Whether you think that style bashing is offensive or a moral imperative, the fact remains that this forum has rules which forbid it. Those rules were put in place so that practitioners of different styles could have friendly conversations without every discussion devolving into repeated iterations of "your style sucks" "no,
your style sucks!" Everyone posting here had to agree to those rules in order to create an account. If your conscience won't allow you to refrain from style bashing, their are other forums devoted to that sort of discourse.
If you are actually concerned about saving students from being misled by "fraudulent" instruction, then you need to think about how to do that effectively.
Let's pretend for a minute that you are the ultimate expert in combative effectiveness and can rate with perfect accuracy the quality of a given martial art or instructor. Let's say that you are talking to a student of WWMA (Worlds Worst Martial Art) and you want to convince him that he is going down the wrong path.
You:
WWMA sucks. It's totally ineffective. You'll get killed if you ever try to use that on the street.
WWMA Student:
Nonsense. It's the best art around. My teacher is amazing. He tells me that your training is what sucks.
At the end of the conversation, have you saved anyone from ineffective training? Nope. The person you are talking to has absolutely no reason to accept your evaluation of his art over his own.
That's even if you are 100% objectively correct.
Someone who is really devoted to learning and progressing will always keep open the possibility that their judgment is not always 100% correct.
I've been training martial arts for 36 years. I have a black belt in BJJ, an instructor's license in Muay Thai, some assorted ranks in other arts, and a fair amount of experience training with a wide variety of representatives of different systems. I regularly discover useful concepts, techniques, and training methods from other systems - even when I personally consider those systems to have significant flaws.
So - how do you effectively influence others when you have strong opinions about what works and you want to help people avoid going down the wrong path? I can understand the urge. I often see examples of training which I consider to range from suboptimal to downright useless or counterproductive. There's definitely a temptation to say "
for crying out loud, stop that crap," but doing so is unlikely to convince anyone of anything.
Here are my general guidelines for offering criticism:
- Wait until feedback is asked for. If someone isn't in the market for critique, they are unlikely to listen to it.
- Ask questions to understand the purpose of a given training method. Sometimes you'll see something that looks completely wrong from a combative perspective, but fail to realize that it's intended to build a particular attribute or isolate a certain skill and it's not intended to represent anything directly combative. Other times it might actually be combatively effective, but only in a specific context which you aren't familiar with.
- Keep criticisms specific and concrete and constructive. "Your art sucks" is unlikely to get a helpful response. "I notice that in this drill uke is feeding a punch from too far away. This changes the timing and angling needed by the partner responding to the attack and will likely lead to bad habits" is more likely to start a productive conversation.
- Be open about your qualifications for offering a given critique. If I were to say that a certain mount escape being presented is low percentage then I can say that is based on my experience as a BJJ black belt who has spent thousands of hours doing live grappling on the ground with partners having a huge range of body types, experience levels, and martial arts backgrounds. If I were to say a certain sword fighting technique is questionable, then my level of confidence and authority would be much lower, because my experience with swords is much more limited than my grappling experience.
- Be polite and respectful and listen with an open mind. People are much more likely to listen to you respectfully when you listen to them respectfully.
