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.
As a martial arts consumer advocate, I offer all martial arts instructors the following challenge: what are you teaching your students in the first 100 lessons that is going to help them in a fight for the rest of their lives? Because believe me, that is the ONLY reason why they walked in the doors to your school in the first place.* They were:
NOT looking for a new "lifestyle."
NOT looking for a way to spend their free time which they figured they had too much of.
NOT looking for a way to spend their money which they figured they had too much of.
NOT looking for a life long commitment to a new art to perfect.
They were willing to train hard to learn how to fight, and it's very unlikely they intended to spend more than a year doing it. It is also very unlikely they were planning to train more than twice a week. For YOU to make good on YOUR promise of teaching "Martial Arts", you have 50 weeks x 2 lessons = 100 lessons to make your teaching worth while.*
But YOU devoted YOUR life to the martial arts, and have so much to share! Cool story bro, not what the customer hand in mind when they walked in the door. If YOU can't provide SERIOUS customer value in the first 100 lessons, you shouldn't be wasting new student's time and money.*
Before you start raging about how I am not bowing to my betters here*, let me give you a few examples of martial arts that most definitely will permanently improve a student's odds of surviving a fight inside of 100 lessons:
Collegiate wrestling: in 100 lessons they might not win any matches at any tournaments, but for the rest of their lives they will have a few basic tools and strategies that will make them devastating against someone their size and weight, all other things being equal.
Same goes for Boxing: Almost nothing can prevent someone from learning a few very useful combos and footwork combined with serious sparring experience to back it up with in 100 boxing lessons. The vast majority of potential attackers will be dropped by a jab-straight combo, for the rest of the student's lives, and they'll never forget how to do it.
That is how useful your martial arts teachings need to be in the first 100 lessons. One of the best martial arts in the first 100 lessons is traditional Muay Thai. Muay Thai in the first 100 lessons will cover:
Kicks to the leg, attacking and defending.
Really amazing options for what to do when someone tries to grab you on the street.
Attacking and defending punches and elbows to the head.
Footwork.
A few basic throws and foot sweeps that are very practical.
The safe, continuous, hands-on sparring to back this all up with.
And here I will offer unsolicited advice to grappling instructors: position before submission, right? The concept behind wrestling, the mantra of BJJ! I didn't start learning ground fighting until around the time I turned 40, and I can tell you for sure that many grappling instructors forget exactly how important "position before submission" is to beginners:
Why teach me a straight arm bar if I don't know how to sprawl first?
Why teach me teach me how to get a wizard grip if I can't even land a single take down in sparring?
Why work on a kimura if I can't even do a side control escape?
Why get into transitioning from an arm bar in guard to a triangle in guard if I don't even have an "around the world" drill down, with no understanding of dominant position theory?
The fact is "position before submission" is something far more important to the first 100 lessons than most grappling instructors seem to grasp.*
Now we get into less established martial arts. Judo is arguably the most deadly martial art of all time, but it is notoriously bad at teaching self defense in the first 100 lessons. More exotic Olympic martial arts fare far worse: fencers and karateka will learn virtually nothing of self defense value in their first 100 lessons. Olympic Style Tae Kwon Do fares better, but not by much. In the first 100 days, none of these less established Olympic Martial Arts holds a candle to Collegiate Wrestling, Boxing, or Muay Thai in the first 100 lessons.*
Then we get into the theoretical martial arts, like Systema, Wing Chun, Aikido, Tai Chi (my personal favorite martial art), and Silat. These martial arts have a particular burden of proof, so notorious they have been for not developing any actionable fighting skill at all. There are definitely exceptions: in all theoretical martial arts there seem to be people who are serious about and decent at fighting, but in all these arts these fighting instructors are rare. But to these rare saints of martial theory I propose: what are you doing to teach your students how to fight in the first 100 lessons?* (Update 2022... I taught this kid Yang style Tai Chi Saber well enough to fight with in less than 50 lessons...)
