CKava is right. MMAist also know the difference between the street and the ring, hopefully. Once they leave the ring and end up in a real fight they know when to apply certain techniques and when not too. Brasilian Jiujitsu looks totally different when applied to self defense. No longer does the fight remain on the ground it's all stand up. So, not all MMAists don't suffer from sports syndrome. For the MMAists that see the clip and say,<deleted>. The video is an exercise to show how to control the space of an opponent.
Nope, sorry. Actually, I hate having anybody view anything I've done that's more than six months old, as I always feel that more than six months ago I still didn't understand a bleepin' thing about taijutsu yet. This clip is close to year and a half old now. That reminds me of a seminar on the subject of kuzushi (unbalancing) I taught some years ago, hosted by a local Aikido school headed by an instructor who was an acquaintance of mine. (I thoroughly liked the guy: He'd show the traditional formal techniques, but would also illustrate the points within them where strikes, kicks, and breaking stuff could occur if you really understood how to use them). So anyway, there were people at the seminar from a variety of different arts, including some jujitsu folks of some sort -- not sure what, but I remember some of them wearing blue belts. At one point I was illustrating something via a henka of the kata Ken Nagare from Takagi Yoshin ryu, with a different ending involving following the uke down onto the ground and ending in position for an elbow break. My wife Teri was training as well, paired with a jujitsu blue belt about 3 times her size. I was sort of watching out of the corner of my eye as he just wasn't getting any of it, and was becoming increasingly frustrated despite her attepts to help him understand. Finally as she punched he just resorted to pure brute force: grabbed her arm, flung her around and down, dropped down with her and tried to actually break her arm. She just shifted and changed her structural alignment so slightly that he wasn't aware of it, taking the worst of the pressure off her arm. He was so focused on what he was trying to do that he was unaware that anything had gone wrong for him until he heard a "click" near his ear and felt the flat of her little Spyderco folding knife blade on his neck, held in her other hand. As I watched, they both remained very still for a moment; then he carefully disengaged, got up, and went into the restroom. He was in there rather a long time, probably washing his underwear; and after he came out he stayed very far away from Ter for the rest of the session.
With a little intelligence gathering you can find another short clip out there of Dale, a couple seconds long, demonstrating "Choshi Dori." I don't know if he doesn't want it posted or has just forgotten about it, but I just thought I'd mention.
I didn't bring that one up simply because it's in a different conceptual category from the "using kukan" stuff this thread is about. "Shaping space" is about much more than mere distance, but distance can be a factor as well. Regarding the 30-second clip, more than one person has commented on how Juan is telegraphing his attacks, but the fact is he had no choice: Per the rules we'd set up, he already knew I wasn't going to be preemptively attacking him. And just as he starts to move, I begin to "fade" a bit and slightly increase the distance. . .Not like I'm "running/escaping" from him, but enough so that I still seem in range but he has to "reach" a bit to get me, unless he wants to just stop and "reset" and start over. The result is bigger, more extended, "telegraphed" attacking -- because I made him do it by the way I was moving. Another thing about this one: If you look carefully, you can see a direct application of the training exercise I was talking about in this post from the "Sparring and Taijutsu" thread:
