Makavilli--Whoa, hang on a second there! TMAs work fine in real combat. Just ask the Korean Marines who decimated a much larger force of North Vietnamese infantry at the Battle of Tra Binh Dong in possibly the bloodiest hand-to-hand combat of any modern war (an account of which appears in the U.S. Marine Corp Gazette, reproduced in Stuart Anslow's new book on combat applications of ITF TKD forms). Those ROK Marines were trained in military combat applications of TKD in the form set forth by Gen. Choi, which included unarmed defense techniques against bayonet attacks and knife attacks, among other things. The Black Tigers were considered the most fearsome agency of the ROK military during the Korean war. They learned the ITF patterns and their combat applications, and inflicted tremendous damage on the North Koreans, fighting behind the NK lines in many cases. No one is saying you apply these poomsae moves literally---like the kata in karate, you need to know how to read them, because they were deliberately disguised. How many people who learn a chamber as part of a down block are taught that that chambering movement may correspond to an elbow strike to the assailant's head, or an arm bar strike on an attacker's grabbing arm trapped by the so-called `chamber' of the `retracting hand', which is retracting not to power up a punch, but as part of a hold on the attacker's trapped wrist? Or that the `down block' motion itself isn't a block, but a strike on the trapped arm, or the carotid sinus, or part of a throw imposed by imposing pressue on the attacker's throat while his arm is trapped? You are saying that these moves are ineffective?
By your reasoning, if you hand a Glock 9 to someone for self-defense purposes who's never used a pistol, and that person comes under deadly attack, starts shooting wildly and panics, you are allowed to conclude from that that the Glock is an ineffective weapon. Because you start off talking about TMAs and suddenly switch to problems with training the techniques which TMAs comprise. But those are two different things, just as the effectiveness of a Glock 9 and someone's ability to apply that potential effectiveness are different things. You cannot justify a claim about the inherent effectiveness of any given art---TMA, MMA or anything else---based on traning practice. Because the same art can be trained effectively or ineffectively. Do you want to say that if those TMAs are trained effectively, they still aren't any use in a make-or-break combat situation? Think you could convince those ROK Marines that their TMA was useless because of the `complex and complicated moves' in ITF poomsae?
You mean, training for real combat, using a training protocol which aims specifically at working with the adrenal shock wave using the toolkit of fighting techniques for some TMA (the way Iain Abernethy trains combat-effective apps of traditinal karate, say), will be less effective than training BJJ or whatever using the same protocol? Can you give some evidence for this claim?