Then we have the truly great martial arts of hope: Kudo, Combat BJJ, Combat Sambo, MMA-lessons-at-MMA-gyms and sparring-oriented Kali. The promise is that from one point of view or another, you will be primed and ready to take on just about anyone who would dare to try to lay hands on you, teaching a very wide variety of self defense options, covering at least two of the three following ranges: grappling, striking, and weapons. But the question I have there is: with such a wide variety of techniques, how do you know any one student is mastering techniques well enough to be able to execute those techniques in an emergency? Does your art have enough focus for the student to master useful fighting techniques in just only 100 lessons?
*Yeah yeah yeah, I know, you can kick my ass, and blah blah blah, you already know every damned thing that there is to know about martial arts. Cool story bro. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to keep you from wasting a lot of time in your student's first 100 lessons.
From my consumer advocacy POV, I see martial arts as having 6 elements of training: Conditioning, Kata, Focused Sparring, Basic Sparring, Advanced Sparring and Fighting. Here I am going to give examples of each from Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ,) Muay Thai and other martial arts.
Conditioning: are exercises considered to be critical to the martial art, but which do not have exact martial application. For example, jumping rope is almost universal in Muay Thai:
In some martial arts the standing shoulder roll is actually meant to be used to pick up weapons on the ground, or to roll out of a throw back on to your feet free back into striking or fleeing range, but BJJ isn't focused on weapons, or escaping grappling range. Yes there are BJJ techniques that use motions very similar to the standing shoulder roll, just as there are Muay Thai techniques that could be seen as similar to jump roping. Yet most BJJ classes I have seen train newbies to do a standing shoulder roll as part of the conditioning part of their class:
Before we get into kata, notice that some martial arts have mediation, stretching or dance exercises without a lot of clear martial arts moves denoted. These should be considered conditioning exercises rather than considered kata:
In Tai Chi and other traditional martial arts, horse-stance mediation is clearly in the category of conditioning, with no viable combat application to the exercise what so ever:
There is a lot of debate out there and yet to be had about what types of conditioning are the most effective, but everyone who knows what they are talking about agrees that conditioning is important for martial arts proficiency.
Kata: are exercises that explain the theory behind how the specific martial arts moves are supposed to work. They may or may not be good conditioning, but the point is to further perfect the ideal version of the technique. An example of Kata in Muay Thai is working with Thai Pads:
The "around the world" drill is common in BJJ, and is an example of Kata in BJJ:
Not all traditional martial arts dances are strictly conditioning, some are also legitimate kata:
(Before we go on to focused sparring, notice that the word "drills" could mean all sorts of things, including any of these kata exercises. One popular phrase is "drills with resistance," meaning that some how you are doing kata, but someone is making it hard for you to do that kata. The people who coined this phrase meant for kata to transition into what I call focused sparring... so a "drill" could refer to a kata practice or a focused sparring practice.)
Sparring: Sparring differs from Kata in that sparring moves past the theory and into what happens when you really attack someone. In sparring, neither side is taking turns, instead both sides are protecting themselves while also attacking.
Focused Sparring: focused sparring means to spar with a very narrow range of techniques, in order to practice and develop those very specific techniques. The best example is probably "positionals" from BJJ:
Here's an example of people training with Muay Thai technique using only kicks and no punches or elbows:
Something very important here is that sparring must focus on moves people would actually use in a fight, as demonstrated in kata. Sparring that does not resemble kata is conditioning, not sparring.
(Another phrase I often here that is similar is "technical sparring." Like "drilling with resistance," technical sparring means different things to different people, sometimes it refers to trying to spar safety, and other times it refers to what I call focused sparring, and sometimes it means other things all together.)
Free Sparring: free sparring is sparring, allowing the most of thed techniques in that martial art. Free sparring allows you to test your moves and strategy against someone who has a wide range of possibilities to stop you from succeeding. In free sparring we become fully prepared to take on someone in a fight. In BJJ this is called "rolling", and as I said before it doesn't involve much shoulder rolling:
Muay Thai is known for allowing a wide range of striking techniques, but sparring as safely as possible:
From a martial arts consumer advocacy POV, the genius of both Muay Thai and BJJ is that they: 1) have the widest possible range of techniques for what they are focusing on (grappling in the case of BJJ and striking in the case of Muay Thai,) while 2) also having the safest possible practices and culture around sparring. When it comes to the value of putting your time and money into martial arts training, it's hard to beat these two styles, largely because of their free sparring practices!
