What does your art do poorly?

[Blindside]

Tellner these are the disadvantages. Because Cuong Nhu teaches as much material as it does it takes a long time to progress in rank. This limits how many qualified instructors there are, and limits availabitly. Because of the length between tests the process is kinda annonying. is that better? or am i still "self-congratulatory"?

The topic is "what is the weakness," rank isn't a weakness it is a unrelatable measure of skill. Do you really think your art addresses everything equally well?

Now if you had said "my art focuses on so many things, we are jack-of-all-trades, master of none" maybe you could consider that a weakness. But that isn't what you said.

Lamont

 

[tellner]

I'm afraid I still see it that way (a tad self-congratulatory). As I said, no art is great or even good at everything. All I'm seeing here on this one is "We're great at everything. The only problem is there's so much to learn and you have to work so hard."

Those may well be the biggest problems you see, but please, we all like what we do. Everything anyone here does is We all understand that nothing has everything. What are the holes? What are one or two of the blind spots? If there is something that your system is particularly good at what are one or two of the complementary parts of the pair?

I'll give another example from Sera. Sera is best at close-in work. Our long-range stuff (especially kicking) is decent, but that's not what we're best at.

 

[MBuzzy]

I'm probably not the best person to answer this question due to my limited experience, so I can only speak to how I am being trained right now.

We do not spar nearly enough. I have heard of a very wide range of Tang Soo Do schools that either do free sparring every night or hardly at all. I'm in the hardly at all range.

I have not seen at my school or at the others I have attended any ground work. Though the training should keep you off of the ground...I'm still worried about some 250 lb wrestler just grabbing me and pinning me to the ground!!

Sorry I couldn't speak in more broad terms!! No one's perfect, so I'm sure there are more out there.

 

[exile]

Another 10 lashes, you TKD peoples are taking a beating

Clinch work? Ground Work? Submission? Escaping Submissions? Takedown defence? Weapons fighting? Restraining a person without injury or pain compliance?

None of those areas are weak in TKD?

I don't mean completely absent neccessarily, just weak.

I'm beginning to think that there are some implicit assumptions in this discussion that I'm just not getting. So... Andrew, you list `submission' and `escaping submission' separately, so I assume that you mean, how good is my art for (i) imposing submissions and (ii) escaping submissions, among other things. But see... I don't want my art to impose a submission on my oppo, any more than I want my art to force an assailant to do funny imitations of Winston Churchill, say. Is the fact that none of the variants of karate has a way to force compliance to perform such imitations a weakness of karate? Surely not, because forcing someone to give the `We will fight them on the beaches speech' in a voice like a foghorn isn't relevant to the outcome of a streetfight. Well, neither are submissions. Submissions are part of sport, a branch of entertainment—come to think of it, just like imitations of W.C., in the right hands. If someone attacks me, I'm not going to try to get them to tap out; I'm going to try to get them to focus all their energy on just getting their next breath through the pain and broken bones. That's my objective and that's what TKD is for. So I don't regard its (lack of any) repertoire of techs for imposing a submit, or imposing a Churchill imitation, as a weakness of the art. If the point of an art is to damage a dangerous person so badly that they cease to be a danger to you—ever again, ideally—then why should the absence of submission techs be a weakness?

And why on earth should I expect a martial art to `restrain a person without injury or pain complaince'? MA training shouldn't be expected to equip you for employment as a hospital orderly in a psychiatric care facility, should it? That kind of job requires injury/pain-free restraint competence, surely. But a martial art is martial, right? As in, warfare? It has to provide me with the ability to restrain a person, most definitely. But if it's a martial art, then why should injury/pain-free restraint be one of its mission statements?

My point is just that you seem to be asking things of a fighting system that have little to do with what goes on in an unsought violent encounter with an attacker who we have reason to believe will inflict mortal injuries on us if allowed to. Martial arts are designed to give you a repertoire of tools for neutralizing such an attacker, maybe permanently. But submissions, pain-free or injury-free complaince... why are these entering the discussion?

