Words you never thought you'd see....
We hear a lot about TMA being full.of impractical, flowery, unrealistic and straight BS techniques and methods.
For this thread I'd like to try to list them and the problems with them and yes, if anyone can actually use said bs techniques the defence of them would also be good.
I think this is a very interesting idea, but would approach it slightly differently. I think an objective evaluation of skills is a really good idea. But assessing skills is different than assessing techniques.
So, in this exercise, to evaluate whether they are impractical or unrealistic (or straight BS), you need to look at the skills that they are intended to build, and first evaluate whether they build the intended skill, and then evaluate whether that skill is practical or realistic.
For example, shrimping is a technique in BJJ. It looks funny, but is an essential skill used to create space between you and a fatso who is on top of you crushing your diaphragm. Does the training model build this skill? Yes. We can see it in isolation, in the drills, and we can also see it in application, when all manner of people apply this technique to create space, move a fatso who is on top of them, and improve their position. And now that we can see the skills in application, we can evaluate their practicality. I'd say shrimping is a very practical skill.
What about inverted or upside down guard? Does the training build the skill? Yes. We can see it in isolation in training, and we can also see it in application. Is it practical for self defense? Errr.... maybe not. The key, though, is that we can evaluate the practicality because people can actually do it "for real." We can see it in action and then evaluate the pros and cons.
This is where we things get dicey and where I get on my bandwagon. You can't even get to the point of evaluating techniques in many programs, because the styles eschew any kind of application. Or said in a less negative way, if I look at a video of techniques taught in, say, the Wushu video above, I can only objectively evaluate what I am seeing. I see people who are athletic, well coordinated, and well trained. They can demonstrate the bejeesus out of those things. So, does the training build fighting skill? Well, I don't know. Skills, for sure, as you don't perform the kinds of acrobatic demonstrations that they do without a lot of skill. But fighting skill? I don't see any fighting in these demonstrations.
In the end, training is both a micro and a macro issue. We can evaluate a individual's contribution to training through their individual success or failure. But we can only evaluate training models on a large scale, looking at larger trends and making decisions about what works and what doesn't on the basis of concrete results. And we see that styles where people compete produce reliable results (whether they are practical for another application or not).
). It doesn’t look much different in that regard than wrestling, which I did quite a bit of.
