Bullshido Video Analyses

[JowGaWolf]

I am just being honest

And I appreciate it. Life is too short not to be honest. Say what's on your mind within reason and the worst thing that will happen will be that people understand who you are. Which is better than people not understanding you at all. Be true to yourself.

 

[Mider]

What I meant by my statement is that. The comments that were made were mostly about the restraint and how it wasn't applied realistically. It appears that no one had issues with the rest of it.

My only issue is the accuracy of that attack that is being defended against.. I've just seen how a low quality attack or an inaccurate one can lead to misconceptions of what is possible.

This is one of the risk that everyone has when doing demos. No one is immune from it.

It depends on the officer I think, getting someone cuffed who is resisting is likely very difficult.

You may like this channel https://www.youtube.com/@bjjcop8038/videos

very good stuff

 

[jks9199]

Went through one of those Hospital SD programs....I was security there, it given by a nun. Never knew it took 5 people to take one person down before. on on each arm, one for each leg, and one to cradle their head so they didn't hit their head when they fell

She taught a way to get out of a from behind choke hold that got you behind the person with an arm lock. Then push the person away..... at that point I had all I could stands and I couldn't stands no more... I said.. "Sister, if I get a violent person in an arm lock like that I'm riding that sucker all the way to the wall, I'm sure the heck not going to let him go to attack me again" And yes, I did actually say heck.

And don't get me started on the SD for a hair grab they taught

That five-point technique, with a practiced team, can be very effective for restraining someone with minimal injury to them -- assuming it was taught right. It minimizes people getting in each other's way, and gives effective control over the UNARMED subject. Don't use it with armed subjects... and the team HAS TO be able to communicate effectively with each other. It eliminates the "pig pile" where everyone is working at cross purposes to each other. It's used in many jails, too.

 

[jks9199]

It depends on the officer I think, getting someone cuffed who is resisting is likely very difficult.

I generally liken it to dressing a toddler who doesn't want to get dressed... and is fully grown.

The challenge is to restrain them without hurting them, while they don't feel any compulsion about hurting you... And it's not nearly as easy as people think.

 

[Xue Sheng]

That five-point technique, with a practiced team, can be very effective for restraining someone with minimal injury to them -- assuming it was taught right. It minimizes people getting in each other's way, and gives effective control over the UNARMED subject. Don't use it with armed subjects... and the team HAS TO be able to communicate effectively with each other. It eliminates the "pig pile" where everyone is working at cross purposes to each other. It's used in many jails, too.

I don't doubt it, if trained right, it wasn't. For one thing, experience made me seriously doubt that the person the 5 are going to apply this to would be as compliant as they wanted the person to be restrained in the class. That and part of that training was you need to call the other 4 people to help you, when the person was already an issue. I was security, alone, and dealt with situations that did not give me the time to call others and then wait for them to show up, get in position and gently (and yes gently was used in class) take them to the floor.

 

[Mider]

I generally liken it to dressing a toddler who doesn't want to get dressed... and is fully grown.

The challenge is to restrain them without hurting them, while they don't feel any compulsion about hurting you... And it's not nearly as easy as people think.

I don’t think that’s a fair comparison as a cop can tase a resisting person and at times strike them

 

[Kung Fu Wang]

I'll do a bit differently. I'll

- move my leading leg back first.
- uses 2 hands to push down his neck.

In 1983 US SC tournament in Columbus Ohio, during the championship fight, my opponent was a wrestler from the Ohio state University wrestling team. He shot in at me 2 times. I took him down on both rounds within 8 seconds. That was the easiest rounds that I ever had in my tournament years. I don't like to win in tournament by playing defense only, but both rounds just finished so quickly.



My SC teacher used this move in his tournament too.

 

[HighKick]

I'll do a bit differently. I'll

- move my leading leg back first.
- uses 2 hands to push down his neck.

In 1983 US SC tournament in Columbus Ohio, during the championship fight, my opponent was a wrestler from the Ohio state University wrestling team. He shot in at me 2 times. I took him down on both rounds within 8 seconds. That was the easiest rounds that I ever had in my tournament years. I don't like to win in tournament by playing defense only, but both rounds just finished so quickly.



My SC teacher used this move in his tournament too.

View attachment 29913

I am not certain where the move was first derived, but that is a common wrestlers up-fighting defensive move. Control the head and you control the body. In wrestling, you have to maintain control while going to the ground.

 

[Gerry Seymour]

There's certainly plenty of bad technique being taught out there. Rather than just pointing and laughing, it might be more instructive to break down how this technique might have been created, what it gets right, and how it went wrong.