Basic Sparring: most free sparring martial arts have a safety form of free sparring that they do most often, which I call "Basic Sparring." In Muay Thai this might be "controlled contact, no elbows." In BJJ this might be "starting from the knees," free sparring without stand up take downs.
But taking an example from Kali, though they often spar using a wide range of punches and
kicks, the majority of their sparring focuses on weapons only. The stockier person in the following kali (basic) sparring video is a well known Muay Thai instructor in the Seattle Area:
In Tai Chi and some other traditional martial arts, "push hands" moves beyond conditioning and drills into the realm of sumo-like basic sparring:
Basic sparring is a safety oriented, frequently practiced type of free sparring that focuses on that martial arts most commonly used techniques.
Advanced Sparring: martial arts need to do free sparring with the full range of techniques they profess to teach, and this is what I call "Advanced Sparring." In Muay Thai if the intensity of the sparring goes beyond their normal safety oriented free sparring practice and includes elbow strikes in preparation for a professional bout, you are definitely looking at advanced sparring there. Likewise in BJJ if they are starting standing up and slapping each other around to show each other where they are vulnerable to strikes, you are seeing some advanced sparring in that art.
Following that first Kali example, he's an example of what I would call Kali advanced sparring, where they are incorporating more than weapon strikes in their sparring:
Back to Tai Chi sparring example, it is common for serious Tai Chi schools to fully apply their Tai Chi into Chinese Kickboxing (I myself learned most of the Tai Chi I know from the same person who taught me most of the kickboxing I know):
Fighting: is where we are showing ours skills against someone showing their skills, for the record. Practice time is over, and now in a fight it is time to go for it, 100%. In BJJ, this happens primarily in the form of tournaments:
In Muay Thai this happens in organized matches that where a fighter trains to fight another specific fighter usually for weeks before the two fighters have their confrontation:
There is a myth that in order to fight and train to fight that there has to be clear winners and losers, and that there must be a highly competitive spirit. An example of how this is not true is in Filipino Martial Arts there are sometimes Tipons (gatherings) where fighters show up for the express purpose of finding other fighters to duel. Once you step into the ring at a Tipon the object isn't so much to destroy your opponent as it is to survive the confrontation. This is my most physically painful Tipon fight I have had:
In both Tai Chi and Karate there are types of full contact continuous fighting that draw skepticism from people who don't practice the art. "American Kickboxing" or "Full Contact Karate," (not to be confused with "Knock Down Karate") which I myself practiced when I was in Jr. High and High School:
Most critics objections to this? No kicks to the legs... if we are going to kick, why skip the most likely kicks be thrown in a real street fight? Likewise, Tai Chi has a form of wrestling called "moving step push hands" where no grabbing of the legs is allowed, which I myself have had some training in as an adult:
I think it is very helpful for self defense purposes to practice putting the your opponent on the ground while you remain standing as with the Tai Chi above. I strongly doubt the usefulness of fighting in a throwing high kicks (which can easily be caught) while in a long stance as with the Karate above (less effective for grappling, fighting with both hands and evasive footwork.) HOWEVER, the above Karate guys ARE fighting continuously, if they were sparring like that continuously (instead of competing in it,) it would be extremely legit sparring, just like the above Tai Chi. Because they are both continuous and have contact, they can really pull off the moves they are practicing in a fight.
But there are closely related to drills, which though often competed in and can thus sort of be called "fighting," can't be called "sparring" at all if practiced outside of competition. Starting with Tai Chi "stationary push hands" here:
That is not sparring. I myself have competed in this, and I can tell you that though it is a great drill for developing balance on your feet when someone is trying to push you, it doesn't cover any techniques you would actually use in a fight - and it is constantly stopping and starting over. Sparring, by definition, is a continuous form of practice where you do not have a ref judging you, pulling you apart, or making you restart. Sparring also always includes techniques you might actually defend yourself with some day.
