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.

Groin Kicks?

My first style of martial arts I ever studied got a lot of things right in the 1980's that I have only come to appreciate in the 2020's. The style was most often called "Tae Sho Arnis," though it was also called at other times "Tae Sho Karate Do" and "Combat Arnis." In an era of Kumite Point fighting that was decaying the quality of martial arts in the USA at the time, Dave Bird decided to combine the best aspects of the martial arts he had mastered: forms from Shotokan Karate, free sparring from old-school Tae Kwon Do, and Arnis for weapons technique. Though he his style produced kickboxers who competed in our area, most of the sparring in class was continuous controlled contact and included both unarmed sparring and stick sparring (though we did also train for Kumite Point Fighting tournaments a few times per year.) 

In the 1990's this controlled contact free sparring would be lost in the USA as MMA got more popular and we over compensated for our participation in no-contact kumite point fighting, but would return to the MMA community by way of Muay Thai within a few decades. But there's something that has not returned 1980's controlled contact free sparring that we used to spar with frequently: groin kicks. I am not sure if these came from Shotokan or TKD, and I have wondered if they came from Arnis; see the kick at 1 minute 26 seconds in the last video I know of featuring Dave Bird:

Later as I studied Chinese martial arts I noticed that the most basic kick WAS the groin kick. If you pick your knee up with a groin kick so that you can stomp forward with the bottom of your foot you get a front kick. If you swing your groin kick around to connect with the side of your target's body you get a round kick. Watch all of this UFC champ and Shotokan master's kicks carefully and you will see many of his kicks that connect are not much more complex than a groin kick (especially his round kicks that connect to the body):

This Kung Fu teacher does a great job of explaining how in traditional martial arts, many different kicks are built from a basic groin kick:

To this day when I am free sparring with kicks I have to be careful because my feet target the groin like a heat-seeking missile because of all that free sparring with groin kicks I did in Tae Sho Arnis. Our basic strategy was simple enough: groin kick to set up straight punches to the face, and straight punches to the face to set up groin kicks. To block the groin kick we would bring up a knee. To counter the knee block we would use a round kick to the calf muscle on the blocking leg. To prevent groin kicks we would try to step on their lead foot as we threw straight punches. In retrospect there was a lot to like about that strategy from a self defense perspective. 

When going full contact you can't count on a cup to protect your groin. But now that controlled contact free sparring is back to the USA, groin kicks are still not used in free sparring because most people doing free sparring are training for combat sports were groin kicks can get you disqualified. But this raises the question: should students who train for self-defense-only include groin kicks in their controlled contact free sparring?

Do As I Say; Not As I Do

 In Make Yang style Tai Chi Great Again I mentioned various problems with Yang style Tai chi, and  how and why it has degenerated so badly as a martial art. There is a very specific issue with Yang Style footwork that helps demonstrate another problem with passing down martial arts. But first, let me point out why I have an opinion on this specific subject.

Yang Chen Fu was THE Tai Chi master who made Tai Chi famous (largely by selling out and watering down the system to outsider students.) His top INSIDER student was Hu Yuen Chow, so that Hu Yuen Chow was the best FIGHTER Yang Chen Fu produced. Therefore Hu Yuen Chow's opinion on technical details regarding Yang Style Tai Chi would be VERY important.

My main Tai Chi teacher was Vern Miller, 1st Disciple of Doc Fai Wong. Doc Fai Wong was one of Hu Yuen Chow's top students in both Choy Li Fut and Yang style Tai Chi. However, Vern Miller did travel to Hong Kong to work out with Hu Yuen Chow and asked that master many detailed questions about Yang style footwork specifically, as Vern had noticed many different opinions on Yang style footwork.

I have studied several martial arts for more than a year each, and cross trained in several others still. When it comes to why different martial arts have different footwork, I have as much experience understanding the differences as anyone. So when Vern Miller lectured me extensively on EXACTLY what he got STRAIGHT from Hu Yeun Chow IN PERSON, I understood very well what Vern was saying.

Let's say we have a two dimensional rectangular box on the floor. In your basic Yang style stance (which is not unlike a Karate front stance,) if your left foot is forward, your left foot would be on the front left corner of that box and your right foot would be on the back right corner of that box. The width of that box would be the width of your shoulders, and the length of that box would be how far you can step in one stride without discomfort.

I am not going to try to explain here all the intricacies of basic Yang style Tai Chi walking, but the issue at hand is how far apart your feet are supposed to be when you walk forward. When you take a step forward, there would be a new box in front of the (and identical to) box you are standing on now. When you step forward onto the next box, what path should your right foot go in as it steps forward onto the front right corner of the next box?

• Should the right foot travel diagonally to the left foot before traveling out again diagonally?
• Should the right foot come up to knee level before going back down to the ground?
• Should the foot drag along the ground as you step forward?

None of the above. The right foot should travel right side of both boxes, with the right big toe about one centimeter off the ground. This is called "staying on the 3rd line," the "1st line" being the left side of both boxes, the "2nd line" being the exact center of both boxes.

This has significant impact on application of techniques. What happens to your feet in relation to your target's feet is very different if you are doing any of the bullet points above, and because so many techniques in Tai Chi are tripping, where your feet end up in relation to your target's feet is extremely important. Beyond this there are questions of efficiency, your foot goes faster from point A to point B in a straight line, and the kind of balance you train is different than intended if you are embracing any of those 3 error bullet points above.

Good luck finding ANY YouTube videos explaining this, and this kind of basic detail about foot path movement wouldn't be debated in Choy Li Fut or Karate, yet there is ZERO consensus on this basic fundamental detail in Yang style Tai Chi. It's so bad that I have found other people who's Tai Chi comes from Hu Yuen Chow who strongly disagree with me on this detail!

Let's actually look at Hu Yuen Chow's Tai Chi form for a few minutes:

He's not a little man, he's tall. If he takes a step forward while keeping his feet on the first and third line all the way through the step, and he takes a full step forward, his stance might look very long and rectangular rather than square. Another thing you notice is that his head is quite hunched forward. However as you see him adjust his student's Tai Chi form, you see that he is getting them to stand perfectly upright instead of being hunch backed! Likewise you see his students using that full box footwork structure in their stance without his apparently more narrow footwork.

When it comes down to passing on important details of martial arts, remember that it's not simply copying the moves of the master, imitating old black and white photographs. It's much more important to do as that master instructed rather than as that master demonstrated.

Tai Chi is the Dominant Martial Art

 These are the top 10 most practiced martial arts in the world. These are numbers just estimations based on Google searches, and probably mostly industry hype. My best guess is the numbers are probably all equally inflated so that the proportions of the true numbers would be about the same...

The hardest and least accurate number for all of these is for Wrestling. My estimation was somewhere between 16,000,000 and 280,000,000 depending on what you call wrestling. One of the things I had to take into consideration is that most wrestlers only wrestle for a few years as a youth. If you have better numbers for the total numbers of people wrestling globally, please post those numbers and links to your sources in Self Defense Evolution. 

The finding is bizarre: not only is Tai Chi the most commonly practiced martial art in the world, but it is practiced more than all other martial arts combined. On one hand this is bad news for humanity because of quality control problems in Tai Chi, but on the other hand there is opportunity here because Tai Chi is rife with potential martial arts application for those who do free sparring. For example, in the following MMA Shredded video, more of the techniques than not are expressed in Yang style forms, especially #2: