Becoming a good fighter...help!

Train the mind for sure.

Training the mind is also a whole area on its own I find.

For alot of fighters, even boxers or sport martial artists, just the constant practice and forcing thier bodies to endure practice is training the mind. As you are training you are always growing stronger in your mind as well to learn techniques and build your courage. Thats how you get alot of cockey "Class Trainers" who think they could kick anyone's ass. But let them be.

As for real fighting situations I usually use meditation and relaxation before and after a fight, hard spar, or pain tolerance exercise. I think relaxing the body and all the muscles concentrating on healing, and strengthening the body helps. I have learnt alot of these techniques from one of my chinese elder Wing Chun instructors. From him I have learnt how to use the mind to prepare the body for the pain and exhaustion, and also to enforce courage. I find this a great help, being able to enter with a clearn mind, and have you body ready to commit to the fight is a big help.

There is also a practice of hypnotic pain tolerance. I did think a couple years ago and it truely can work to shut out pain. By telling your body you feel know pain the pain wont get to your brain and effect you. The best way to do it is along with the natural flow of the body to hold back all pain until the fight is over. This works with the adreneline to keep you at peak condition until you relax, then blood also does this when you are stabbed. Usually in a fight when you are stabbed you wont start bleeding until your heart rate slows down. When you are tense and fighting the blood clots that area to help the body survive, but look out cause as soon as you relax you better be running for a bandage or the hospital. I dont practice this as much anymore and it can be misleading. You may be able to endure more attacks but I was realizing that the attacks were damaging my body without you knowing it (ie getting broken ribs from a kick and not knowing it). I think the best method to build pain tolerance is to get callused up and have a high physical pain tolerance so that when you take a kick your ribs wont break, and you will be able to physically endure the attact. If you can do this physically then i think it would be benificial to use meditation/hypnosis to block out any extra pain. That way you would have the best of both physical and mental protection.

Bruce Lee also taught in JKD how to use the emotional flips that he used while in a fight. Being calm and relaxed while staying in long range, and blocking, and then flipping on your rage while barreling down your opponent. Emotional release also give you an extra boost of energy. Try practicing this on the heavy bag at first. Throw it some light punches and dance around then charge in with a straight blast or series of hard attacks, then back off and be relaxed again. After getting good at this you are at a great advantage in a fight. Usually because someone who wants to fight you is going to be mad, at something that happend to them or some other personal reason. This usuaally result in even a good martial artist forgetting his skill and turning into a flailing crazed man. If you can stay calm and keep focused on the situation and not on winning the fight you will definatly have the advantage.

In I fight I think you shouldnt tell yourself you are going to win, have a strong trust in your skill, but tell yourself you are going to do as best you can and just take the fight one move at a time. I find that this puts more focus on each move resulting you to put 100% effort into each one in hopes of finishing your opponent with just that set. Often this is the case if you were to throw a round kick to the head followed by a straight blast, then a knee fo the solar plexis and a headput to finish. Concentating on finishing that set of moves will pretty much finish any man. But if not, you just bounce to the next set and do it again.

But probably the most important thing to know in your mind is that in a real fight is "you will not rise to the level of your expectation, but fall to the level of your training"

 

so its incidental in your part i presume. so you train to be calm to prepare for an extremely pressured situation? and also what kind of fights are we talking here? i somehow get the picture. is it ok if i ask what kind of fight situations you have been to? hope you don't mind.

 

I spent some time growing up in a ruff neighbor hood where fights were a weekly thing. If you have ever seen the bumfights video, you might see a glimps on me in the background of one of those street brawls where getting into gang fights was sort of a hobby/sport (im not really in the video but thats the idea).

After that I started training in boxing/kickboxing and moved to a rural community for Sr. High. There I stood out as a 'city slicker skater punk' type kid, so going to alot of bush parties packed with hicks often ended up in mimi-brawls. Eventually I got fed up with them, so me and my friends just started going to bush parties with the entention to call on any hick of any size to a fight to submission. Unfortinatly things didnt always end with submission.

In grade 12 I moved to a small city (80,000 people) and started a noon hour fight club with my friends. It slowly grew and we invited more and more people over. During the 1 hour break we would all run to my place (3 blocks from school) and have fights to submission. Just like the movie, no shirts no shoes, but we wore those small padded bag punching boxing gloved. Anything went, and when someone tapped out it was over. But having those gloves on really gave people the courage to just let the other have it. During these fights noone was ever seriously hurt, broken nose, blackeyes, nothing crazy.