The above drill is with 100% resistance, but it is nothing close to sparring. It may or may not be helpful for some martial artists, but it is no replacement for sparring. Same goes for this incredibly popular practice related to the karate "kick boxing" above:
As you can plainly see, these fighters don't spend most of their time practicing against each other, they spend most of their time stopping and starting over whenever the ref or judge tells them to, they are not getting the same kind of continuous practice in the first karate "kick boxing" video above. Also, the techniques used in this karate "Kumite Point Fighting" drill are less realistic for fighting than in the first karate "kick boxing" video above. I have competed in this as well. It is an interesting drill for using reach, timing, and finding openings on your target, but it is no substitute for actual sparring.
Before you attempt to say this is not a fair comparison because Karate "kick boxing" has been successful in MMA but Tai Chi has not, please keep in mind that numerous Tai Chi practitioners are involved in combat sports, and you have probably already seen Tai Chi in combat sports without realizing it. The best example is probably Nick Osipczak of the UFC:
So yes, it is a fair comparison, in fact I believe it is a direct parallel. I am livid that in the 2020 Olympics Karate has been reduced to Kata and Drills without any real continuous fighting technique of any kind, which Tai Chi and Karate are both capable of. In fact, this is what people who understand martial arts wish was in the Olympics instead of Karate drills:
But as you see above, there is a big difference between drills and sparring. Drills can involve a lot of instructional oversight, stopping and starting over, and may use obscure techniques not often actually used while fighting, in the interest of building certain characteristics in the martial artist. Sparring on the other hand is continuous and ongoing, and focuses on techniques that are actually going to be used. Karate "kick boxing" and Tai Chi "moving step push hands" are examples of sparring, but Karate "kumite point fighting" and Tai Chi "stationary push hands" are example of drills that are not sparring.
It is an impressive act of skill for an individual martial artist to get a KO by landing a kick on his opponent's head - it takes flexibility, diligent training, some body strength and a certain amount of natural talent.
But it is NOT an accomplishment for a martial art to teach people to KO someone by kicking them in the head.
KOs happen by rattling someones brain - imaging the skull is the rattle and the brain is the thing inside the rattle that makes the noise when you shake the rattle. The way you shake the human skull like that is to deliver a strike with enough speed and weight to make the skull travel faster than the brain can follow, smacking the brain into the inside of the skull - that's your basic KO.
Look at where a punch goes from the time it begins until the time the punch connects. Typically it goes from the puncher's jaw to the arm being fully extended, in the time it takes to twist the hips into the punch. That distance is under 3 feet.
Now look at how far a foot, ankle or lower shin travels before it connects with the head, typically over 4 feet. It is delivered with a twist of the body that takes almost the same amount of time as a punch, so that it must be moving faster than a punch would be at the point of impact. Then there is the issue of the body weight, most methods of kicking high project the body behind the kick even more so than in a punch, but with the rare kicks that just use the weight of the leg, that's still a significant amount of human bone and meat behind that strike to the head.
In other words, almost any conceivable high kick can KO someone. The weakest kick is a front snap kick, and now there have been many documented KO's from front snap kicks to the face:
Now while most of those weren't exactly a lead leg teep, almost anything you do to get your foot up high and fast enough to connect with the head is going to get KO force going behind that kick. Almost any high kick from almost anyone is a potential KO threat.
There are more ways to kick the head from martial arts from all over the world than I care to mention. I am equally unimpressed by all of them. I am impressed by fighters who can pull them off, but I give the individual martial arts very little credit for their high kick techniques being in some way more special or effective than the others. A high kick is almost always a threat, no matter what spin you put on it.
To fully appreciate how alarming this actually is, understand there are 3 very different types of Karate, based on their sparring practices:
The best kind is called Knock Down Karate, notorious for being bare-knuckle and not allowing punches to the face, but otherwise being more or less like Muay Thai with a Gi... with less grappling and more high kicks...
