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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3467047" data-attributes="member: 4937">That's certainly true.Actually, speaking as a street brawler, the reverse is in fact true.  Martial arts like Kung Fu and Karate work far better when used on someone who has practiced Kung Fu and Karate than some who hasn't, and in fact I can't enummerate all the 'black belts' I've met or heard about that tried to pull that on a brawler with no training but a small amount of practical experience and ended up getting thier butts kicked because their preconceptions of the pacing, distance, and technique were so badly skewed by thier training methods.  One of the reasons I respect Bruce Lee as a teacher is that he recognized this at some point and set about to correct the problem.What happened to Eastern melee combat martial arts is something like what happened to Eastern martial arts in general.  You start someone like SunTZhou who seems to understand basic precepts of strategy and if you read his Eastern commentators they take his insights and run entirely in the wrong direction with them, so that the theory ends up becoming an hinderance to the practice.  So much of Kung Fu is about the philosophy of the combat and nature and everything else, that it loses sight of what actual combat is and becomes a physical treatis on the natural world that sadly and frequently departs from actual physics.  Which is why you can walk into Karate classes and see very sincere teachers teaching thier pupils to do things which are entirely counter to the actual physics - for example teaching them to reduce the momment of inertia in their punches (which is fine for sparring if you don't want to hurt someone) while actually believing that in doing so they are making the punches more damaging.I think that the big contribution of Eastern martial arts at least to melee combat was that they actually were total combat systems, and that most Western melee combat had atrophied as unnecessary (firearms, right to bear arms, professional displined armies operating in units rather than individual combat prowess) and were totally relegated to sport arts.  You don't see actual Glaive fensing taught in the West anymore, even though as battle art, Glaive fensing is far more practical than fensing with smallswords.  Now I don't think that there were many Eastern martial arts that were very good and practical total combat systems, as I've been saying, but it did reawaken some interest in combat systems and work towards recovering and maybe even improving a lot of lost technology.</blockquote>

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