mark "funny, they don't say a word when I go through security with my solid wood walking stick"
In the USA, that's an "assist device" and protected by Federal law. Not even the TSA can take it from you.
Same legal category as wheelchairs, crutches, canes, etc.
Why yes, that is a security loophole... and there's an entire subculture of "assist device" users taking maximum advantage of that.
]]>1) Marines in the US have hand to hand fight training, MCMAP, often called "Semper Fu.")
2) Iaido (drawning a sword and making a perfect cut in one motion) which is old Japanese stuff
So the motivations of practitioners are key here: there's very nearly no overlap between the reasons a person learns MCMAP vs Iaido. Context, content, as far apart as any two arts I could pick. I'm not going to characterize the contrast, but across that range of extremes come things like Karate, with MCMAP type motivations at one end (you're a cop who wants better brawling skills) and Iaido type motivations at the other (the Kata man, the Kata!)
Self defence as a motivation is almost certainly entirely irrational: defensive driving lessons and smoke detectors and EMT training and so on almost certainly offer statistically vastly more protection. There are a handful of professions which involve regular exposure to high risks of physical violence (police, bouncers etc.) and one can imagine fight training specific to each niche in additional to general skills training.
But, by god, there is something deep in the reptile brain, in the base of the spine, which says "I could take him" and it feels good. "I am not helpless. I am not afraid. I have options."
Martial arts might well be the cheapest and easiest way of creating that sense of empowerment for people, even if the training has very little impact on overall statistical mortality.
When I teach fighting (once in a couple of years I'll do a brief seminar for friends) I focus on four things.
1) understanding which fight you are in: escaping, status fighting, murder.
2) understanding and controlling distance.
3) do not fuck up your hands, and do not be too enthusiastic about kicking.
4) disengagement from early stage violence (i.e. recognizing a fight is starting, and identifying exit points like running away as soon as somebody physically pushes you.)
At the end of that, I guarantee I've added very nearly nothing to a person's ability to win a fight in ring against a determined opponent. But I have given them a sense of control, because usually they haven't thought enough about violence to be able to use their rational intelligence to strategize about it. Just having a few bits to hang on to really helps people feel more confident: when trouble starts they have a road map, even if all it really says is "run away now."
I think there's something deep in our animal soul that, for some of us, needs this as much as we need mountains and wilderness and sea shore.
]]>Yet actually, as I play with the analogy in my head, I want to say that at least in the creative writing classes the students are doing actual writing. So there's that crumb of comfort.
]]>None of my teachers have claimed that my art (capoeira) will let you win a real fight. In fact, they make a point of discussing what happens when an outright brawl breaks out in the roda, that we are practicing an activity with rules that are absent in real fights. The biggest claim I've heard is that you might be better equipped to dodge a blow or fall without hurting yourself. And capoeira has been used in street fighting - of course, back in that day, they were also doing it with razor blades.
I know students who came to capoeira looking to learn to fight, yes, but that mindset was always quickly discouraged.
]]>No. The cheapest and easiest is carrying an effective weapon.
]]>I played capoeira (badly) back when I was in college, and I'd say that it's actually great for fighting in a couple of unobvious ways. One is that capoeira plays in the space between game and fight. If you've noticed, most martial arts are about how you'll handle yourself once the fists are flying at you, capoeira's about reading the signals and (very importantly) improvising on the spot, all the time. I'm also more fond of the way capoeira handles ground work than, say, aikido, because you go down, keep moving, and get right back up again. Don't get me wrong, breakfalls are important, but in most martial arts, that's the end of the sequence. In capoeira, you better keep moving if you're on the ground, or you'll look like an idiot in the roda. There's also something very useful about the trickery in capoeira--a skilled capoeirista is a tricky rogue, not an honorable, stand-up warrior, and it's a martial art where embarrassing someone without hurting them (say by tripping them) is considered better art (and more fun) than beating them bloody.
Finally, capoeira's got this neat trait that it's a performance art. You've got something to aspire to be good at even if you don't want to fight. It helps that it has some of the most powerful kicks on the planet, but when they're used for spectacular show, who cares about how dangerous they are? Jogo bonito!
]]>students who came to capoeira looking to learn to fight, yes, but that mindset was always quickly discouraged.
I've been having Tae Kwon Leep flashbacks all through this thread...
]]>But there's one set of techniques that you are very good at indeed, and rarely think about or even realise that you know: breakfalls.
Glad someone mentioned it, if only because I managed to have all of my teeth broken (either chipped or cracked) by one badly executed breakfall (mainly because the person throwing me was a newbie who got distracted during his first class and he forgot to let go at a crucial point in the throw; conservation of angular momentum is a right pain in the enamel at times).
I didn't study aikido for very long - four or five years, just long enough to learn how to hurt myself in new and interesting ways - but I never thought that what was taught in the dojo would be used in a fight outside the dojo, and that point got stressed a lot in training by the instructors.
To be honest, it's the breakfalls that I value most from the few years I spent training (if only because I probably paid the most for them). As our teacher put it, you're very unlikely to ever use kote-gaeshi outside of a dojo, but knowing how to breakfall will save you from a broken hip or worse when you slip on ice on the pavement at age seventy. And he was right, though I didn't have to wait for age seventy to find out; I managed to step in shampoo walking out of the shower in the gym after one class and I can distinctly remember seeing both feet with the far wall under them and thinking "this is not going to end well" then hearing someone do a breakfall and realising a few seconds later that it was me and I still had an intact spine, which I personally enjoy having.
Plus, learning the breakfall for kote-gaeshi is a hell of a confidence booster - all the other breakfalls look almost normal (how hard is it to pretend to be a hamster tripping up mid-trot?), but the breakfall for kote-gaeshi - the proper, full-speed, rotate-around-a-point-three-feet-off-the-ground, breakfall - that just looks utterly impossible right up to a point about a tenth of a second after your aikido teacher decides you're not going to do it yourself and shoves you through it for the first time. That was nearly twenty years ago for me, and I can still close my eyes and hear the "oh shiiiiislap" noise and see a few of the higher grades grinning along. The utter bastards.
For me, that was the entire point of studying aikido - I didn't want to learn to win a street fight because frankly, I never really wanted to get into one and that's what running away is for. I sure as hell didn't want to get "combat training", because (a) guns, (b) drones, and (c) ICBMs. Learning how to punch hard sortof stopped being how you won in combat a while back. Training for me was about learning to move (something puberty tends to swipe from most boys for a few years), learning not to hurt myself if I fell, boosting confidence and having fun. And the gi looked a damn sight less silly than a leotard, so it beat gymnastics quite easily...
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