The next kind is called "Full Contact Karate" (once occasionally referred to as "American Kickboxing," though that term is now inappropriately misleading to use,) this was boxing with only kicks above the belt allowed. I strongly doubt the value of this martial art to martial arts consumers, but you spar or you don't, and they definitely spar. They are decent at what they do, which is punches and high kicks, even though their kicking over all is missing the most important kicks of all, low kicks. Some full contact karate fighters have had more than decent footwork as well.
Then there is the very bad type of Karate, which trains to fight in "Kumite Point Fighting". In this type of fighting, they stop and start over every time someone is perceived to have executed a good technique... usually with only very light contact allowed. The end result is a lame game of tag that has nothing to do with fighting... some see it as a helpful drill for beginners, but most who practice this form do it instead of any real sparring training, and I see it as a plague that almost killed off martial arts in the 80's.
The type of Karate in the Olympics is the last kind, Kumite Point Fighting. How could the UFC/MMA fall victim to this atrocity? Well there already was mixed striking and grappling combat sports (what we now call MMA) before the UFC, the most famous called "Pancrase" at the time. Here is the Pancrase fighter's experience from the first few UFCs:
To hear him tell it, you would think the early UFCs were an advertisement to sell BJJ lessons. Sore loser, right? Probably not, check out Full Contact Karate legend Bill Wallace's recollections of the same events as a ringside commentator:
Stylistically Pancrase is nearly the opposite of Full Contact Karate, and these two have exactly zero motivation to agree with each other on these accounts. Your takeaway here is this: originally, the most famous MMA venue of all, UFC, was specifically designed to sell BJJ lessons.
The second thing you have to realize, is that us Muay Thai and Sanda guys were saying things like "cool story bro, you pull that crap on us and the bottom of our foot is the last thing you will ever see." When one of the most respected fighters from our clique was finally allowed to participate, he cleaned house in the UFC:
And from then on until now, BJJ has had to share the MMA spotlight with Muay Thai. I know of fully 3 cases in the last 5 years in the Seattle Area where BJJ institutions attempted to sabotage the teaching of Muay Thai.
This creates a "bad romance" between Kumite Point Fighting and BJJ. Potentially the two are a match made in hell:
BJJ needs striking to look bad for self defense. Kumite Point Fighting
is a tragedy when it comes to self defense value, and BJJ instructors
can use it as an example of how it is so easy to close the distance with
a striker that striking itself is not a reliable strategy to defend
yourself, because after all, "most fights end up on the ground", when
your striking experience is the one year it took you to get your Karate
For Kids black belt.
BJJ fighters sometimes see themselves as closing the distance quickly, so that they are likely to only get hit by one strike on their way in to a take down. Kumite Point Fighting is only concerned with that one strike, it sort of matches the BJJ stand up game plan.
BJJ was in a Brazilian cultural context, which is generally rejects blind obedience to authority. In today's world with ever inflating BJJ tuition and increasing competition from other martial arts, they need their followers to have a different mentality in order to come up with a car payment level of tuition every month and never question most BJJ schools very limited striking and footwork. The styles of Karate that are most represented in Kumite Point Fighting were specifically recreated from previous martial arts, in order to spread Japanese Imperialist values - blind obedience to authority.
The UFC/BJJ economic powerhouse has a perverse incentive to see Kumite Point Fighting succeed. This is likely to catch up with them in the long run: almost anyone can get a black belt in Karate-tag quickly, and then point their new students to show-off long-stance MMA fighters who beat even-one-fighter-with-any-BJJ-rank-whatsoever, and thus claim that Kumite Point Fighting beats BJJ in the UFC all the time.
There are so many variations of Karate that it isn't fair to lump them all together, but here's my gripes about Karate as a whole:
Rigid Technique: In pretty much every other striking art, one does not try to stay flexed all the way through the strike, but rather relaxed, building up as much speed, structure and body weight as possible at the point of impact with the target. In general Karate tries to keep the same speed from the beginning of the strike to the end.
Rigid Movement: moving around super stiff is the ideal practiced in Karate Kata. This is practiced in almost no other arts outside of Karate, and for good reason - movement should be adaptable and fluid.
