preparing to fight in a match or tournament, typically in very revealing clothes in front of a large audience. Competing in matches or tournaments is having to confront a challenger who is far more competent than the average attacker on the street, but instead of on the street on a stage where your humiliation can be far more widely publicized. The fear you have to deal with preparing to fight in a match or tournament is far more extreme and tangible than just getting really worried about a potential attacker situation. If training your nerves or natural ferocity is important, there is no better way to train for that than combat sports. Talking about what a solemn and serious danger a self defense situation is, in my view, is a total and complete waste of time. It's generally done by people both in and out of combat sports who don't want to spar with an appropriate range of techniques for the situation they are talking about.
When it comes to the subject of martial arts, this blog has become a broken record. In 2002 I started writing a book on Martial Arts called "The Orthodox Technique", a direct response to "The Art of Jeet Kun Do" by Bruce Lee. And in 2002 I was not wrong about where MMA, international kickboxing striking technique, and most Traditional Martial Arts (TMA) striking technique was at. The point of The Orthodox Technique, was to document that type of striking which I had learned while training in K-1 Rules kickboxing and Chinese TMA in the 90's. Now this kind of fighting is well documented, it's pretty much what we just call "Muay Thai" these days, where most of the time you:
Lead with your left side to protect your liver, keep your left hand in the game so you are functionally a two handed fighter, and to keep your fight foot primed for aggressive movement and power striking.
Keep your hands up (and jaw down) to protect your jaw and keep your hands closer to hitting the face of your target.
Keep your hips facing your opponent, in a fairly square stance with your feet shoulder width apart, to block leg kicks, keep your body ready to twist into an attack, and to be ready to sprawl against a throw attempt.
Don't stop moving. Maybe you are closing distance or running away, orbiting your opponent or turning to face them, throwing a combo or checking with a jab, but you are most definitely never just standing there in your fighting stance waiting for something to happen.
Strikes should include a twist of the hips and shoulders following into the attack, in one simultaneous motion with the attack. In a fight, anything from a jab to a leg kick should have knock out potential.
Unfortunately MMA has not destroyed the cancer to martial arts that is Kumite Point Fighting. There are so many people doing MMA that many of them are also contaminated with this cancer, so that once is a great while they will pull off a technique in an MMA match which can be claimed to be related to Kumite Point Fighting. Fortunately this type of technique goes absolutely no where in Thailand, so that striking critics can always say "that stand up game might work in MMA where you can resolve your conflict grappling on the ground, but please show me this working in Thailand."
But there isn't any point in me writing about any of this anymore. Kumite Point Fighting is becoming an official Olympic Sport, apparently the UFC gyms are actually good with that, and few martial artists are speaking up against it. And why should I care? In the old days martial artists tried to keep their best secrets to themselves so their enemies couldn't train against those secret techniques. If the great secret today is "Muay Thai as practiced in MMA gyms is better in a street fight than MMA if that MMA is based on Olympic Tae Kwon Do and blue belt level sport-only BJJ," what do I have to gain by sharing that secret that isn't hardly any secret at all anyways?
We are moving into 2020, which may be the most important year for internet trolling of all time, and I have said most of what I have to say about martial arts. This blog is about a lot more than Martial Arts, and in 2020 it won't have much to do with martial arts. I have actually found my martial arts trolling time cutting into my martial arts training time, and that is a heavy price to pay for something that does me no good what so ever. In conclusion I want to respond to a few points of criticism I have gotten over the last few years in this "Martial Arts Messiah" martial arts troll campaign:
A BJJ instructor on the internet suggested something like "it's too bad you wasted your life
studying a bunch of crap martial arts, now you should devote what years
you have left to the BJJ industrial complex." If I
had just done BJJ this whole time, I would have been stabbed and beaten
severely, maybe even killed, or done time in prison for defending
myself, several times over. I have never had the luxury of a life style where the worst
threat to my person was some drunk guy at a bar - I don't experience
self defense situations where A) both sides of the conflict are equally
matched, or B) there won't be legal consequences for me taking one of my
attackers to the ground and literally choking them. I value the BJJ
training I have had, but I certainly don't value it as much as the stuff that has actually saved me numerous times, which if I had to describe in one word
would be "Muay Thai," but which in reality includes some stuff I have only found in TMA.
It is important to me that people from the cultures specific martial arts come from have access to those martial arts. As a communitarian and amateur ethnologist, I despise a uniform world of big box stores and cultural uniformity. Cultural diversity not only creates innovation to help mankind as a whole, it makes life far more enjoyable than it otherwise would be.
Studying the martial arts of other cultures helps us appreciate those other cultures, actively working against racism. Beyond that, two of the Asian martial arts masters in my area that I know in my area, who I have tremendous respect for, both have at least one instructor who is white. Thanks to cultural appropriation, these Asian Martial Arts are here for these Asian Martial Arts masters.
A major annoyance of mine is people clinging to the cultural origins of each martial art, as if "Budo, the ancient martial arts of Japan" was some how functionally different from "Kung Fu, the ancient martial arts of China." NO one ever did "Budo" or "Kung Fu," that is a far broader reference than what any one individual ever actually experienced. You can say a person trained in "Kyokushin Karate" or "Choy Lay Fut" for example, and then culture actually matters, because it was specific Japanese people who passed on the art Kyokushin, and specific Chinese people who passed on Choy Lay Fut. These specific people operated with specific cultural values, and that history matters.
But the fact is Choy Lay Fut, regardless of cultural circumstances, is far more similar to Kyokushin, than Choy Lay Fut is to its rival, Wing Chun. Furthermore, Kyokushin is far more similar to Choy Lay Fut than it is to the more popular form of Karate, Shotokan. To suggest that Choy Lay Fut is functionally related to Wing Chun simply because they have a shared culture (or Kyokushin to Shotokan,) THAT is a cultural stereotype, THAT is martial racism.
For example I am interested in a certain type of grappling, the sort of grappling Aikido aspires to, the type of grappling you see in Muay Thai, Sumo, Tai Chi and Viking Wrestling, where people work on takedowns from the clinch, without going to the ground themselves. Many if not most martial arts consumers are also interested in that. But a conversation about this was recently mired when someone wanted to start talking about "Chinese Grappling," as if Chinese Wrestling and Tai Chi had the same objectives because they shared cultural origins, ignoring that Muay Thai, Sumo and Viking Wrestling aspired to the same thing as Tai Chi - particularly problematic since some martial arts like Choy Lay Fut have adopted certain Tai Chi practices as a way of getting better at these kinds of takedowns. He was able to avoid admitting an entire functional range of martial arts techniques existed by throwing up a smoke screen of martial racism.
There has been a lot of talk about what the best martial art is. But what I have found since I took my first martial art lesson in 1988, is that the name of the martial art does not tell you how effective a specific martial art school is. There are certainly trends - Muay Thai schools have a tendency to teach more effective fighting skills than Shotokan Karate schools - but this isn't guaranteed. Furthermore there are usually vast differences in the quality of fighting skills taught between martial arts schools claiming to teach the same martial art.
When I trained in Choy Lay Fut in Bremerton from Vern Miller in the 1990's, Doc Fai Wong's "First Disciple" (first student approved to go off and start his own school in Doc Fai Wong's lineage,) learning to fight full contact was part of the training. Sometimes Vern would make everyone do K1-Rules Kickboxing before teaching them even the beginning katas in Choy Lay Fut. And historically, Choy Lay Fut's reputation has been all about the Lei Tai (Chinese fighting ring,) so Vern's approach was indeed very "traditional" for that style. Older videos and stories I have heard about how Doc Fai Wong's schools were sparring in the past were very similar to what is practiced by Enshin Karate now, lots of full contact strikes and take downs, not easily represented in the "American Kickboxing" rule sets of the 1960's and 70's.
Years later living in Seattle I ran into another Doc Fai Wong lineage school. I was exited to get back to training. But when I brought up sparring, the Sifu said "I don't like to spar, it makes for sloppy technique." I didn't even know where to get started with him - how did he not know that the real technique is the technique that happens in sparring? Kata hopefully informs that technique, but the technique isn't the step by step instructions in kata, technique is what you can actually do when someone's trying to do something similar to you at the same time.
So right there in schools of the same brand, geographical area and lineage, I had some of the most effective fighting skills I have ever heard of taught to me in one school, but in another school essentially no effective fighting technique taught at all.
All across the USA right now, you can find gyms that train MMA fighters. In many of those gyms, you can sign up to take kickboxing fitness classes that don't have any sparring in them. They will teach "Muay Thai" moves, but at no point in time in these classes I refer to will you do those moves on another person. You will have in actuality not ever really done the moves at all.
There are Shotokan schools that go beyond the lame Olympic-style kumite point fighting, proceeding to continuous American Kickboxing or "Full Contact Karate" sparring. I know, because my first style I learned, Tae Sho Karate Do (aka Tae Sho Arnis: a recognized kickboxing gym in the Pacific North West in the 1990's,) was one such school. Certainly there was a huge Arnis influence on that style, but the unarmed Kata was 100% Shotokan. Yes we participated in Kumite Point Fighting, but most of our sparring was continuous full contact karate. If you read my blog regularly you will know that I have a lot of contempt for American Kickboxing/Full contact karate, but it beats the hell out of Muay Thai with no sparring at all.
The bottom line is this: not everyone can relocate where they live in order to train at the perfect martial arts school for them. We have the martial arts available to us, not the martial arts we wish were available to us. But we've had the internet and YouTube for a long time now, we can look up best practices for martial arts, and elevate whatever martial arts we have available to us to the level we need in order to learn effective fighting technique.