 

[Carol]

And why on earth should I expect a martial art to `restrain a person without injury or pain complaince'? MA training shouldn't be expected to equip you for employment as a hospital orderly in a psychiatric care facility, should it? That kind of job requires injury/pain-free restraint competence, surely. But a martial art is martial, right? As in, warfare? It has to provide me with the ability to restrain a person, most definitely. But if it's a martial art, then why should injury/pain-free restraint be one of its mission statements?

For a few reasons.

One is, if you get attacked on the job and you get in to fisticuffs with your your attacker, both of you will likely get fired for fighting. Sad, but true. If you fight on the job, you are seen as a violent person. HR departments don't want violent people on staff and think that getting rid of violent people protects the rest of the non-violent people.

Another is, being a martial artist typically doesn't get anyone brownie points with the police. If two people are fighting, they will be arrested and charged with fighting-related crimes. Who started it? Each will say the other guy, I'm sure. For someone to clame self-defense, the person has to act in a way that the law recognizes as defensive.

Third is, if you hurt someone and there is no crime committed, you risk a civil suit. One of the requirements for a successful suit is the person to prove to the court that they were damaged. If the person was made to comply without injury, they will have a tough time making the claim that they were damaged.

 

[Andrew Green]

I'm beginning to think that there are some implicit assumptions in this discussion that I'm just not getting.

Martial arts are designed to give you a repertoire of tools for neutralizing such an attacker, maybe permanently. But submissions, pain-free or injury-free complaince... why are these entering the discussion?

Actually, it seems you are impossing assumptions about the nature of martial arts, I'm open to all levels of conflict, and all levels of dealing with it. And confrontation, including hospital orderly type situations right up to life or death. We all have different goals, and different objectives in our training, which is basically my point.

Submissions are a great tool, nothing better to end a fight then a choke IMO, put them to sleep, no serious harm, minimal legal issues. Of courrse getting caught in one is bad as well, cause if you loose consciousness, well, no telling what you will wake up to.

Now the two go together in the sense that if you don't train to do chokes, you are also not training to defend them in a meaningful way. Same for striking, takedowns, weapons and everything, you always need both sides in your training, otherwise it is being poorly trained.

Now if your primary goal is to hurt a untrained person as much as possible, as fast as possible, that is your choice. But it is a specialization that lacks in many other areas, same as any other system of study.

 

[exile]

Actually, it seems you are impossing assumptions about the nature of martial arts, I'm open to all levels of conflict, and all levels of dealing with it. And confrontation, including hospital orderly type situations right up to life or death. We all have different goals, and different objectives in our training, which is basically my point.

Submissions are a great tool, nothing better to end a fight then a choke IMO, put them to sleep, no serious harm, minimal legal issues. Of courrse getting caught in one is bad as well, cause if you loose consciousness, well, no telling what you will wake up to.

Now the two go together in the sense that if you don't train to do chokes, you are also not training to defend them in a meaningful way. Same for striking, takedowns, weapons and everything, you always need both sides in your training, otherwise it is being poorly trained.

I take your point, Andrew, and I don't disagree in the least. But where we seem to differ here is that I don't believe that a martial art need actually contain all the techniques that it provides you with technical means to defend yourself against. The kind of reality-based training developed in detail by people like Iain Abernethy in the UK and his experimental research group—that's really what it is!—throws all kinds of aggressive techniques at you and asks you to reach deep into your karate toolkit to find effective counters for them, even though many of the aggressor's moves won't be part of karate itself. There is no need, in my view, to have chokes in your repertoire in order to learn how to use weight shifts as unbalancing tactics and elbow strikes to the face of an assailant behind you who's trying to impose a choke on you. (BTW, as Abernethy's and Simon O'Neil's work show, chokes are part of both the karate and TKD technical reserve and can be recoverd from kata/hyung and trained as an effective tool; but there are counterattacks to someone trying to choke you that are logically independent of the existence of chokes in your repertoire, so I'm assuming the `strong' position that you don't actually have chokes in your art but have resources to use to prevent an attacker from applying them regardless).

