What a load of... Has anyone ever thought of not eating garbage called 'fast food' and not spending one's day inside one's room all the time? Read more here: http://www.examiner.com/article/martial-arts-should-be-your-weapon-the-war-on-obesity
Truth be told this isn't all bullcrap, but like any other sort of physical activity, you get out what you put in. Self-defense is always a bonus though, even if realistically you're probably never going to have to use it (unless you live in a shithole neighborhood or something).
I agree about martial arts' positive effects, however this article claims it is the only solution for losing weight, and that is bullcrap.
I've come to realize that self-defense is what people call memorizing choreography that will all go to shit in real-life application. Self-defense is reflexes, athleticism, and often-times sheer luck. If you watch the cold-blooded guys in actual situations, they typically do whatever they do in a matter of seconds without really processing what is happening. It's almost all pure instinctive action/reaction, no room for rote memorization. The worse news is that the more likely somebody is to try and rob/mug/kill you in a bad neighborhood or similar setting, the more likely they are one of the above people. If you want real applicable self-defense, get a .380 and go to the firing range once a week. As for the fitness aspect, working out should never be tied to a an external goal that fitness doesn't have an almost absolute correlation with. People should work out because they want to become healthy or even very healthy, not because they want to turn into leet shinobi warriurx. It's easier to gauge your progress in an accurate manner when you're evaluating based on concrete capabilities like cardio endurance and weights/reps instead of nebulous and almost-unrelated things like skill and reflexes.
Most people have no idea how little style and flash are involved in a street brawl. Some people think that their 2.5 years of training "whatever"-FU will save them from anybody. What they fail to understand is that in an alley there are no rules and that coked up *insert nationality of your choice* brute will just laugh at you if you tell him you have a black belt in "whatever"FU. If he's a nice guy that stanley he got in his hand will not be used to open up your face. If you don't have the mentality of this guy... well you better leg it.
There is really no excuse for Oddguy "pointing out" that this isn't news. Examiner is to news what minty is to fresh breath.
Has anyone here actually tried fighting a 2nd degree blackbelt of any school? Seriously, you'll get your ass kicked unless you also train or have a significant strength/weight advantage.
If you follow sparring rules. Anything and everything about fighting goes out the window the first solid bruising or bone-breaking hit you land on a martial artist. Forward, forward, as if your life depends on it. Immobilize, incapacitate, kill. No time to think. No time to rely on training. Hit as fast as you can. Trade hard for fast if you have to. Never let a limb be useless. If you're hitting with your right, your left better be following up. They won't block both. Aim high with one hand and low with the other. Use your forehead as a weapon, aim for the point of their nose. If they grapple and get you in a lock, bite until you draw blood and if that fails bite until a chunk of something rips off. Eastern martial arts is dancing. It's all sherry and giggles until you hit somebody that can beat your training just by simply doing what their body tells them to do next. You can play tennis every day for hours and not beat Nadal. You can practice lay-ups for years and never beat LeBron. You can play 18 holes every damn day of your life and never get as good as Tiger. Reflexes and accuracy are just part of the game, and this is especially true for fighting. It can't really be trained. Either your body has the right response to a threat very quickly after it happens, or it doesn't. No amount of training (especially in controlled sparring environments) can prepare one for that. Even firearm training has the same problems. Somebody who can draw, aim and fire in perfect precision in combat training can be reduced to a fumbling cowardly mess in a stressful real-life environment. At the root of it, the biggest problem is that martial artists experience the same adrenaline as is involved with athletics. It's a fast-twitch forethought-oriented experience that gets you over-focusing and analyzing. In fight-or-flight, it's actually a flight reaction. Your mind is racing and you are actively engaging what is happening even as you do it. Your blood feels warm and time moves at normal pace. Real combat is the fight portion of that response. Your mind shuts down, your heart pumps, and your body goes cold and everything is in slow motion. Your relfexes are over-reactive. It's like switching the sensitivity of your mouse during an FPS to hyper-sensitive. A twitch goes a mile. Things get awkward when you try to use practiced movements and your experienced response overestimates by a longshot. It's all in the moment. Either your body is a practiced machine that removes all intellect and guesswork from the process, or it isn't. Rote memorization doesn't help. It can't be applied under different circumstances. For martial arts to be an effective training regimen, you would literally have to have real fear for your life every time you trained.
I agree to a point, M-arts is dancing and fitness is key. However, when it comes to training for defense there is real value to practice, not so much ridicules repetitious but rather sparing. If you pay for self-defense classes and are not beat the fuck up after every class you are getting robbed, any technique practiced w/o the sticky copper penny taste lodged in the back of your throat, a giant knot forming on your thigh, eyes swelling shut, ect. is a wast of time. A large part of teaching survivability, the biggest initial time investment, is the emotional/mental components. Initiative, aggression, tenacity, reaction control are skill sets that most American kids don't come equipped with and even then vary situationally, allot of truly tough guys turn into fuck'n babies when you roll them into a pretzel. The goal of an effective fight program is to set up situations that force a mother fucker into fight or flight then work the response. Every Monday, Wednesday, Friday. I think out of the 8 other M.A.C. instructors in the battalion most are belted in this, that or the other except for 2. I hold black in Aikido, brown in Jujitsu and Level 4 m.a.c. We get a quite a few belted soldiers and most of whom get beat the fuck up the first week or so. They are usually a little more fit and catch on faster but rarely make the fight team. Usually it's the fucking farm kids with no formal training outside of high school wrestling that end up fuckn' beast, teach the to throw a decent punch and how to maintain dominance on the ground, then watch them corn feed faggots absolutely crush bitches.
