You have to be willing to hurt people to compete in anything worth the effort and even very responsible training carries a risk that you'll hurt someone.
Testing your understanding of the art is part of learning the skills the art has to offer you. If you don't test yourself under some sort of pressure how do you know you've understood the lesson? I've personally trained with people who perform techniques that "look" flawless only to find they have little of substance behind them. As soon as a little resistance is offered or something unexpected happens, their technique fails them. You must test your own understanding.
The ever famous question has arisen again, are traditional martial arts good for self defense or not... I mean doesn't it really depend on the school your learning from.
To a degree, although if you are training in what passes for a traditional manner these days the answer is almost categorically no The traditional arts in the past were drilled hard, fast and often...a shame that died off but then few have the stomach for it. Most masters of the past would wholeheartedly approve of MMA and related training methods if you want my personal opinion
. I always want your opinion Hannibal. And I agree with you. I actually had the pleasure of training with some guys from Japan once and wow it was like two hours of basic technique and with no water break then they were ready for kata, wow. After we were done it was like the reverse punch and I were one...
No reason why they shouldn't be, but in a lot of places...even as a "rabid TMAer" I'd have to say no. You guys usually have water breaks? Yeah, the way a lot of people who practice things like karate that I've spent time with (myself included at points) is pretty weak sauce. It's almost like most people want to be seen to be training hard but not actually do it. Hell, most other karateka I've mentioned it to give me ghastly looks when I suggested previously that training with weight is a perfectly valid and important part of our karate practice (or should be).
And the answer is the same as it has always been: If they are trained in a realistic way against realistic resistance, yes, and if they are not, probably no. That means most aikido probably isn't. I love my aikido, but I got over the illusion that it amounts to realistic self-defense training a long time ago.
Hi, I get that you hope to never have to use MA. I get that you would turn things over to the authorities if possible. But these two comments above IMO conflict with each other. How do you expect to be able to protect your loved ones without seeing first if your skills work by testing them?
What a silly notion. Martial arts is not only about hurting people. One of the paradoxes of martial arts training is that by learning to harm others we often gain significant respect for scaling back the damage we cause and restricting ourselves to less lethal responses. Because of my martial arts training I've been able to not hurt violent people, controlling them using pain compliance and superior positioning, and making sure they didn't harm anyone else. There is no way I'd have been adept at that without significant training. I've seen the way people behave who don't have enough mat time but whose job requires physical intervention. It's one of the primary reasons law enforcement overreact and deploy weapons when it's unnecessary. If they had better H2H they'd rely on it more. Instead, they respond in fear.