Now if your primary goal is to hurt a untrained person as much as possible, as fast as possible, that is your choice. But it is a specialization that lacks in many other areas, same as any other system of study.

True, but the point is, I think, that hurting a (gratuitously violent, dangerous) untrained attacker as fast as possible, as quickly as possible was the historically the primary purpose of traditional MAs (and some non-traditional ones, such as Krav Maga) since most violent unprovoked assaults are carried out not by individuals with well-developed MA training. And that history is a clue to a current, and recurrent reality: there are now well-documented inventories of what Patrick McCarthy calls the habitual acts of violence (HAOVs) that people who are the targets of assault are almost always confronted with—Bill Burgar, in his book Five Years, One Kata gives a nice summary of these, with fairly good graphics, relying on McCarthy's work and also work by people like Geoff Thompson and Peyton Quinn. Careful examination of the forms of TMAs like the karate-based arts or CMAs strongy suggests that it is just these kinds of attacks that the TMA patterns are offering you a set of effective techniques against. The important point is that these HAOVs are, statistically, by far the likeliest physical dangers that the target of a gratuitous attack will face. Training for far less probable techniques, applied in far less likely scenarios (you are mugged by a BJJ instructor dropping off a garage roof onto your back as you wander home from the pub) seems much less productive than training for some drunken or sociopathic yob throwing a hard roundhouse at your head after grabbing your shoulder, or trying to knee you in the groin as a followup to grabbing your shirt or coat with both hands to immobilize you.

So yes: I am explicitly assuming that the primary job of an MA is to provide you with technical resources to protect yourself from the (relatively) small number of HAOVs that are overwhelmingly the typical opening moves in an unprovoked violent attack. And I just don't see any justification for describing the lack of tech `Y' in some MA `X', when X does provide you with technical resources to defend yourself against Y, as a weakness of X.

For a few reasons.

One is, if you get attacked on the job and you get in to fisticuffs with your your attacker, both of you will likely get fired for fighting. Sad, but true. If you fight on the job, you are seen as a violent person. HR departments don't want violent people on staff and think that getting rid of violent people protects the rest of the non-violent people.

Another is, being a martial artist typically doesn't get anyone brownie points with the police. If two people are fighting, they will be arrested and charged with fighting-related crimes. Who started it? Each will say the other guy, I'm sure. For someone to clame self-defense, the person has to act in a way that the law recognizes as defensive.

Third is, if you hurt someone and there is no crime committed, you risk a civil suit. One of the requirements for a successful suit is the person to prove to the court that they were damaged. If the person was made to comply without injury, they will have a tough time making the claim that they were damaged.

These are good and important points. But the question is—based on Andrew's original post—to just what extent is it a weakness of a MA if it doesn't give you a means of, for example, painlessly restraining a violent assailant (which you might want to do for the various reasons you cite)?

Let me think a little bit more about these scenarios, Carol... more anon (if I can force my poor brain to do any more thinking tonight...) They deserve to be addressed, for sure.

 

[Carol]

These are good and important points. But the question is—based on Andrew's original post—to just what extent is it a weakness of a MA if it doesn't give you a means of, for example, painlessly restraining a violent assailant (which you might want to do for the various reasons you cite)?

Because as my instructor says, Martial Arts aren't about fighting, they are about health. The reason why we fight and train to fight is because either we care about our own health or about someone else's health...and it is why we can legally do so as well. Fighting and not caring about someone's health (including your own) isn't defense, it's battery. Or murder.

Fired from a job...criminal conviction...legal liability...those aren't good for one's health.

If doing martial arts leads to something that ends up impeding one's health, then it is a weakness of the art.

 

[Andrew Green]

Shaolin Monks being the mythical beginning in Asia, harming others I just don't see as there primary goal. I've come across Buhdists that refused to kill flys.

