OT: Western v. Eastern martial arts

[K]

While all I have is my personal experience, I can tell you that after several years of Tai Chi that a lot of it is not practical. You honestly can learn all the "moves" of an entire martial art in about three months. The rest is just physical conditioning like speed and strength training and learning to react both instinctively and intelligently with the correct move.

I also studied Karate under a streetfighter ex-Marine and I can tell you that the stripped-down version looks nothing like the moves you see on TV. He basically said "I'll teach you to fight first, then I'll teach the impressive stuff if you still want to learn it." I watched the Capoiera club at my school for weeks before deciding that presenting my butt to an enemy is just not practical in any form. Saber fencing and Tai Chi saber fencing also can be mastered in any practical way in a few weeks (I fenced with an Olympic saber fencer and could beat him 1 out of 4 times and I was nowhere near the athlete and half-blind to boot).

There's a great mini-documentary on the Batman Begins DVD that shows the progression of a modern martial art called KC. It's a good example of showing how martial arts are designed toward a particular focus (in that case, fighting several enemies at once).

Mostly, I think martial arts get great marketing and religious stuff added to it so that teachers can get students. Learning to fight well is simply a matter of practice so that even the best trained warrior can be beaten by a street-fighter who has cobbled together a style from kung-fu movies and a little formal training (see Bruce Lee).

[vfb]

It sounds like you're basing your argument (regarding whether studying martial arts is practical) on Tai Chi and Fencing. That's pretty funny! I've yet to see anyone in MMA whose martial arts style is "Tai Chi". If there was anyone, probably he didn't make it very far.

My personal experience is with Aikido, which may also be impractical in a street fight (or MMA), but it's great for keeping the wife and kids in line (see my wife and kids).

Aikido does have some lame mystical elements, but horrible marketing, so they probably added a bunch of extra moves so it would take longer than three months to learn, thus retaining their core student base.

P.S. Batman Begins was horrible.

[lch]

Originally Posted by vfb

My personal experience is with Aikido, which may also be impractical in a street fight (or MMA), but it's great for keeping the wife and kids in line (see my wife and kids).

I have no idea what Aikido looks like, but I have now the mental image of vfb throwing his family members around the house stuck in my brain.

[rdonj]

I've heard that there are people who teach Tai Chi as a martial art rather than as a method of exercise and that it can actually be quite dangerous. But I would say that pretty much any martial art can be powerful if practiced by a sufficiently gifted student, so long as it's not something silly like martial arts tea ceremony.

I don't know what aikido looks like either, but I suspect it looks a little like judo. My brother used to do judo... and of course he would always practice on me.

My personal experience is with Aikido, which may also be impractical in a street fight (or MMA), but it's great for keeping the wife and kids in line (see my wife and kids).

To my understanding, Aikido is basically a grappling art, like judo or jujutsu. Looking up the acronym MMA, I seem to get a hit relating to UFC, which I am vaguely aware of and heard somewhat to the effect that it was dominated for a while by practitioners of gracie jiu jutsu in particular. So apparently it would probably not be impractical for that, though personally I am not that convinced of grappling arts superiority. Then again, a lot does depend on the student.

And K, interesting that you dueled an olympic fencer. Olympic fencing kind of bugs me though... usually, the two people just lunge at each other and whichever hits first wins, so it seems mostly determined by who has the best reflexes. In my book that's not winning, that's mutually agreeing to die :P I tried fencing once... I was at a renaissance faire, and they had a few guys there offering fencing lessons. I had a bit of bad reflexes for it being used to somewhat different sword arts, so I would keep trying to do things I wasn't supposed to and had to restrain myself. Anyway, I ended up going 2 to 3 with my instructor, with a rather furious battle on that last point, neither one of us wanted to lose Relevance? Well, I guess what I'm trying to say is that with martial arts, it's not necessarily so much learning the moves as perfecting the technique and acquiring the reflexes required for it. Being properly fit for the school helps too.

