Functional martial arts training

But here's the gorilla in the room: How do you "truly and sincerely" train something that involves doing serious (and sometimes lethal) bodily harm to another human being?

 

this is the revolution of judo, no? by eliminating dangerous techniques to allow 100%-effort sparring, we've found that something else much more valuable was gained.

and no, you can't train to crush someone's larynx, for instance. of course not. i've had my fill of play-acting personally. in hapkido, we always trained a "finishing" move. guy "attacks", you perform your "move", when you get them on the ground, "crush the knee", or "rip out the larynx" or some other nonsense. of course, you can't actually "crush the knee", but you can pretend to, and yell your ki shout while you're at it. "hiiiiyyyyaaaaaaahhhhh!!!!!"

 

Here's one point of view that might be relevant.

http://www.koryu.com/library/tnishioka1.html

 

How many training partners have you injured or killed then?

Frankly I can barely muster the energy to decry this nonsense, especially as it has been done to death so many times on MAP

 

To me, there are two problems with that model. First, we can't actually perform moves that involve gouging eyes, crushing throats, etc. So our experience of it is (happily) highly theoretical. Second, I'm not a big believer in this "move versus move" model that we seem to espouse. Obviously, moves have counters, which have counters, etc. But we seem to market this "if he does X, you'll use Y" idea. As though the key to success was simply having the appropriate movement in your repetoire. And people with more experience know that there's much more to it than that. That a couple of good moves that you can pull off under pressure will take you a lot further than "knowing" the counter to dozens of supposed attacks.

I'm getting ready to start taking judo classes, by the by.

 

No one has ever said it is.
And seeing as, basically, Matt Thornton brought the term (but not the concept) aliveness into the martial arts arena you don't really get to define it differently.
Aliveness is what it is.

 

awesome! nothing better in my opinion.