What criteria are you using her for “top martial arts?”
If we’re talking in terms of “widely practiced,” there’s a strong selection pressure favoring schools which don’t impose activities on their students which are highly painful, frightening, or conducive to injury. In the absence of strong feedback mechanisms where if the training doesn’t work, the students find out and leave, the most popular martial arts will be ones which don’t demand much of their students.
That’s not to say that forms only persist because they allow students to believe they’re practicing martial arts without engaging in more demanding activities; even arts with strong feedback mechanisms generally include some non-alive exercises, such as bagwork or shadowboxing, or the striking practice used in kendo.
It would not necessarily be correct to assume that the manner in which traditional martial arts are practiced today strongly reflects the training methods used by the traditional masters; the forms might be the same, but the emphasis on different types of training has shifted.
Non-alive training methods may be preferable when the techniques can’t be practiced in alive training without an unacceptably high rate of injury, or when one is practicing basic movements at high levels of repetition to ingrain them into muscle memory, and involving a partner to use as a target would, even if it helped refine the movements, impose a great deal of boredom on the partner.
That’s not to say that forms only persist because they allow students to believe they’re practicing martial arts without engaging in more demanding activities; even arts with strong feedback mechanisms generally include some non-alive exercises, such as bagwork or shadowboxing, or the striking practice used in kendo.
Some of these exercises are also oriented towards muscular conditioning rather than technique practice.
If we’re talking in terms of “widely practiced,” there’s a strong selection pressure favoring schools which don’t impose activities on their students which are highly painful, frightening, or conducive to injury. In the absence of strong feedback mechanisms where if the training doesn’t work, the students find out and leave, the most popular martial arts will be ones which don’t demand much of their students.
A common adaptation seems to be to decouple the more painful and dangerous parts of practice from the less. I’ve studied a couple of arts where the harder forms of practice were taught in separate classes, at different times and not required for advancement in rank.
In both cases these were labeled “sparring class”, but that’s a little misleading; it seems common for them to incorporate more intense and painful conditioning techniques, or forms of partnered practice that aren’t strictly sparring.
What criteria are you using her for “top martial arts?”
If we’re talking in terms of “widely practiced,” there’s a strong selection pressure favoring schools which don’t impose activities on their students which are highly painful, frightening, or conducive to injury. In the absence of strong feedback mechanisms where if the training doesn’t work, the students find out and leave, the most popular martial arts will be ones which don’t demand much of their students.
That’s not to say that forms only persist because they allow students to believe they’re practicing martial arts without engaging in more demanding activities; even arts with strong feedback mechanisms generally include some non-alive exercises, such as bagwork or shadowboxing, or the striking practice used in kendo.
It would not necessarily be correct to assume that the manner in which traditional martial arts are practiced today strongly reflects the training methods used by the traditional masters; the forms might be the same, but the emphasis on different types of training has shifted.
Non-alive training methods may be preferable when the techniques can’t be practiced in alive training without an unacceptably high rate of injury, or when one is practicing basic movements at high levels of repetition to ingrain them into muscle memory, and involving a partner to use as a target would, even if it helped refine the movements, impose a great deal of boredom on the partner.
Some of these exercises are also oriented towards muscular conditioning rather than technique practice.
A common adaptation seems to be to decouple the more painful and dangerous parts of practice from the less. I’ve studied a couple of arts where the harder forms of practice were taught in separate classes, at different times and not required for advancement in rank.
In both cases these were labeled “sparring class”, but that’s a little misleading; it seems common for them to incorporate more intense and painful conditioning techniques, or forms of partnered practice that aren’t strictly sparring.