I don't think I was clear enough in the post you're responding to, GB, so let me just amplify a few key points, in no particular order:
When I talk about the logic of the fight, I mean, the logic of the
fighting. And there definitely is a logic to that. Hikite in karate is a good example: given that you've just used one of your limbs to strike the attacker with, converting that striking limb into a
controlling limb—a punching hand into a gripping hand, e.g.—while the other hand initiates a new strike—is logical, given the premises of the situation: to incapacitate the attacker in the shortest possible time at minimum risk to yourself. Giving up a 'tempo', as they say in chess, creates the danger of the attacker recovering enough to recommence the attack; hence, the most efficient use of your resources requires that you keep the hand you just used to attack with in play to set up a new attack. Or in the face of a roundhouse punch, logic again dictates that you counter by going
inside, rather than outside, and that you close the distance, to take advantage of the attacker's defensive weakness in launching a large-radius punch. And so on. I'm talking about the biomechanical logic of attack and defense. I'm not talking about the rationality of the circumstances leading up to the combat, or your emotional state while you're involved in the fight; what I'm getting at is your ability to find the optimal move, optimal in an engineering sense, that either does maximum damage with minimum risk, or sets up the physical situation so that the continuation leads, as inevitably as possible, to your inflicting maximum damage with minimum risk on your attacker.
Right, but once again, I'm not talking about a large number of techniques. I've learned a relatively small number of techniques in the six years it took me to get to shodan, but a fight isn't a series of techniques against other techniques. It's a series of responses to a set of challenges, and those challenges can be any number of variants on a restricted set of nasty attacks. To get to the point where, no matter what your assailant does, you can see, and recognize, the openings you're getting and how to take advantage of them... that is going to take a much longer time than two years, unless you're training, under brutally noncompliant reality-based conditions, for five or six hours five or six times a week. And who does that, any more?
Two points here: first, the sparring side. If you want to use TMAs for self-defense, then you have to train under SD conditions, not sport-sparring conditions. And that means that you have to take on training in which your partners comes a good part of the way toward trying to seriously damage (and maybe kill) you. This has come up on another thread; just to save time,
this was something I posted earlier this year in a still different thread on the relevant notion of sparring. I just want to emphasize that none of this is original with me; the really brilliant, dedicated combat professionals at the British Combat Association, and their American cousins like Peyton Quinn, have been the pioneers this way of making the TMAs street-effective (as they once unquestionably were, way back when).
Second, technique creation. It's not a matter of creating techniques, but of recovering techniques that have been lost or hidden by design. Take an innocent looking down block: left fist to right ear, and then down. Simple....
not: that movement is identical to what you get with the following: (i) upward arcing elbow strike to the head, or a very forcibly imposed pin on the attacker's extended arm, after you've reversed his grab on your shirt and retracted your fist (still holding his ex-gripping hand) to forcibly extend his arm. Slamming that elbow into his extended arm above the elbow is a very nasty surprise arm-lock for him; (ii) forward/downward spearing elbow strike (to the face, maybe?) with the elbow that was just used in the upward elbow strike; (iii) followup hammerfist to the throat. Do those moves smoothly, in quick succession, display it to a bunch of karate or TKD students or instructors, and you will get that connected sequence of moves identified, 10 times out of 10, as a down block. Typically, 'basic' TMA moves have a lot more going on than meets the eye, and different possibilities can be profitably exploited
depending on the situation—but learning how to do so take a lot of time.
Every one of the common kihon techs can be decomposed in this way to reveal a wealth of really evilly brutal destructive techniques and
combinations of techniques. The point is, a relatively small number of techs can be combined in a very large number of ways. And because each situation is different, it's a very good idea to explore all the ways you can combine these techs, under severely noncompliant conditions with a good imitation of a pathologically aggressive attacker.
My guess is that to become really secure at this, really good, quick, at ease and confident, is going to take
way more than a couple of years. And I have no financial axe to grind here, GB: my instructor, who's a KKW-certified 5th dan, and I teach for free, twice a week. No one has made a dime from any of this, or wants to—and it still took me six years, and I don't feel it was even a little bit longer than it should have been. Different strokes, I suppose...