Karate - Itosu & Funakoshi promoted that based more on the fitness levels.

Korea made a national sport out of it.

Kano was also big on sport, took Judo to the Olympics.

Tai chi is certainely not about hurting people as a primary goal.

Aikido is joined at the hip with some pretty heavy pacifist philosophy from its founder.

Kendo is definately sport.

Kung fu / Wushu has a sporting aspect, a performance aspect and a self-defence aspect. But I think those are the means, not the goal for many anyways.

Martial arts has very little to do with self-defence IMO.

 

[MJS]

Time for some honesty, what is it that your art just doesn't do very well? And yes, there is something, probably a few things.

There is far too much "Mine is the best for everything" attitude in the martial arts, probably partially responsible for some of the style vs style nonsense. IMO part of knowing what you do well, is part of knowing what you do poorly. So lets be honest, what system do you do, and what does it suck at?

Anyone that says "Nothing" gets 10 lashes for lieing

I would have to say the main thing would be the ground game. There are defenses against grappling type attacks, ie: wrist grabs, chokes, and defenses against tackles. I'm referring more to escapes in the event you find yourself on the ground. To solve this however, I cross train in BJJ. In addition, one of the Black Belts at the school is ranked in BJJ, so thats a big plus, as he gives his feedback to the Kenpo material.

Mike

 

[MJS]

Cons:
Time: Your looking at 6 years to get a black belt
Availabity: Low outside of Florida. Lower out side U.S. (one in Germany, France, and Venezuala respectivily)
Process: At times annonying
Tests: Hard as heck (it's meant to be that way)

answer questions?

Actually, I believe the OP was looking for specific things in the technique area.

Mike

 

[MJS]

I'm a bit late to this thread, but one thing that I have not seen here yet, is the things that are done poorly in BJJ/MMA. I mean, thats an art too right?

 

[Andrew Green]

lol, yes, well I'll have a go with MMA (seems fair, I started this)

MMA is geared towards a specific goal, and that is one one one fighting against an opponent of roughly the same skill level. Things outside of that window are generally ignored. Some of them can be trained within the same framework, Multiple opponenets can be done, stick fighting can be done. But it is still confined to the trained opponents who know they are in a fight model. Not to mention those things are a rarity, if ever for most people. But at the same time I would probably consider the Dog Brothers methods MMA, or a variant of it, and they are very heavily into sticks

So generally MMA lacks in weapons and multiple opponents.

It does take surroundings into consideration to a limit degree, in that you have to be aware of walls / cage / ropes, depending on your training environment, and those things are a part of the strategy. However other people are generally ignored and you can get a sense of tunnel vision in that you train always just to worry about one guy.

The other thing it lacks is training geared towards situations which are not fights. MMA, as everyone has heard countless times, is all about live training, against resisting uncooperative opponents. However in "real life" that is not always what you get. SOme situations may be more static, sometimes you can use physical force or control, without escalating things to a fight, which is what MMA is geared too. Sometimes that wrist lock, or comealong is all that is needed to subdue someone being a jerk, but not to the point where a full out fight is going to happen, yet something is needed to get them to cease being such a jerk.

One other thing that I think could get people into trouble with MMA is that there is a different end game. In sport fighting when you sense weakness or that the other guy is rocked, you go in to finish, and you keep going until the ref tells you to stop. In the real world this could be called "excessive force". Once you are mounted on a guy pounding his face in it becomes harder to call it self defence.

Finally (of the top of my head) gloves let people hit harder, they protect the hands. And any gloved sport athlete can fall victim to a broken hand if the adrenhaline kicks in and you start blasting on someones skull.

Oddly enough the weaknesses in MMA come from what I would call its greatest strength, the training methods. Assume a skilled opponent, and use as few rules as you can safely use. That is MMA, it's what makes it great. That everything is tested, tried and everyone gets a little beat up and goes home happy. But, not everything can be fit into that model. Not everything should.Trying to do everything would leave us all with no real skills in anything.

