Martial arts training in some ways is much like insurance. You hope you never need to use it, but you train for the 1% occurrence when you do. If you don't feel good about your training, you won't stay with it and you'll train somewhere else, just like changing insurance companies.
You misunderstood what I said, and I guess I didn't express it clearly. If you don't feel like your training is doing you any good, you will go train somewhere else and/or in something else. That's what I meant by how you feel about the training. My apologies for phrasing it poorly.
I agree, but ultimately, how you feel about it is completely disconnected from whether it works or not. How you feel about your training will have a lot more to do with customer service skills and effective marketing than anything related to martial arts.
It can be disconnected, but isn't always. For me, my evaluation of the effectiveness of what's taught has always been part of how I feel about it.
I disagree. Or, well, maybe it's more correct to say that I see this way of thinking as fraught with danger. It's great, until you are confronted by an external, objective measure of it's effectiveness.
Actually, some of those things do contribute to the effectiveness of the school for what you're looking for (though not necessarily for the stated purpose). In that situation, a parent will likely say they're looking for the techniques for fending off an attacker (and that's obviously part of it), but they're more concerned about the child's safety, and all the things that keep him from being bullied and keep him out of a fight will help with that. The parent will feel good about the result because it fits an unspoken need.
Noooooo... nooooooo. Come on. Features and benefits. It's like buying a house that doesn't have a roof, but saying, "Hey, it's got a basketball hoop already installed."
BS. Come on, man. You know this is BS. It's salesmanship. And the thing is, sure, the parent will feel good. That's my entire point. They'll feel good as long as there is no external feedback.
We're not as far apart on this as you think, Steve. My point was that there are often other needs that get met that we don't even realize go into our "feeling good" about our training (in my case, that included a sense of community, a sense of challenge, and some other stuff). That part admittedly doesn't have much to do with the overall effectiveness of the art for combat, but it does have to do with whether the art meets our needs.
That's all fine and good, my friend. But it's a red herring as my post was in response to Balrog's declaration that how one feels about their training is all that matters. If you're training for self defense, that can be a very misleading and potentially dangerous position to take.
Again, I don't think we're all that far apart. I'm good with this.
That's evidence it hurts. It's not really evidence of its ability to break, and that was my point when I mentioned destructions. I can practice any of the destructions to a point of pain, but I can't really verify the break (well, except by accident). There are times a painful lock is sufficient, and there are times it's not. A brown belt I trained with many years ago was a bouncer at a local bar. He came in one Monday and told us about a guy who stood up through a shoulder lock, ignoring the pain. It dislocated the guy's shoulder, as it should. He kept fighting, but the arm wasn't much use. Police suspected drugs were involved.
Sure. He hasn't practiced specific techniques for that, I think, but if he hits them hard enough or gets their arm in an appropriate lock, he'll be able to disarm them. Would he be more effective if he also had some specific techniques developed for that? Probably. By how much? Hard to say. It's a matter of percentages, rather than can/can't, IMO.
I realize most of us agree the best test of fighting ability is to actually fight someone. I'm referring to mma competition and various rule sets as the best mode of testing empty hand fighting ability and it seems that view gets a lot of push back. You guys keep bringing up physical limitations of practitioners, weapons, deadly joint destructions, situational awareness, feeling, and things that either can't be reasonably tested or don't pertain to fighting ability. We are talking about a reproduceable method to test fighting ability. Right now mma is the best we have. I realize fighting ability is only one component of self defense but I think it is important for those that choose to be able to test their fighting ability and those that claim proficiency in fighting should be able to prove this in some manner. Some schools and friends I know have different alive drills that are more removed from mma competition that still assess the same skills mma does but these are isolated instances and not widely available. What we need are standardized methods (like mma competitive ruleset) that test fighting ability from entry level to high level.
