Most striking martial arts intentionally develop effective wide-hook hand strikes as part of their curriculum. These are as fundamental to Choy Li Fut as jabs are to Boxing:
Mike Tyson was famous for powerful overhands and hooks. However one of the greatest MMA fighters of all time used these kind of punches as a core part of his effective strategy that often won by KO:
A lot of people on the internet criticize punches-that-are-not-straight-punches as "wide," "swinging wild," "sloppy," "hay makers" or "wind up punches." Here's an example of someone stereotyping all wide punches like this:
When emotion takes over technique is replaced by the body's natural attack mechanisms. When a fight escapes control of the judges and referee, what gets used are:
those wide punches used by Tyson and Fedor,
low kicks,
clinching and
grappling for position on the ground (without submission holds.)
I would add that these are legitimate techniques, so you can train to do them well. But are these the most important techniques to get good at to protect yourself in a street fight?
On Amazon in around 2006 I left a nasty review of "Under the Banner of Heaven" (UBH) by John Krauker. What is strange is people who read my critique of UBH reached out to me trying to correct my Mormonism, ignoring my critiques of the book. (I am sure I will enjoy the TV series based on his book because I love me some true crime drama, and because I have enjoyed related media like the series "Big Love.") Here I will regale you with that tale and then illustrate how my views have matured since then.
UBH attacks LDS as a whipping boy for organized religion, using fringe cases of murder by extremists Mormons who aren't even LDS. Krauker blames LDS by way of association for these criminal actions, digging up Mountain Meadows Massacre drama, ignoring the historical context of how violent the Old West was in general. And he absolutely follows that up with anti-theist rants that struck me as somewhat Islamophobic when I read this book back in 2006-ish.
After reading my review a sad man e-mailed me complaining about my review of UBH. LDS was bad because a friend of his had to sell space on her body for a tattoo artist to practice when a bishop wouldn't help her with rent money. (It was the Problem of Evil applied to LDS specifically: if God is Good, and God made Everything, how come Evil exists?) The sad man asked me how I dare defend such a violent religion, and complained that the LDS religion destroyed his family. The sad man's wife didn't leave him exclusively because of his abandoning of his faith, but apparently he wanted a lot of other things to change about their lifestyle and the wife and kids were not having that.
So I replied to the sad man,"you say God could not have a church where in some cases it does not work as well as advertised for families, or a church where leaders make mistakes. But in school I have studied numerous global human services problems, and the one that haunts me is child soldiers in Africa. Those kids are forced to kill their own family members in front of the rest of their village so that they can never return, and then are used as sex slaves for that army until they are old enough to use an AK-47. If we can have a God that would allow something like that to happen, then I think that same God could have a Church with flawed leaders and flawed members." His reply expressed disgust for my my cynicism, and the conversation ended when I sent him the lyrics of this song:
LDS believe in the REAL divine, whatever that may be, and we do dare name that divine "Jesus." We live in the world we do, and it is a dark place. Jesus may have a very different value system from the rest of humanity. Or at least that's how I saw it then.
A few years ago I became interested in LDS apologetics because I had a younger friend who was interested in LDS and I thought he deserved betters answers than my dark rivethead views on life. Kwaku El on YouTube pointed out something I had always known about LDS but I didn't realize the philosophical significance of before: the LDS reject entirely the premise of Ex Nihilo.
Ex Nihilo is the belief that God makes things out of nothing. The problem is ancient peoples never experienced anything like that, and never believed anything like that: everything that was created in the ancient world was created from other raw materials. Ex Nihilo wasn't even formalized until the 2nd Century AD, so that none of the Christians, Jews, Samaritans, Romans, Philistines or anyone else you read about in the Bible ever actually believed that God "created the universe out of nothing."
The actual belief is that 1st century Christians and others at their time or before had was that God created the universe out of chaotic unorganized matter. LDS see all of humanity as "children of God," so that our mortal existence is part of an ongoing act of creation, as we become more God-like through trying to be better people and through our eventual Resurrection from death. Life is then an ongoing battle between God and chaos.