So ... the idea behind the technique being shown is actually a useful principle to understand. Leaving aside for a moment the faulty understanding of cuffing technique, the person doing the demo has their arms bent behind them, with upward pressure being applied to their wrists at right angles to their upper arms. This gives the person holding them a mechanical advantage. Not a huge advantage, given that the arms aren't fully bent, but enough that the defender probably can't force their arms straight without possessing superior strength. If only one arm was held, then the defender could rotate their body to change the angle of force, but with both arms being held, that isn't an option. So by jumping upwards, the defender is able to straighten their arm without fighting directly against the attacker's force. Once their arm is straight, then the attacker's upwards force is now travelling along the length of the arm rather than coming in at right angles to a bent arm and offers no mechanical advantage, making it easy to break free. This concept - moving in an unrestricted direction to change the angle of a limb so that it isn't vulnerable to control - is very useful in escaping submissions.

No, where it went wrong ...

Firstly, there's the lack of understanding of how cuffing procedure works. I've never worked in law enforcement, so I'm certainly no expert. But the way the attacker is holding the defender in this video doesn't seem particularly conducive to effectively handcuffing either a compliant or a resisting suspect. (Here, I started to speculate, then decided it would be smarter to just search YouTube for instruction in proper LEO handcuffing methods. Sure enough, none of them show anything like what the attacker using in the video and the demonstrated technique would be irrelevant or ineffective for any of them.)

Secondly, even if we leave aside the stated "resisting arrest" scenario, the demo fails to take into account what could happen if the attacker doesn't just stand there statically. If as the defender jumps upwards, the attacker raises their wrists to follow, then gravity will put the defender in a much deeper double hammerlock position and possibly injure them as they come back down.

Thirdly, putting aside any arguments about the ethics of resisting arrest, the real world practicalities are that it rarely leads to improved outcomes for the person resisting. Possible results can range anywhere from being dogpiled and handcuffed in a much more painful way all the way to being shot dead. (In fairness, the video only shows a clip of the technique without explanation. It's possible that the instructor was actually just trying to demo a technique for escaping a poorly executed double hammerlock and whoever posted it to Facebook added the "resist arrest" headline as clickbait.)

So, what do we have? We have a legitimately useful physical principle (probably learned via techniques which have actually been properly tested) being creatively applied to a novel context, but without any attempt to investigate the realities of that particular situation or testing to see what flaws the new technique might have against a resisting opponent. That describes ... well, rather a lot of the bad techniques I see being taught by instructors who have some legitimate skills in other areas.

I think this is a great example of a technique being practiced without sufficient attention to "failure mode". By that I mean that part of the value of a technique is inverse to how bad it gets if you fail. In this one, as you point out, there's a very easy (even accidental) counter that makes the technique produce a significantly worse outcome. If the potential payoff were huge, it might be worth it in certain circumstances, but there are other - less risky - methods for dealing with that double-grip at that point, since it isn't set all that well yet.

For clarity, the point of this examination of failure mode is to help rule out techniques that have too much risk if they fail, as well as sort of "ruling in" techniques that may not be very high percentage, but which don't produce much negative (and might even produce some positive) when they do fail. A jab is a good example of the latter - you don't need it to connect all that often, because it a) doesn't create a big negative, and b) might even create a positive (flinch, move of guard, etc.) when it doesn't connect.

 

[Gerry Seymour]

I don't think this one is bullshido. Any technique can be disrupted by a resisting opponent if you don't time it correctly.

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Some folks will call anything "bullshido" they don't agree with, or don't like the setting of. I think this is a poor choice of techniques, but in the situation set out in the actual demo (poorly set double rear grip) it would work if timed properly and not countered well.

 

[Gerry Seymour]

Oh, I certainly wouldn't want to try learning (or teaching) the underlying concept from such a fundamentally flawed technique. But I find it interesting to do a forensic breakdown and figure out how someone came up with the idea in the first place.

I also find it instructive to note that the same pattern comes up repeatedly:

1) Practitioner learns some legitimate concepts (often through the vehicle of existing techniques which are functional at least in a certain context).
2) Practitioner tries to apply those concepts to a novel situation, not taking the time to learn the relevant differences in the new context. (Often including the way that certain attacks are actually performed.)
3) Practitioner fails to test the new application against competent resisting opponents.
4) Practitioner gains unwarranted confidence in a technique which may range anywhere from suboptimal to complete garbage.
5) Practitioner teaches the new technique to students who have no frame of reference to judge its practicality.
6) Some students accept what they have been taught on faith and resist any suggestion that their teacher may have given them flawed material.
7) Other students eventually recognize that not all of what they have been taught is functional and (assuming they don't just throw the baby out with the bathwater and go train something else) are faced with the challenge of going back through their lessons to figure out what elements are practical in the right context, what that context might be, which techniques are functional, which are useful just for training certain attributes or concepts, which need to be tweaked, and which need to be thrown out entirely.

