Martial arts these days are kind of funny. There’s three broad groups you’ll find each with it’s own peculiar quirks.
You have the old school, traditional martial arts (TMA) for whom preserving and passing on a complete way of life is important. Forms, etiquette and rank tend to feature highly as do making your moves look so nice.
You get combat sports, like mixed martial arts, kick boxing and Olympic style tae kwon do which generally do a great job for your conditioning but within the rules of the sport.
Then you have the ‘reality based’ purely real world combat oriented stuff that typically strips out as much as possible that doesn’t do the job leaving you with a much smaller toolkit of more generally useful moves.
So the question everyone wants to know is how do you really know how useful your art or sport is actually going to be in a really violent situation? What kinds of combat systems work the best in the real world?
First up, you can either learn from own experience or from others. When the experience required involves being punched in the face lots, I’m happy to let specific others figure out what works best!
Short of actually having lots of bar brawls, indulging in gang warfare or joining the military yourself you’ll need to do some homework from people who’ve been there, on either side of the fence.
Get online and watch some real combat footage. Find video or CCTV footage of prison riots, bar brawls and general drunken mayhem.
Notice what kind of moves are getting used the most. Notice who wins. Is it the person who hits first? Is it the person who tries a fancy kick? Is it always the bigger attacker. What happens once the first couple of shots land?
Now notice how the emergency rooms around the world are full of people who ended up there at the hands of completely untrained people.
Does any of this look like the way most people train in their martial art?
What you’ll probably notice is that the primary quality needed to ‘win’ is a level of comfort with being extremely violent and doing unpleasant things to another human being. Turning ‘Mr Nice’ off entirely for the duration is step one.
Most persistent violent criminals have no ‘Mr. Nice’ to turn off so the very fact that you’re a halfway decent human being is the first handicap to overcome. This might sound bleak and that’s because it is.
There’s some interesting research on what happens to brain development in physically abused children – beat a kid lots growing up and their tolerance for violence, pain thresholds and arousal levels gets hard wired in on a much higher setting than any ‘well adjusted’ individual.
Step two is to isolate the physical striking skills that you can deliver with the most power, speed, reliability and least damage to yourself in the process.
Grappling and kicking is great if you’ve already invested a lot of time in being really good at it but neither rolling around on the ground or balancing on one leg are good tactical moves when there’s more than likely several other people trying to take a pop at you.
Think gross motor skills that are easy to remember under pressure. Straight head shots, elbows and hammer fist blows. Basic knees and kicks as people go down. Basic covers to soak incoming shots as best you can but only for the briefest moment it takes you to resume the offensive. Keep your toolkit simple, small and flexible.
Step three is to pressure test your responses so that under duress, exhaustion and obstacles your mindset is constantly on attack, attack, attack. The only reason to block is because the target is still standing!
Once you’ve got these basics firmly drilled in, then you can expand back into more sophisticated concepts once you have build a better game plan, making your basics more and more powerful rather than more thinly spread.
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From Michael Campbell and SuperHumanSecrets.com
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