As someone with a lefty activist background, I never really identified with the "warrior codes" (Chivalry, Bushido, etc.) found in the martial arts, because I didn't see myself as a warrior, but as part of a resistance against oppression. But seeing Kwaku El's point here helps me appreciate the role of the warrior, because we like God fight to establish the order we desire in a chaotic and unforgiving universe. The world is indeed a dark place, but that's not God's fault.
So again I reject Krauker's anti-thesim in UBH. In Tai Chi we realize that when things are good it is time to watch out for vulnerabilities, but when times are bad it's time to search for and exploit opportunities. A dark chaotic world is an opportunity for us to create the world WE want to have, and we do so primarily by choosing what rules we want to live by. You may not like the can-of-answers that is the LDS religion, but your contempt for my empowerment sounds like a you problem.
"Sham Focus" is focusing on the fact that MLM is a sham first, before being distracted by other annoyances (cult overtones, personal health consequences, poor product value, etc.) For those who don't understand why MLM doesn't work, every MLM ever has convincing arguments as to why their specific MLM is not like the others. Thanks to a Trump endorsement, ACN did significant financial and reputation damage to multiple people I know after those same people had already sworn off other MLMs:
Part of why I was able to get out of Herbalife in the 90's as quickly as I did was that I did not recruit downline. A few of my friends warned me I was getting involved in a "Pyramid Scheme," even as other friends were trying to join my downline. However, once I was out of Herbalife I didn't really understand what was wrong with MLM until I ran into an endless-chain-scheme that worked in 3 phases:
I read an advertisement in the paper which read "turnkey mail order business, send self addressed stamped envelope (SASE) to [a post office box.]"
I got a convincing letter back in my SASE that said if I send them just $10 they will send me a package that will get me started in the business.
In return for my $10 was the final "package," another letter that read: including the final letter I was now reading, the first letter I received in my SASE, and the advertisement I originally read in the paper, I now had everything I needed to run my own turn key mail order business.
Obviously there was no way for that business to work because sooner or later if everyone who lost $10 started pulling the same sham, they would eventually run out of people gullible enough to fall for it. Understanding this endless chain scheme helped me see why MLM does not work and thus avoid any further participation in MLM. I challenge you and your friends to openly discuss the following:
Why don't you send money or bank account information to a Prince who contacted you randomly by e-mail?
What is "Affinity Fraud" and why should you avoid it?
What is an Exit Scam?
What is a Ponzi Scheme?
What is the difference between an Endless Chain Scheme and a Pyramid Scheme?
What would you have to do to "legalize" a scam in order to get away with it and avoid prosecution?
How would "legalization" of a scam impact that scam's victims?
What is the difference in risks between owning stock through an Index Fund, vs investing your time and money in a semi-legalized pyramid scheme (MLM)?
How does the risk of participation in MLM compare to the risk of participating in an illicit pyramid scheme or gambling at a casino?
Why are people who are interested in real business concerned about "market saturation?"
However most of us are not going to get together to discuss THAT over the weekend. Here are some other strategies I have seen that I like for getting hip to the MLM sham:
Balls Falls Ostrich Egg Consultants is a spoof MLM that illustrates what is wrong with MLM through humor. Right now I believe it is mostly good for keeping people from joining new MLMs after they got out of previous ones, but their proselytizing of Balls Falls Ostriches is a notable example of reaching out to people caught up in scammery.
I have a strategy for undermining the MLM mindset by building on the victim's doubts regarding their upline and downline. My "How to Succeed at Network Marketing" ploy aims to educate the MLM victim regarding market saturation and what a legitimate business model might look like.
Encourage anyone considering joining an MLM to make a business plan considering both time and money they will be spending to participate in the MLM. Ask "could you possibly become financially independent doing this direct selling without recruiting others? Considering that others are being recruited to sell the same thing in your social network and community, how much of this stuff do you think you can actually sell month after month?"