This isn't the only way that martial arts and martial artists can get off track, but it's definitely a common path.

Agreed. Some of my best "light bulb moments" during training came when I saw someone do something that I just didn't think was a good choice. Analyzing it to figure out why I had that reaction to it usually led me to a better grasp of a fundamental concept (like what I call "failure mode").

 

[Gerry Seymour]

Eh, it needs some tweaking to have a reasonable chance of success against anyone who isn't completely asleep at the wheel. But it's more fixable than the technique in your original post.

Yeah, one big problem in that video is that the counter is nearly full-speed and highly committed, while the demonstrated technique is like 1/4 speed (and low commitment). We tend to complain vociferously when the reverse is true, and should be as annoyed with it here.

 

[Gerry Seymour]

I really don't like #7. It's the easy way out. Why train a system if the answer to every road block is to train a different system. Totally nuts and irritating to me. I would even go as far as to says that #7 occurs much earlier on in your list. Like right after#3 lol

I don't think Tony said anything about having to train in another system, unless I've misread it. What he's talking about is the same thing I did going back through NGA when I left my instructor's school. I spent years going back through the foundational curriculum to figure out what purpose each part served in training. I added new techniques to my primary curriculum to fill in where instructors had been trying to force modern application from techniques I feel have little (but are still important for training specific concepts). There are even a few techniuqes I'd have eventually stopped teaching entirely, if I'd built enough of a student (and instructor) base that it didn't seem necessary to keep a close connection with the mainline curriculum.

 

[Gerry Seymour]

I can think of much better ways to deal with that arm.
1. Don't try move it back "That's such a long way. The shorter route would be to simply grab the opponent's pressing hand with the same hand he's using. If my opponent presses with the right hand, then I want to use my right hand. If my opponent presses with the left hand then I want to use my right left hand."

In the video. He should use the hand he's waving with to seize the pressing hand. Then twist that hand towards the opponent's center by using grip strength and the torso to twist to the right (towards the opponent's center.) This forces the opponent to punch or attack across his body.

The way that is shown in the video has too many variables. Especially since somehow, he goes from wrist control to thumb control with the lock. For me personally I can twist that wrist faster than I can move to the side of my opponent. Not for me. It definitely not my first choice when there are faster and quicker ways to handle that type of "attack"

I don't think there's a strong "should" to be applied about which arm should be used here. The advantage of using the same-side arm (mirror image, so left responding to right) is that you have the other available to respond to your opponent's free arm. The bigger issue to me is that there's no obvious change to the attacker's structure - just moving that arm. That leaves him the abilty to quickly and fully counter-attack, and there's no adjustment to the demonstrator's structure to defend against that likely counter.

 

[Gerry Seymour]

Please forgive the movie pun but number seven was magnificent. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

And you never should.

 

[JowGaWolf]

I don't think Tony said anything about having to train in another system, unless I've misread it. What he's talking about is the same thing

I was just sharing what I usually see when people get to #7

 

[Kung Fu Wang]

7) Other students eventually recognize that not all of what they have been taught is functional and (assuming they don't just throw the baby out with the bathwater and go train something else) are faced with the challenge of going back through their lessons to figure out what elements are practical in the right context, what that context might be, which techniques are functional, which are useful just for training certain attributes or concepts, which need to be tweaked, and which need to be thrown out entirely.

Sometime students may try to make a technique work when that technique is used to develop foundation.

For example, in long fist, there is a move that exist in many forms. You kick and punch at the same time. In reality, if the distance is suitable for kick, the distance may not suitable for punch (or the other way around). IMO, this move is used to develop body flexibility and balance. It's not used for combat.



There should be an 8th concern. That is the teacher may not teach the "key point" to a student.

For example, when you apply a head lock on your opponent, if your elbow is not pointing straight down to the ground, that mean your opponent's head is not twisted enough. Your head lock may not work. Most of the time, even if a student may understand the key point, but his "ability" has not been fully developed yet, his strength is not strong enough to twist his opponent's head that way.

Example of bad head lock.

 

[Kung Fu Wang]

I think this is a great example of a technique being practiced without sufficient attention to "failure mode".

If you spar/wrestle 10,000 rounds, whether a technique should work or not, you should have a good idea.

If you spar/wrestle 15 rounds daily, it only takes you 2 years of your lifetime to develop your combat skills.

10,000 / 15 = 666.66 days

If a round lasts for 3 minutes, 15 rounds only take 45 minutes.