Rigid Defense: Being stiff as a board makes strikes more effective against you, because you can't "roll with the punches" that way. Super stiff inside-outside blocks to block kicks? Probably going to get your arm broken against someone who knows what they are doing.
Rigid Stance: Because most Karate doesn't spar with leg kicks, they get into a long stance that is terrible for fighting against sweeps, leg kicks, and grapplers (as in the case of Full Contact Karate.) It confines movement direction, makes the groin more vulnerable, makes the practitioner more vulnerable to circular strikes, opens the jaw to straight punches, etc. etc.
Rigid Mindset: If you find karate that does spar with leg kicks, they often spar without any hand strikes to the head - you know, the most likely strike for you to be attacked by (as in the case of Knock Down Karate.)
Rigid Strategy: The lack of head and leg targets is if you find serious karate into sparring, unfortunately stop and go "Karate Kid" style Kumite Point Fighting, not really continuous sparring at all but a strange game of useless tag that has no application to self defense to speak of, is what most Karate Schools do instead of doing any real sparring or fighting.
Rigid Kata: Almost all traditional martial arts spend too much time on Kata and not enough time sparring, but Karate is extreme in this regard, especially since so many Karate styles are kumite point fighting instead of doing real continuous sparring.
Rigid Application: Karate is notorious for its practitioners disregarding Kata as not relevant to fighting. This is almost always by karate people who are talking about kata not applying to Kumite Point Figthing - which no kata should, because Kumite Point Fighting is very unlike any kind of real fighting. It turns out that if you spar continuously, it is far easier to see the applications in kata... though on average, Karate kata are much more sanitized for political reasons than other martial arts with kata or forms.
Rigid Philosophy: Karate was popularized in Japan at a time when they were trying to instill a very specific group of values into the young people of that era - Japanese Imperialist values - warrior codes that would later justify mass rape, murder and attempted genocide. The blind respect for authority they praise in Karate is the last thing you or your children should be internalizing.
Rigid Ideology: Why do you think they tried to get the people they occupied (especially in Korea) to study Karate? Usually occupied peoples are not encouraged to do martial arts by their oppressors. Karate was, even more so than Aikido, first and foremost a way to teach a specific set of values, than it was to teach people how to fight. In fact Kumite Point Fighting was arguably created to make sure people didn't learn how to fight!
Or in other words:
The more a Karate style avoids the title of "Karate" (Kudo, Kenpo, Kyokushin, Enshin, etc.) the better of a martial art they tend to be. As Kumite Point Fighting in the Olympics in 2020 diminishes the reputation of martial arts as a whole and destroys the reputation of Karate, I encourage all practitioners of Karate that are truly serious about the martial arts allow their art to evolve beyond Karate:
You first need to read my post on Martial Eras and my post on the coming Martialocalypse in order to understand what I am talking about in this post. Until you do, just understand that I think we live in a very specific time when it comes to martial arts, and I think that time is coming to an end as the public imagination turns from MMA to Karate Kumite Point Fighting.
From my POV, MMA had one job, and that was to stop the spread of Kumite Point Fighting. Look at WHY it failed to do this: there never resulted from MMA a casual tournament format. The genius of MMA is that it is still more of a testing ground for martial arts to prove themselves than it has been a martial art in and of itself. But that never really made it to the tournament scene in a big way, not like Kumite Point Fighting did. Instead with are left with the several mixed grappling/striking formats we had before MMA: Pro Hapkido, Sport Japanese Jujitsu, Pankration, etc.
There's another WHY that should be mentioned here, and that is that the UFC always was a ploy to make BJJ look good. Let this sink in: how many MMA instructors out there think that we actually don't need mixed striking/grappling tournament rules because we already have BJJ tournaments? How many BJJ coaches have said to themselves "if people really need striking tournaments, they can do that Karate Kid point fighting stuff, after all, it's probably just going to the ground anyways so it's the BJJ skills that really matter, who cares if their stand up striking is garbage?"
Kumite Point Fighting is going to get the public's imagination in a way that it never did before. It will suck finances out of the BJJ school system, and MMA will have less viewership as people believe the lies of Kumite Point Fighting. That infrastructure that has kept martial arts at a high quality in our age today will be degraded.
But as more people do point fighting, some fraction of them will become disillusioned with it, because it's still ineffective in real situations. So basically all new students of non-kumite-point-fighting schools will be disillusioned former Kumite Point Fighters themselves. They will be looking for mixed striking/grappling arts with better sparring rule sets.
The mixed striking/grappling martial arts, given very little attention in MMA, may have their day in the sun in this new age of martial arts:
Kudo is very likely to explode in popularity.
The Tipon/Gathering scene is likely to become the new gritty street fighting venue.
The grappling arts that have significant striking elements that they sometimes compete with - such as Combat Sambo - are likely to see significant growth if not dominance.
BJJ, in response to selective pressure from Sambo and Kudo, will likely become mostly the Combat version with no Gi and lots of slapping each other around.
Muay Thai will remain very popular because of their clinch fighting, and ability to quickly teach people real striking skills to fulfill the broken promises of Kumite Point Fighting.
Knock Down Karate (Kyokushin, Enshin, etc.) will become very popular as the "real Karate."
Many TMA schools who are not married to any particular tournament rule set are going to have some kind of ground grappling that they never took seriously before MMA became popular.
Combat Glima is going to become the default grappling style for any martial arts system looking for easy answers to their lack of grappling. It's going to be huge in Western/Midevil martial arts as those arts continue to move on to more realistic continuous fencing practices, shamed away from traditional fencing by stop-and-go Kumite Point Fighting dragging down the reputation of martial arts as a whole.
But here's what we are not going to have: that standardized mixed striking/grappling ruleset for casual tournament competition that martial arts has desperately needed now for over a century. MMA will be like the Shoulin Temple is now; there will be a lot of martial arts schools tracing their roots back to fighters who once participated in MMA in it's glory days. There may not be many BJJ schools left to study at, and the ones that are left may be very different than the ones we enjoy now, but MMA will have passed on the legacy of grappling to that part of the martial arts community that still cares about effectiveness.
One of the first things I noticed in Chinese Martial Arts when I was first exposed to them was be it in Yang style Tai Chi or Choy Lay Fut, the basic straight punch was thrown with a vertical fist instead of a horizontal fist.
As I got into kickboxing I used vertical fist punches mostly at close range to the body, and horizontal fists long range to the head. My aspiring kickboxing career ended after my first two fights were cancelled because of chronic wrist pain in the mid 90's, which is were a lot of my aversion to punching to the face comes from.
Over the last few years I have gotten into cross training with MMA and Muay Thai fighters. My wrists are so sensitive that I can't hit focus mitts for more than a few rounds without the pain coming back. But I recently discovered that if I strike with a vertical fist I don't get that wrist pain:
I figured old people teach kung fu forms, so as they get older, of course they teach old people ergonomic moves like vertical punches. Imagine my surprise when Fight Perfect recently produced a video advocating this style of closed fist strikes (Update 3/14/2020, Fight Perfect has been censored on YouTube, but the following video covered more ore less the same material as the now missing Fight Perfect video):
It is interesting to note that the vertical fist straight punch has been around a long time in western boxing as well:
In today's world there is a lot to learn about martial arts in general and striking specifically. Where I personally lost power on my straight punches wasn't on under rotation of the punch, but on my elbow coming up. The easiest way to keep my elbow down has always been vertical punches, and now that I see they are also more ergonomic, it seems to me that this is the fastest way to teach people to throw an effective straight punch.
As a Tai Chi practitioner, I have become very interested in Combat Glima (aka "Viking Wrestling") over the years, and I have noticed its popularity growing among historical western martial arts groups. WHY I am interested in it is this: in many indigenous grappling arts the goal is to put your opponent on the ground while you remain standing. But very often in the grappling styles that emphasize this, both opponents go to the ground. Stopping sparring to reset frequently is a poor sparring practice, and if your sparring goes there all the time you should probably just include it in your sparring. The logical implication would be that if your main goal was staying on your feet in the first place, getting back to your feet should your main goal on the ground. That is Combat Glima in a nut shell:
This has a few ergonomic advantages over MMA grappling styles, which make it less injury prone and less expensive in terms of infrastructure (notice Glima mostly training on grass instead of mat$.) First instead of trying to drive the opponent into the ground or otherwise submit them, on the ground they are grappling to get up:
Second they are not trying to slam their body weight down on top of their opponent when they throw (because they are trying to stay on their feet when they throw like in Sumo, Muay Thai or Tai Chi):
Even in Tres Espadas there are critics of Combat Glima, "I have done grappling before, and I think that Combat Glima has poor technique." But all the above advantages still stand - so if the technique could be better, lets improve it!
