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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 663834" data-attributes="member: 5171">Well, in fairness, I'm also really touchy about it.Well, I hope it helped in some way, for ideas if nothing else, but my rants about learning martial arts from a book or video would be better off in a whole other thread.Fair enough.  I'm not saying, "Fourecks would get his clock cleaned in a fight," however.  I'm in no way doubting your ability to survive a fight.  I'm just skeptical of your ability to judge whether years of martial arts training would have helped you in that fight, given that your training consisted of some lessons from a room-mate and a book.  I don't doubt your ability to say "A kick to the head would be useless here," because in most street-fights, a kick to the head is gonna result in you getting laughed at and then punched in the groin.  But not all martial arts is of the "kick to the head" variety.Kenpo -- derivation of Ed Parker Kenpo.  Frankly, though, it's all about the school.  There's another Kenpo place just a few blocks away, and they're really big on tournaments and ego-stroking and getting their guys to black belt as quickly as possible.  At my school, we do light sparring to help build reflexes and get you used to having fists coming at you -- and at the higher belts there's a full-contact test to prove to the teachers that you can keep fighting after someone has just bloodied your nose and knocked the wind out of you.  Ninety-five percent of my school's material is designed for street practicality -- either directly, through the techniques, or indirectly, through the kata that gets you to practice the techniques over and over again so that they become useful.And yeah, the "real-world practicality" stuff, which can range from "We're turning off the lights" night to practicing in the alley behind the school, has been great.  I think that for the beginning belts, that's definitely true.  We're taught to overcome that, though -- for example:In one drill, we take one of our techniques, say "Fluttering Leaves", a basic technique where someone tries to push you and you knock their hands out to either side and do a right chop to the top of the ribs, left speed-chop to the throat, right spear-hand to the solar plexus, and left downward chop to the groin.  Then our teachers say, "Okay, now, attackers, don't push them.  GRAB them.  Defenders, you have to make Fluttering Leaves work against a grab.  You're attacked on the street, it's the first technique that occurs to you, and you've got to make it work."So we learn to alter it that way.  Then the teacher says, "Okay, now, attackers, this time, go back to pushing them, only when they knock your hands to the sides, throw a punch at them.  You're a SMART attacker.  You've got a backup plan.  Defenders, figure out how to make Fluttering Leaves work with a push followed by a punch."Then it's "Okay, now, attackers, do the push on them, let them start the technique, but block that first chop and try to grab their arm...."Pretty soon we're adapting Fluttering Leaves against any dang attack in the whole world, doing different alterations if our first strike doesn't work, if our first and second strikes don't work, if the attacker is still standing at the end of it and we need to add more strikes onto the technique, or even if there's a club or knife involved in the fight and we have to keep them away from the weapon until we can get to it.It's not something that any student picks up in one lesson.  But at any school that trains for practicalities, it should be part of the curriculum.  Is that the kind of thing you're thinking of?-TackyPS: Maybe a difference between what you think of as martial arts and what I think of as martial arts is that in MY martial art, raking my fingers across their eyes, stomping the arch of their foot, grabbing their groin, and putting a half-fist into their throat is considered a thousand-year-old tradition. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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