In a one-on-one unarmed fight with no outside interferance, all other things being equal, I give the fight to the MMA guy everytime. But that is not the only way force gets used, not by a long shoot.

I think sometimes MMA practitioners get cocky about that though, too much competitive spirit, or testosterone or whatever. But as a whole we often judge everything to our standards, and of course everything else falls short. Just as MMA falls short under different sets of standards.

 

[exile]

Karate - Itosu & Funakoshi promoted that based more on the fitness levels.

Itosu promoted Karate in Okinawa in a way that he thought would maximize its chances of getting incorporated into the Okinawan school system. Funakoshi did something similar to get the Japanese military and education ministries to pick it up as a `character building' group exercise. But Itosu (Funakoshi's teacher) did something quite different with karate as a practitioner himself. He was involved in dozens of fights, as were Matsumura, Chotuko Kyan and most of the other Okinawan giants of 19th c. karate who gave us the technical repertoire that we now possess. Matsumura and Itosu were amongst the chief bodyguards of the King of Okinawa; Matsumura functioned as a kind of chief sheriff of the island, and he, Itosu and others of that group developed and used karate as a brutally effective combat system when as and as needed. Let's not confuse the promotional methods that the Okinawan masters used to market karate on a mass scale with the reasons they developed it the way they did.(I'll be glad to document any of these comments if you want bibliographical references).

Korea made a national sport out of it.

Sure they did. But first they made it a supremely effective battlefield H2H combat method that was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of North Koreans in the Korean War (at the hands of the Black Tiger commandos trained in the Korean adaptations of Shotokan karate that the kwan founders brought back from Japan) and Viet Cong and North Vietnamese unfortunate enough to encounter ROK Marine troops in CQ combat. As a military tool, Korean karate was savagely effective for the purposes the Korean military required. (Again, I can provide documentation for these statements if you'd like) When the military threat receded and the Korean national interest seemed better served by achieving prominence in top-level international sport competition, then yes, the WTF effectively removed the hand techs and other street-combat components from their version of the art by means of the scoring systems they implemented, but exactly what does this show? That a government sport bureaucracy, as the WTF became, will tend to repackage combat systems for sports purposes because of its own institutional agenda? No surprise there! :wink1:

Martial arts has very little to do with self-defence IMO.

If you'd rather not use MA techs for self defence, by all means don't. Matsumura, Itosu, Mas Oyama, the Kwan founders who trained people to defend themselves in the extremely dangerous, crime- and gang-ridden Korean society of the Occupation years and the decade or so afterward, would probably be baffled by your choice, but they would probably take into account that the world that the MAs they created were intended for isn't the world you, I or our contemporaries live in. But the MAs were created specifically for self defense; their military and combat applications were the main reason they were taught and trained. Funakoshi's emphasis on the `moral purity' dimension of karate was, as has been repeatedly observed, his way of protecting karate from the demilitarization policies of the American governors in the immediate postwar period, disguising a combat art as a kind of spiritual training. Matsumura, Itosu and the others would probably have laughted at the idea that the raison d'etre for karate was anything but hard-core self defense; it was the one tool they had available to defend their king, given the illegality of weapons in Okinawa under Japanese domination. The combat systems we call `marital arts' were developed for combat, for self defense, for personal protection. Whether you want to use them for that purpose or some other is, of course, up to you!

 

[meta_aesthete]

I haven't been in the Bujinkan long enough to form a thorough opinion, but I'll give a stab at it and welcome any BBT masters to smack me down. My taijutsu still sucks, but I'm not a terrible observer.

The biggest problem with the Booj? Making the transition from an obscure art to an international community. Ninpo's more esoteric parts are ripe for misinterpretation. Also, legal concerns and commercial appeal have, from what I can tell, watered down training in the US as a general rule. While Booj has many soft principles, neither Takamatsu nor Hatsumi could be described as "soft" people.

