Reality fighter by Loren W Christensen -

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Hello, The November issue of Black belt magazine (2006). The interview article with Loren W Christensen really explains about fighting for REAL.(page 80)

Many of us have his books and videos and he really shows/tell us about REAL SELF-DEFENSE that works on the streets of today.

Please if you get a chance to read the article, I think it will open up your world? about the way you train! Do you practice for the street style fighting where most of us could be in?

In my opinion, he is one of the few who practices,teaches,preaches, REAL self-defense of fighing for the modern world of today.

Check his opinions on Kata's too....you may find yourself agreeing?

He makes very real sense here.......Aloha
 

exile

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In my opinion, he is one of the few who practices,teaches,preaches, REAL self-defense of fighing for the modern world of today...Check his opinions on Kata's too....you may find yourself agreeing?

Loren C. is the real deal. An LEO with many years of street combat experience and a refreshingly `low-ego' way of presenting his views. I've always found his discussions of MA technique and training to make terrific sense.
 

searcher

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A real class act. The guy has tackled some issues in training that nobody else has.
 

Drac

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Read the article and I LOVED it...
 
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Hello, Ever since I started training....One knows the olds ways take alot of time to learn to be effective. Many times you wonder about some of the techniques and Kata's...Why? and does it work for real self-defense.

Loren W christensen makes you realize there are other ways to train to fight back.

As you view the many different arts systems, You realize many things are out of date, Certain things that is practice "Makes no sense to real fighting".

Today most people have a limited amount of time to train and learn...If the old lady can poke your eye and hit you with her purse and survives the attack and lives to tell the police....Why do we train the way we do...and old lady stuffs works and she has no training.

One will find the more you read about Lorens theories /thoughs the more you want to learn things you can use NOW....Aloha
 

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Hello, Ever since I started training....One knows the olds ways take alot of time to learn to be effective... you want to learn things you can use NOW....Aloha

One thing I've come to believe is that it shouldn't take four years to train someone to be a competent fighter. If the techniques are too complex to get down pat in a couple of months (say, 12 weeks) then I would argue that there is needless complexity involved.

Obviously, the speed at which a student learns is directly related to the abilities and amount of effort invested by them, but even then I often feel that schools needlessly drag out the training time.

Having said that, a student can only progress in skill over time, and experience always counts for something.
 

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Obviously, the speed at which a student learns is directly related to the abilities and amount of effort invested by them, but even then I often feel that schools needlessly drag out the training time.

Having said that, a student can only progress in skill over time, and experience always counts for something.

This is true and points to something else that's important about LC's ideas. He has, in other stuff that he's written (Fighter's Fact Book, e.g.) pointed out that it's important to understand the katas in karate in terms of the effective techniques they record. Katas are all about self defense, once their bunkai are correctly understood, and Christensen is part of that group of karatekas and, increasingly, Taekwandoists who do a lot of research extracting the simple, effective fighting moves from the patters those MAs teach. The complexity of the moves isn't in the patterns, it's in the technical (over?)elaboration that has come into these arts as a result of their increasingly exclusive sports orientation.

TKD is a good example of this because it's best known for its elaborate kicks. But if you look at the hyungs, not just for colored belt but for black belt too, within say KKW-style TKD, what you see are actually very simple kicks---and not many of them, either! Koryo, for example, has 30 moves, of which fewer than a third are kicks, and those kicks are the simplest and most street-effective ones---low and middle side kicks and mid front kicks. Ji Tae, a more advanced form, has 28 moves, only five of which are kicks---again, just basic front and side kicks. No 360 crescents, no gyros, just basic stable stuff you can use as effective finishing strikes. The emphasis in all the TKD hyungs is on hand techniques---elbow strikes, strikes to the groin and throat strikes (disguised as down and rising blocks respectively) and throws (camoflaged as basic punch-block sequences and weight changes in stances) and so on---stuff that if you train it right, will work in a real fight.

But Adept's point is critical here---to make those movements automatic, to really grind them into your neural programming so they become reflexive, takes a long time. It may not take a long time to present an effective skill set, but it's going take a long time before the practitioner will really `own' that skill set as a wired-in pattern of reactions to physical threats---a pattern that kicks in automatically as soon as it's clear there's imminent major danger.

The TMAs have got a ton of good stuff in them, and LWC is well aware of that, as his other writings show. But---as a zillion people on all kinds of different forums here have said before---it all comes down to whether, and how, you train that good stuff, and LC's main point is that many people need to make their training style much more realistic, if they want it to be effective for self-defense.
 
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Hello, All you need is a few techniques that works for you, Knowing where to strike, and when to strike. The right mind set to fight back!

Most real fights is just punches and a few kicks....

NO one fights like Kata's movements, and in those slow paces. Real fighting is fast,furious,always changing,lots of moving around too. Ending quickly...usually the first guy attacking will have the advantages! Especially when the other guy is not prepare for a attack.

Just my thoughts,...still think..learning to fight back should be more realistic.......DO our training reflects that? Does yours prepare you for the "street fight"....anything goes...biting and all....Aloha
 

exile

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NO one fights like Kata's movements, and in those slow paces. Real fighting is fast,furious,always changing,lots of moving around too. Ending quickly...usually the first guy attacking will have the advantages! Especially when the other guy is not prepare for a attack.

Those are exactly the techniques that are implicit in the katas, in the analyses of them by people like Iain Abernethy, Patrick McCarthy and Javier Martinez. Do you think Matsumura and Itosu, the guys who guarded the King of Okinawa with their bare hands and feet, were recording slow-paced moves when they constructed katas like Chinto and the Pinans? Take a look at the two- and three- move defense sequences that Abernethy shows in Bunkai Jutsu or in Throws for Strikers and you'll see that every single move in the katas is, as he says, intended to end the fight right now, with the assailant on the ground unable to move, maybe forever. Itosu said upfront, when he created the Pinans and other kata for the Okinawan schools to use, that the block-punch-kick interpretatations he was providing for the school children weren't the true interpretations, that if you want to do real karate you had to use the `deep' interpretation, which was brutul, nasty and proven by his own experience and that of people like Matusumura, who never lost a fight in his long career, Chotuko Kyan and Chojun Miyagi. These were the people who gave us the basic forms of the katas we have today, and for them the katas were the faithful record of their fighting art.

There is a lot of work, by some very formidable fighters out there now---Abernethy is just one of a number of combat experts in the UK working on the fighting techniques encoded in karates kata and TKD's hyungs. Take a look at any of Abernethy's books (or some of his DVDs) on the street applications of kata bunkai, and you'll get a very different picture of just what those moves in kata that you think you're seeing really are. Don't jump to conclusions about what the katas have to tell you about `all-in' fighting until you've at least looked at the work that these people have devoted decades of research and experiment to in their own dojos and dojangs.
 

Cirdan

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One of my favourite chinese sayings goes like this: train slowly, learn quickly. Kata need to be approached with this in mind. Also IMHO the Katas most valuable lesson are the principles rather than the techniques. However if a person`s goal is only to learn to defend himself on "tha str33t" in a short time, he`d be better off taking up boxing instead of a more traditional art.

Another of my favourite sayings is this by Ohtsuka: The difference betwen the possible and the impossible lies only in your will. The old martial artists were not ignorant of reality. They too knew that your will rather than your technique is what will save your life. :uhohh: :angry:
 

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