Ask anyone currently in MLM to keep financial records of all time and money spent on the MLM, and have them go over their records with you. Help them include anything they have forgotten in their records, including the cost of training, inventory, travel and how much they value their own time they could have spent not doing the MLM. When they see issues, explain to them the problem is the corrupt business model, not their lack of effort or ability.
VanDruffs "What's Wrong With Muti-Level Marketing?" is the document that recruited me to the cause of anti-MLM in the 90's, long before Reddit ever existed. It does a great job of putting the problem of MLM being a sham first, before explaining their other annoyances regarding MLM.
There are a lot of good YouTube videos regarding MLM now that emphasize the fundamental business problems with MLM. I think this one video helps illustrate the problem faster than anything else:
I hypothesize there have been two main stages of Martial Arts Evolution so far (1.0 and 2.0,) and we are now moving into a 3rd stage (3.0.) First understand that children wrestle and swing sticks at each other in mock battles naturally without adult supervision. Free sparring is fun and natural and anthropologically speaking probably predates formal martial arts training. Martial arts that do NOT have free sparring have degenerated into incomplete (0.?) martial arts. These incomplete martial arts are usually based on older arts that did have free sparring.
Martial Arts 1.0: Traditional Martial Arts
Martial Arts that have been around a long time and have a systematized form of free sparring are what I would call the first generation of complete martial arts, or Martial Arts 1.0. This includes Fencing, Wrestling, and many Eastern Martial Arts. These Traditional Martial Arts have curriculum driven by two main factors:
Tradition - often based on drills taught to soldiers for life and death combat, techniques continue to be studied even when considered obsolete by modern soldiers.
What works in free sparring with other people studying the same martial art.
In the 80's and 90's people experimented with full contact competition rules that would work for different Traditional Martial Arts to compete against each other. The Martial Arts that competed in these kind of competitions were influenced by other styles, and new Martial Arts formed based on that mindset of training. Examples of these kind of competition formats and styles include Combat Sambo, San Shou, Pankration, etc.
Martial Arts 2.0 curriculum is based on two main factors:
The strategies inherited from the multiple Traditional Martial Arts that the individual Martial Art 2.0 was based on.
What works when competing against other styles of martial arts.
A great example of Martial Arts 2.0 is Kudo (Judo augmented with Karate):
Martial Arts 3.0: Evolved Self Defense
We are now in an era of the evolution of martial arts where Martial Arts 2.0 has been around a while. Thanks to social media like Facebook and YouTube, martial arts consumers are able to learn a lot about the downsides of martial arts training before they get involved. In fact there seem to be Seven Deadly Sins of martial arts including:
Neglecting Beginners: is failing to get real skill into the hands of new students quickly enough. This is often giving beginners too much to practice, so that they don't get good enough at any one skill set to use in self defense while still beginners.
Over Specializing: is focusing on one specific type of self defense technique while neglecting other import types of self defense training. For example some styles focus almost exclusively on high kicks while neglecting other strikes, take down defense, knife attacks and situational awareness.
Neglecting Sparring: is not having enough free sparring. Usually being Evolved Self Defense will require a martial art to have multiple forms of free sparring instead of focusing on sparring with only one set of rules.
Over Training: is putting performance ahead of safety. Combat sports for example are notorious for seriously injuring people while preparing for fights or while fighting in fights.
Ignoring Consequences: is ignorance of legal needs of today's martial arts consumer. Just because ground-and-pound is a good idea in the cage doesn't mean that it is a good way to stay out of prison.
Assuming Enforcement: is misapplying strategies for police, security and military to civilian martial arts consumers. Most martial arts consumers need to focus on personal safety rather than enforcing rules.
Neglecting Weapons: failure to train for dealing with improvised weapons (especially knives.) Contrary to what you see in the movies, knives and other improvised weapons present both a self defense opportunity and personal safety threat to most martial arts consumers much more often than firearms.
