Karate to the rescue

[exile]

I want to shift the focus for a second to something very striking...um, so to speak... in the article interview with this young chap. He says that he wasn't discomposed by facing a bunch of guys with tire irons because, at his dojo, he regularly trains by facing mulitple adult opponents:

I wasn't really scared at all because when I train in my classes I fight against six or seven adults at the same time...

I find this fairly astonishing. Let's assume that what he says is literally true—that his dojo training really does provide for seven adults to attack him at the same time... but those adults are very likely unarmed even with simulated weapons, and he knows that they aren't going to kill him if they get him down on the ground. Here you have a number of probably extremely hostile guys, big guys by his description, armed with the 20th c. equivalent of the mace, the weapon that made chain mail obsolete. There probably isn't a hell of a lot of technique transfer between the dojo situation and what he was facing at the mall that day...

And doesn't it seem weird for that kind of imbalance of forces to be part of regular dojo practice?

The story is a little perplexing in these respects, I have to say...

 

[Em MacIntosh]

I have to agree. Even training against multiple attackers in the dojo is still just theory. You can train it but aplication is really having to use it.