People can react the way they trained it. Just look at the samurai, knights, line infantery etc. That are people who spent several years of their life loosing their instincts and repleacing them with fighting techniques. A medival knight would pull his sword when aviable if you would surprise him, because after a youth of training that shit he doesnt know what else to do. You just need to do more than repeating stupid moves every day. Look at the shaolin monks, they spend their hole life doing some spiritual stuff and fighting. They will just fucking kill by touching your shoulder. No matter when. And about the firing stuff And again, you can train to chill your nippels in that situation. Just look at every european 18th century army ever.
The mortality rates are not great for them. Again, it was luck most often. Their martial arts are just like any other martial arts. You perform under the conditions you train under. As monks most of them have never had anybody attack them in earnest, so they're even more disadvantaged than the random person. I highly doubt they'd be able to implement their training in an impromptu hostile situation. I feel like that proves my point more than anything else. Tom-Cruise-San was playing a battle-hardened redman-killer. He was alive because he was familiar with do-or-die survival situations. He thrived in life-or-death circumstances because he was repeatedly exposed to them. His highly-trained ultra-disciplined r33t-nipponese soldiers had not performed under those circumstances and wet themselves when somebody pointed a gun in their direction. And even if this wasn't true, Hollywood is no place to get your expectations and definitions of reality from.
Fucking WHOA. I don't play these text wall games but I'll try. First off, what I'm addressing is this: Bullshit, here's two examples from life experience. 1) European friend, 5' 8''ish, 250lbs or so, practices jiu-jitsu about twice a week since he was a kid. We're at a bus stop, approached by four gangbangers looking to start shit for no reason (pretty common around here). One of them is running his mouth to my friend while the other three stand back. All my friend says is "You don't wanna do this man." Gangbanger gets brave and grabs at my friend's shirt. In one motion, my friend drops this guy's skull on the concrete, busting his face wide open in the process. He gets up dazed as fuck, and they all back off. End. 2) Bar fight on the southside. Mexican friend, studies taekwondo. As someone who also studied taekwondo, I will be the first to say it is the most pussy-ass choreographed dancing showmanship martial art in existence. Regardless, my friend delivers a front snap kick right to the jaw and knocks the assailant unconscious in a split second. I could go on, but that's enough. In every day self defense situations, a martial artist will have a clear advantage. I'll leave you with this video. I agree but that's not what I'm really getting at. You're talking about sport, and also contradicting yourself because wrestling is just as viable as any martial art. In fact if I were placing bet on MMA fights I'd lean towards the guy with a wrestling background over the striker. In real life self defense situations, training makes a huge difference. And if anyone gives me the "oh they got a gun" bullshit - here's the real world for you: Unless you're a drug dealer, nobody is sticking you up with a gun. That's hollywood bullshit, street muggers don't run around risking 20-to-life over your fucking watch. They just kick your ass and take your wallet.
Edit: accidentally hit reply prematurely...it's a problem I'm speaking from experience too. I've been an athlete. I've been in fights. One involves training. One involves what you get. All training goes out the window. All learned behaviors are subconscious. You use things you don't even remember knowing in a fight. That's the point. Your mind recycles what you know quicker than your conscious mind can process it. If you don't have the kind of mind that can cycle this stuff in time, you're shit out of luck. My luck was that I found myself reacting before I knew what I was doing. The fight was over before I knew what happened. The other guy was hauled off by his friends with two black eyes and multiple contusions. I had a fat lip from the only hit he managed to land. He was bigger, stronger, and threw the first punch when I wasn't expecting it (not hard when you're 5'7"). I had no fighting training whatsoever. I didn't have any skills or preparation. Whatever happened after the fact was a product of pure reflexes and reactions. It was as different form my experiences in athletics involving training and preparation as I could conceive. Time moved completely differently and part of me is still unsure what exactly I did when it happened.
I was talking about humans in general, not our "society" Medival knights did train most of their lifes to fight. ok I am sure they all survived training. I dont even exactly know what situation we are talking about. When you get robbed/ ambushed , you just need some seconds to chill out and gain controll of yourself again. Thats the whole art; stay cool, then you can use what you learned. In a fight however, you can use ur skills any time.
As a Kendo and Tae-Kwon-Do student, I can understand if you do such things for discipline, competition, 'fitness', or just the fun of it. If you are doing it for purely weight-loss purposes, you are very wrong. Though Kendo did drop my weight down by 5 pounds during the first 2 months (that shit is fucking brutal)