After Highschool and 1 year of kickboxing and turned to martial arts to increase my fighting skill. I studied a little hwarang ku do, TKD, and Akido, but found them all lacking to the fight experience I had before. After that I stubbled in to Bruce Lee's work and JKD. Since then that has change my life.
After doing some reseach and buying all his books, I decided to go and take the 3 day Navy Seal JKD combat course. That was brutal, but I loved it. All they focused on was headbuts, knee's, elbows, and thumb in eyes, as well as some stick and knife. Mastering these moves and combos were a great help.
Seeing there is no good Jun Fan JKD in my area I looked around for a while and found a Wing Chun club which had a passion to train fighters, so I joined up with them. In addition to the standard Wing Chin techniques, They also hold classes to teach those full contact drills that i posted above and some others, but the system is designed to immitate a real street fight. I find it very effective to my past experiences and a huge help.

Im my first year of collage I got mixed up with the old style street groud again and ended up having to bail my friends out of alot of fights. But following Bruce Lee, and not drinking anymore, I became the designated bouncer fo all thier hall parties which often have 400-500 people there.
Me and some other friends took on the role of bouncing to try and keep alot of the acid / crack heads from coming in and trashing the place. Probably the worst situation was when 2 gangs got into a fight. 1 group all had pepper stray and knuckle busters, and the other one had a coulple guys with 21" ASP batons, and push blade knives. For those situations I carried 2 21" ASP batons, and used alot of my stick training experince from the differant martial arts.

After realizing that lifesty was going nowhere I left the city and relocated to where I am now to take my 2nd year of Uni. Since then I have not been in any real fights at all. And I dont really plan on going back to that lifestyle of fighting. But to keep up on my fighting skills and defense I recently started another fight club at my University but am having some trouble locating a steady place to practice, as I live in an apartment now. I have found some eagar students who want to learn how to fight, and I am helping them train in all the ways i posted above, and we try to hold weekly fightclubs.

Many people fear pain and fighting, but really its amazing how much the physical body can take, escpecially when you train it.

I dunno, that about sums up my life in fighting..

 

I thought the first rule of fight club was that you DO NOT TALK ABOUT FIGHT CLUB???

 

Staying with the orignal post on the way of becoming a good fighter....
train.train.train.

There is a lot of good advice here especially about health, which is what you really need to look at too, style wont mean a thing if you got poor health.

If you wanna fight professionally go to a good training ground, countries like Russia have government funding for training k-boxers, sambo and such.
Also in a streetfight, need to learn how to fight dirty too, although a good clean fist to face would knock someone out. Last like 10 seconds.
I like sparring. Its fun. I pad myself up and fight, the padding is there because i dont wanna hurt my friends that i have made in class, If its a person i dont like then i take off the padding and actually hit them less, but with a hell of a lot more force. Thankfully, that is very few and far between.

Some people like fighting for different reasons. A lot is just to show others their 'superiority' and beat their chests (i see a lot of that) other just wanna test their skill (i dont see enough of that).
I refuse to spar with a couple of people in my class because they just wanna hurt someone and they laugh when they do, for example, wearing shoes while the other is barefoot. Unfortunatly lowering myself to their level would only encourage them more. ( and please no posts that reply...'well in the street, you never know what the other blah blah' as the situations are totally different).

Wanna learn how to fight? get your butt kicked on a regular basis like i did and you will learn something. seriously.

 

Dammit your right.. hahaha..

Its ok, im not trying to start a international terrorist organization.

 

hahaha! i agree! the masters of kali illustrisimo first learned from the old man by paying him to show them something. he would then tell them to get thier bastons and would proceed to just barrage them with strikes. they eventuially learned to block the strikes so the master would then start with counters to the blocks, upon which his students started to learn counter striking. and so forth and so on.

there is a martial arts brotherhood here in the philippines called bakbakan. for them ang sabak ang siyang guro (the fight/ sparring is the best teacher).

 

D are you still there, this is pretty old now,
Did you ever get your answer? Aravi has a point, fighting is an art, it starts from within.....

 

I would recommend you NOT go out and seek street fights. Good way to get arrested or killed.

Sounds to me like what yer after might be some form of MMA. Shrug.