It doesn't take long for the potential martial arts student to figure out what is available to them could take too long to learn to be worth their time, make their life a lot worse through training related injury, not actually work at all, potentially land them in prison, give them bad habits for a real self defense situation or ignore basic self defense scenarios people are likely to encounter such as a knife attack. As time goes on, Martial Arts 3.0 curriculum is likely to be based on:
Techniques and strategies from Martial Arts 1.0 and Martial Arts 2.0.
Fixing the above Seven Deadly Sins with the martial arts training already available.
Christopher Hein teaches a form of Aikido augmented by his experiences in other internal martial arts, training in MMA, participation in Dog Brothers, and careful examination of what his Aikido students really needed. Hein's Dojo (Fresno Aikido) appears to be teaching a form of Martial Arts 3.0, Evolved Self Defense:
It's time for martial arts consumers to think deeply about what we do and do not want out of martial arts training. One possible exercise is to think about what changes a martial art would need to make in order to become Evolved Self Defense. For example I did such a thought experiment with Brazillian Jiu Jitsu here: https://bfgalbraith.blogspot.com/2021/06/how-to-fix-bjj.html
Self defense training should improve your fitness and reduce your injuries if you are attacked, and should help you prevent being attacked, and it shouldn't take away from the rest of your life from being too time consuming. Combat sports does the opposite: it asks you to turn your self defense training into a part time job for the next few decades of your life, guarantees you will be in public fights half naked against very well trained people who will hurt you, and will give you more violence related injury than you were probably likely to suffer without any training at all. The public one on one fights, super intense fight camps, and intense daily training give you skills rapidly in the short term but in the long term may give you injuries that make you less able to defend yourself than if you had NOT done public one on one fights, intense fight camps, and intense daily training.
In the following an Aikido black belt reports gaining better self defense skills by studying kickboxing and BJJ casually, only to have his over all self defense capacity reduced by preparing to participate in combat sports events:
Imagine how much better off this Aikido Black Belt would have been if he simply did NOT agree to fight publicly. Take the daily over-training and the fight camps out of it, and he would be more physically capable of defending himself than he is now!
In the 90's both of my fights were cancelled because of chronic wrist pain, and I had been training 6 days a week for 4 hours a day for about 18 months when I finally gave up on becoming a pro fighter. I returned to the same instructor several years later to train casually only, and in so doing got a few medals from competing in Tai Chi in the 2001 Tiger Balm Internationals. While I was there I observed the controlled contact San Shou competition and could see instantly that it was of high value to me and other martial arts consumers. However my instructor dismissed this controlled contact competition as not important enough to distract him from training his boxers and kickboxers:
Training for a controlled contact tournament like the above example is much more appropriate for the average martial arts consumer than training for match on a fight card. This is in my view a huge part of why BJJ has been so successful, instead of relying on a system of pre-arranged fights, they instead focus on a culture of frequent participation in tournaments. Training is then just as casual or intense as any particular martial arts consumer studying BJJ actually wants or needs, without the pressure to strip down and fight half naked in public.
Icy Mike recently had a rant were he bemoaned that "there is no such thing as a self defense school" because there are too many areas of self defense to cover at any one location (firearms, situational awareness, submission grappling, kickboxing, etc.,) and that it would take "dedicating your life" to any one of those areas to become adequately proficient do defend yourself. However this demonstrates the need to distill and focus the material presented to martial arts consumers. Some kickboxing techniques are a lot better than others for self defense: leg kicks, footwork and clinch are a lot more important than higher round kicks and superman punches. Likewise when it comes to grappling, sprawling and escaping from mount and side control is far more important for self defense than arm bars and guard pulls. Most people have faster access to knives than guns in self defense situations.
Is fully possible to have comprehensive self defense systems in today's world, but the people qualified to put such a system together are too distracted by "dedicating their lives to the art," to develop such a system. It's time to appreciate that martial arts consumers are not violence professionals. It is time to evolve self defense and martial arts to the needs of our generation.