[Panpiper]

Originally Posted by rdonj

But I would say that pretty much any martial art can be powerful if practiced by a sufficiently gifted student, so long as it's not something silly like martial arts tea ceremony.

A tea ceremony master was walking through the town market one day when he accidentally jostled a samurai. The samurai took great offense, but because the samurai and the tea ceremony master were of the same social caste, the samurai could not simply lop off the tea ceremony master's head. So the samurai challenged the tea ceremony master to a duel the following dawn.

Now the tea ceremony master knew nothing of sword fighting, but was bound by honor to show up for this duel. Not wanting to embarrass himself, he went to the town sword master and asked the sword master if he could be taught to use a sword. The sword master was rather flustered, not really being able to teach much in the space of one evening. He showed how to hold a sword, how to do a basic sword stroke, and then said this;.

"I can teach you nothing about how to fight this evening. But I will tell you this; Go to the bridge in the morning, hold the sword thusly over your head. Think of the tea ceremony. When your opponent approaches, strike with all your might."

The next morning at dawn the sword master stood at one end of the bridge and the samurai arrived at the other. The tea ceremony master held up his sword as he had been shown and thought of the tea ceremony. The samurai watched the tea ceremony master for a good while. Finally he bowed, turned, and walked away.

Here endeth the lesson. ;-)


I could write a LOT about the martial side of tai-chi, but Endoperez did a pretty good job of defending it.

[rdonj]

That was supposed to be an obscure joke, but thanks for the story

[Endoperez]

Ha! Challenge! To arms and argument!

Originally Posted by Omnirizon

isn't Tai Chi that _real slow_ martial art. the kind that old men do?

my friend practices that. he says it isn't a 'fighting' martial art but is purely a sort of mind-body-soul thing.

The slow thing that is done in tai chi is called a form.

Yes, the form is often practiced real slow, and yes, many old men do it. Once you are good you can also perform the form fast (if you want to), and some of the old people can do more than just the form:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUf1llA3HXg

Also, moving slow isn't easy. Does your friend sweat during the form? I didn't, until I slowed down. I had been doing it too fast for several months! That's what you get for not having a teacher.

Many tai chi teachers don't even know that tai chi is a martial art, and of course anything they teach won't be a martial art either. It doesn't mean that your friend can't practice his meditative tai chi, or that other people can't practice just-for-show modern Wushu. I, however, am not interested in learning just the form, or in learning gymnastics. I want to learn the martial art, which has forms and (some) show, but also lots of fun stuff you won't get from the other two.

Originally Posted by K

While all I have is my personal experience, I can tell you that after several years of Tai Chi that a lot of it is not practical. You honestly can learn all the "moves" of an entire martial art in about three months. The rest is just physical conditioning like speed and strength training and learning to react both instinctively and intelligently with the correct move.

I bolded the parts that tai chi teaches.

I speak about "tricks" instead of "moves", because sometimes similar movement can be done in slightly different ways. It's still a single "move", but at the same time, several "tricks". Learning all the tricks isn't what martial arts are about, because in a real fight you don't know what tricks are allowed and what the other guy is going to do.

A form can have a hundred movements, and the flowery names are a great help for learning all the tricks. I was taught to use "grasping bird's tail" to parry a straight punch while blocking the attacker's other hand, like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2co2w288Tho

In addition, the form helps with posture, footwork and balance, doing the posture very slow and very low will strengthen your legs, and practicing daily will help you learn to perform it more precisely. There are other ways to practice the same stuff, of course.

I also studied Karate under a streetfighter ex-Marine and I can tell you that the stripped-down version looks nothing like the moves you see on TV. He basically said "I'll teach you to fight first, then I'll teach the impressive stuff if you still want to learn it." I watched the Capoiera club at my school for weeks before deciding that presenting my butt to an enemy is just not practical in any form. Saber fencing and Tai Chi saber fencing also can be mastered in any practical way in a few weeks (I fenced with an Olympic saber fencer and could beat him 1 out of 4 times and I was nowhere near the athlete and half-blind to boot).