In the 80's Kumite Point Fighting almost destroyed the martial arts scene in the USA, and this destruction was only prevented by the emergence of real competition between martial arts in the form of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA, at first K-1 Rules Kickboxing but later mixed striking and grappling competition like the Ultimate Fighting Championship or "UFC".) The MMA movement has matured and is now extraordinarily influential, making the better martial arts like Muay Thai and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu more popular than the Kumite Point Fighting that once gave martial arts a bad name.
However, Kumite Point Fighting has now been officially approved as an Olympic sport. Where MMA was once a savior to the martial arts community, it will now be used to promote Kumite Point Fighting. A small minority of fighters like Anderson Silva and Connor McGregor have managed to have success even with dropping their hands or using long stances in MMA. Even though this is rare among all MMA fighters, champions or otherwise, their style of fighting will be used to justify the Kumite Point Fighting style of martial arts.
It won't matter that most of their technique is Muay Thai. Kumite Point Fighting instructors will be able to say "look they are the best in MMA. They fight like we do, in our stance, using the body's longest weapon, the kick" just like they used to say before MMA. And they'll have plenty of boards for people to break to show how "powerful" those Kumite Point Fighting kicks are, just like before.
"But BJJ is so popular right now, it won't fall from grace as the most popular martial art..." People are going to watch one season of Cobra Kai and become interested in the of the "Olympic sport" of Kumite Point Fighting. The instructors perpetuating this abomination are going to reference MMA as a justification for why those students don't need to bother with Muay Thai or BJJ.
That is what this bottle cap challenge is about, popularizing the idea that Kumite Point Fighting style kicks should be praised for their accuracy instead of their power. It is the worst omen in the world for the future of martial arts. "But UFC 1 proved BJJ was the best!" Self-serving platitudes won't save us, because there was a lot more to the UFC than just UFC 1:
"If you can't beat one person, you can't beat multiple people." (Since there is some small chance that you could be attacked by a BJJ practitioner, it is impossible to adequately prepare to fight multiple attackers without first being the best BJJ fighter on earth, because otherwise, you could be potentially attacked by someone who is better at BJJ than you.)
"Your only chance is to run anyways" (as if you could count on being faster than every other person in the group attacking you, and as if no bouncer has ever dealt with two drunk jerks at once.)
"You are unlikely to be attacked by more than one person anyways" (as if people planning to attack you planned to fight fair.)
This same BJJ blind rage is aimed at every martial art that is not BJJ. BJJ has become dependent on a lot of martial arts infrastructure: high tuition, a robust system of tournaments, a community of professional full time instructors, well maintained dojos with expansive mats, armies of Gi distributors selling uniforms on Amazon, etc. At least in the Seattle Area, over time BJJ has become less likely to share infrastructure with other martial arts, some schools ending Muay Thai programs or insisting instructors only teach BJJ. This not-playing-well-with-other-martial-arts is not financially sustainable if BJJ starts to get less income from fewer new students and needs to share infrastructure with other martial arts in order to survive.
The real legacy of UFC 1 was it restored public confidence in people wearing martial arts uniforms in the face of tough guys with muscles - and BJJ does indeed deserve all of the credit for that. BJJ may lose most of their new incoming students to Kumite Point Fighting, thanks to their self-congratulatory hubris, Cobra Kai, the Olympics and all the MMA fighters who thought it was cute to use their Karate-for-kids in the cage. The dark ages we haven't seen since the 80's are about to return, and this time it is not clear to me that martial arts as we know it today will ever be this good again.