Also, the image of the ninja has taken on a life of its own. I've gotten to the point of saying I train in Taijutsu just to avoid irritating, cliche arguments or jokes. Also, I think that the yearning for tradition and exoticism in ninjutsu runs contrary to the very adaptability and fluidity that the art encourages.

So yeah, politics isn't a strong suit, but I think it's all growing pains.

While ground techniques do exist in the Booj, they could use more attention. If for no other reason than that with the advent of MMA and BJJ, there are more violent meatheads out there with ground skills. By no means do I mean all MMA'ers are meatheads -- but meatheads generally follow the popular "badass" art of the time. So the threat is more prevalent these days, and Boojers have to know how to deal with it.

Also, tired arguments about "aliveness" aside, it seems like many dojos give lip service to fluid motion but don't train it. I'm happy enough with mine (my sensei started out in judo and kickboxing, so he's familiar with the educational benefits of getting clobbered while trying to work that fancy tech) but I've heard enough stories to believe the problem is out there.

Lastly, I think that in an art that stresses ending or escaping confrontations as quickly as possible, we should do more running. Martial arts instructors always say, "if you can, run away." Well, then what? I know that at higher levels there's more of this, but I think teaching some basic parkour-esque obstacle avoidance/fence jumping/sprinting form skills up front would really set the Booj apart. And maybe save some white belts from getting stomped.

That said, I'm still in mediocre shape, am a beginner, and have crappy taijutsu. So I'm welcome to criticisms.

 

[Andrew Green]

Also, tired arguments about "aliveness" aside, it seems like many dojos give lip service to fluid motion but don't train it.

That's been happening for over 30 years now, ever since that Lee character started trolling the martial arts community with his wacky ideas about cross training, abandoning traditional ideas and personalizing your training. Rubish I say! :lol:

 

[Brandon Fisher]

We do ok on the ground but not great. Its enough to get away if needed but not our first option. Kobudo could be better also but I am working on that to make it better.

 

[Andrew Green]

Before things get heated on this, I want to clarify something

In a one-on-one unarmed fight with no outside interferance, all other things being equal, I give the fight to the MMA guy everytime. But that is not the only way force gets used, not by a long shoot.

By comparisson, jump back a couple hundred years, before guns where the new big thing.

MMA is dueling. It is training for the duel, using the duel as the model. If you want to be at the top of the dueling game, it's the way to go.

But dueling is not the only skill involving a sword. A person might be a great swordsman in a duel, but get killed in there first skirmish should they join the infantry.

Likewise, a great soldier, might not fair so well against a mediocre dueler, off the battlefield.

And both might make terrible guards.

Different skillsets, different goals, each has different requirements to do the job. There is some overlap, but not enough to guarantee success in others based on skill in one.

 

[shesulsa]

In the WHRDA syllabus I started with, there is a lot of repitition. For example the same technique applied at the sleeve near the wrist, the sleeve partway up the arm, the sleeve near the elbow, the cloth at the shoulder and the lapel; each of these would be a separate technique, sometimes grouped together in the number sequence, sometimes spaced apart. This challenges the mind and the memory to be sure which, I suppose, would test a student's mettle.

I am still but a lowly student, but I wonder if there couldn't be a better use of time? Perhaps to teach the core technique effectively, then expand that technique to include different approaches (which could lead to some self-discovery by the student) and spend a little more time getting more intricate with weapons or supplemental syllabus.

Although it bears repeating; I am but a lowly student. :asian:

 

[Cirdan]

Wado Ryu:
-Breaking
-Weapons
-Grappling
-We do not do enough stretching

Ju Jutsu:
-Footwork except when throwing or executing a lock
-Lacks finesse in the striking game
-Breaking
-Use of weapons

This is how I feel about the Dojos where I train at. Wado and Ju Jutsu are both very diverse systems and these points may be very well be strong points at another club where they have a different focus (they will of course have other weak points too. Nobody is perfect.)