It looks like you have practiced more martial arts than I, and I'm impressed with your fencing merits.
Regardless, I disagree. The movements "that work" are simplifications. "Boxing is about punching" is a simplification, because a good punch relies on good footwork and balance and bluffing.
You can learn lots of useful tricks very fast. These tricks can be stripped-down street-versions, or applications based on tai chi form, or aikido wrist locks. They can be useful and save your life, but they're only one part of the story.

The tricks you use don't matter as much as the other stuff: your balance and speed and reflexes, your attitude, your ability to think fast and outsmart others, if you noticed you're in danger ot not, etc. I think it's the same thing you're saying in here:

Mostly, I think martial arts get great marketing and religious stuff added to it so that teachers can get students. Learning to fight well is simply a matter of practice so that even the best trained warrior can be beaten by a street-fighter who has cobbled together a style from kung-fu movies and a little formal training (see Bruce Lee).

(What do you mean about Bruce Lee, btw? Was he beaten up by some fan or something?)

In the short time I practiced tai chi (about a week) I didn't learn much about balance, but I've been practicing what little form I learned and it has helped a little. I did go through nice two-person drills where you have to react to your partner's movement, follow him when he steps backwards and change direction when he changes direction, and I'd love to do them again. They are very fun to do, and challenging, and teach reflexes and footwork.
Here is a great video about pushing hands practice. It starts with basics, and then moves to showing applications.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkyq9FljlG8


Now, before I go any further, I have to say I can't fight with tai chi. Not yet, at least. However, in a week of tai chi I learned more than in the ~2 years I practiced a Korean kicking art. In there, I only learned tricks: kicks, punches, counters to different kicks, parries to straight punches, etc.
In tai chi, I learned lots of new tricks, but also the fact that tricks alone won't be enough.

Originally Posted by vfb

It sounds like you're basing your argument (regarding whether studying martial arts is practical) on Tai Chi and Fencing. That's pretty funny! I've yet to see anyone in MMA whose martial arts style is "Tai Chi". If there was anyone, probably he didn't make it very far.

My personal experience is with Aikido, which may also be impractical in a street fight (or MMA), but it's great for keeping the wife and kids in line (see my wife and kids).

I have seen one (1) MMA match which a tai chi- bagua-sanshou fighter won. I think it was his first MMA match. I'm trying to find it, but I haven't had any luck. It didn't look like tai chi, of course, because he wasn't doing a form.

I've been learning aikido for about half a year now. Aikido as I've been taught is nowhere near as brutal or direct as the tai chi I was taught, even though it shares some similar ideas. The practice has been too static, for one thing. We almost always practice a spesific counter-move to a spesific attack. The tricks are good, but we always practice from the same, static pose. I'd love to have this kind of practice:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK7w1j-zRCQ

That's from a martial arts school in Rome, but that kind of practice could work in ANY martial art. Wonderful stuff.

[Omnirizon]

isn't Tai Chi that _real slow_ martial art. the kind that old men do?

my friend practices that. he says it isn't a 'fighting' martial art but is purely a sort of mind-body-soul thing.

[vfb]

Yeah, that's the one. Old ladies too.

But there was some book or movie a while ago where the hero studied Tai Chi for years and years, or 3 months, or something, and he was such a Tai Chi god that he could rip out people's hearts through their eye sockets. I think it was sponsored by the American Federation of Tai Chi Clubs Financial Committee.

[JimMorrison]

The "mystical" elements are quite important, for true mastery of mind, body, and environment.

Understandably, they are easy to downplay, because developing oneself spiritually, conflicts with putting oneself on public display - thus the martial artists (or "fighters") that you see in movies and documentaries, tend towards the practical, rather than the intangible.

I won't claim any exclusivity for any particular methods, but I was under the impression that it was common knowledge that honing the mind and the spirit is rather important to self-perfection. You don't have to be a good person to be spiritual, and you don't have to be spiritual to be dangerous. In fact, the more dangerous "fighters" are those who have developed the weapon, without developing the warrior.

I'm sure this post is going to open a hell of a can of worms (judging by the few posts just before it!), so have fun.