Overtrained

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.