Actually, the martial arts world has recently benefited from a big dose of reality in the form of mixed-martial-arts tournaments. Throwing together fighters from different styles demonstrated that some were overwhelmingly superior to others and unleashed a rapid evolution of technique that blended together the clearly superior methods.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_martial_arts#Evolution_of_fighters
This is sort-of true, but with one really, really big caveat that people seem to forget: any form of fighting that is controlled basically screws large portions of many styles.
If you go into an MMA tournament and deliberately break someone’s arm, you aren’t going to be asked back. Let alone if you break their neck. Furthermore, non-crazy martial artists don’t even want to: there’s too much respect for that. There are styles that are centered around causing maximum damage as quickly as possible, and they are entirely useless in MMA fights. You’re never going to see a hard-style master being competitive in an MMA tournament, because 90% of what they know is irrelevant.
rlpowell, you are incorrect. You are spouting an untested theory that is repeated as fact by those with a vested interest in avoiding the harsh light of truth.
In actual fact, there is no problem with breaking someone’s arm in an MMA fight (see Mir vs. Sylvia in the UFC, for example). It’s also close to impossible to break someone’s neck (deliberately), despite what you may see in movies.
The “we’re too dangerous to fight” is an easy meme to propagate. But let me just ask you this: let’s just say, hypothetically, that your theory (“maximum damage” masters are “useless in MMA fights”) was false. How would you ever know? Assuming that someone did not yet have a belief about that proposition, what kind of evidence are you actually aware of, about whether the statement is true or false?
You know what? You are absolutely right that I’m spouting an untested theory. I have since stopped.
The problem is that I see no way to test either side; either what I said or the converse, which you seem to be asserting, which is that whatever comes out of MMA is basically optimal fighting technique.
The only test I can think of is to load up fighters that assert opposite sides of this, and are both highly trained in their respective arts and so on, on lots of PCP, and see who lives.
There are … some practical and ethical problems there.
I do think, however, that neither of us get to spout either side of this issue and claim that we have a well-tested theory on our side. Having said that, I would say your side has more evidence at this time.
which you seem to be asserting, which is that whatever comes out of MMA is basically optimal fighting technique.
If that is the claim you are rejecting then I must agree. I have no reason to expect optimal fighting technique to come out of MMA, indeed, it would indicate a failure of optimisation in MMA competitors. As you go on to indicate you are measuring fighting technique as it serves to facilitate survival in one on one fights to the death. The social and physical payoffs in MMA training, competition and sparring are different. Optimising for one instead of the other has the problems of a lost purpose.
Of course “optimal fighting technique” suffers from some rather significant No Free Lunch issues. Optimal for what? How many opponents are attacking you? Do you wish to use your arts to intimidate as well as protect? Are there consequences to killing the opponent instead of incapacitating? How tall are you?
The only test I can think of is to load up fighters that assert opposite sides of this, and are both highly trained in their respective arts and so on, on lots of PCP, and see who lives.
I can’t suggest a better test than this but there is another problem here related to the above NFL considerations. There will be a correlation between the effectiveness of a fighting technique and success in battles but it is not a simple one. You will end up identifying the technique that is optimal for the most physically capable combatants, not the optimal fighting technique in general.
A technique that is highly specialized to steroid pumping genetic freaks but barely usable by the majority of fit and healthy people will get the kills.
There will be a correlation between the effectiveness of a fighting technique and success in battles but it is not a simple one. You will end up identifying the technique that is optimal for the most physically capable combatants, not the optimal fighting technique in general.
I wonder if there’s something like this at work in programming?
This is also quite a while after the fact, but I will note that we do have access to some relevant information on this issue, coming in large part from military martial arts research. Active militaries have significant exposure to data on what sort of techniques are useful in self defense, and they use this as their metric for success. How closely does MMA resemble military based martial arts? I think the quote from one of the instructors in the Krav Maga episode of Human Weapon, to the host Jason Chambers, pretty much sums it up.
You’re a good pro fighter, but you don’t know shit about self defense.
How many unarmed combats do you think modern militaries actually get into, and how much of their training time do you think is spent on preparing for this eventuality?
My understanding is that the answers are “almost none” and “very little”. Hence I place very little weight on the fact that military organisations have at one time or another used one martial art or another.
The fact that a Krav Maga salesperson claims that their product is better than MMA for self-defence is not evidence that should shift a Bayesian’s prior probability estimate more than infinitesimally, because they’d say that whether or not they had proper evidence it was true.
Israeli forces use Krav Maga for peacekeeping (“peacekeeping,” anyway,) not just armed military engagements.
MMA has a lot fewer rules than, say, kickboxing, but practically every illegal technique is useful in some way (otherwise there would be no need to have a rule against it,) the matches are fought in rounds, always against a single opponent, with a referee who restarts the action if the combatants reach a stalemate on the ground, in a ring with plenty of space to maneuver, no obstacles or potential improvised weapons, and fighters have months in advance to research each other’s fighting styles and plan countermeasures. It’s not as if MMA constitutes a particularly rigorous investigation into the optimal fighting style for personal self defense.
MMA has a lot fewer rules than, say, kickboxing, but practically every illegal technique is useful in some way (otherwise there would be no need to have a rule against it,)
My own view is that Krav Maga, Wing Chun and similar belief systems use an inverted form of Sagan’s Dragon reasoning. Whatever you cannot test is whatever they claim would allow them to win, hence they always have an unfalsifiable hypothesis that their style would win in MMA.
There were almost no rules in UFC1 yet groin attacks and whatnot that have been hypothesised to be dominant strategies in no-rules engagements failed to perform as advertised and bread and butter techniques like punches, kicks and rear naked chokes were what won. So we have a very limited data set, but based on that set we should place a low probability on the hypothesis that these are dominant strategies.
I wouldn’t put Krav Maga into the same category as Wing Chun; it’s essentially Jeet Kune Do under another brand name (or Jeet Kune Do is Krav Maga under another brand name, since neither particularly owes its existence to the other.) To the best of their abilities, Krav Maga instructors test the performance of their skills under as close an approximation of the circumstances they expect that their soldiers will need to apply them as they can contrive.
I only took a few classes in Krav Maga, but I spent a longer time training in Wun Hop Kuen Do, a branch of Kajukenbo with similar training outlook. Kajukenbo was a mixed martial art before the rise of sport MMA, and developed a formidable reputation in Hawaii at a time when violent street engagements were common. My own instructor’s teacher (Grandmaster Al Dacascos, father of the martial arts movie actor Mark Dacascos,) reminisced about how back when his old school had a white pants and white shirt dress requirement, students from his school would actually go and beat up sailors and steal their pants to wear in class. This is not a style that developed in isolation from regular exposure to evidence of what works on the street. As a side note, some Kajukenbo schools train professional MMA competitors (such as the one where Chuck Liddell trained.)
When I did full contact sparring with my instructor, he would indeed usually finish matches by submission. Having trained for a while in BJJ as well, while I was never able to submit my instructors using legal techniques, I often found myself in positions where I could grab their testicles, gouge their eyes, manipulate the pressure points under their ears, shove a thumb into the base of their windpipe, etc., and they would tell me that while those techniques were effective in a real fight, I wouldn’t be allowed to use them in competition. Trying those against Sifu Jason, my Wun Hop Kuen Do instructor, he’d simply shut me down because he was used to dealing with all of them. He trained and used his techniques in MMA rules fights (Krav Maga practitioners often spar this way as well,) but he would also do heavy contact multi-man sparring drills, weapon vs. weapon sparring, weapon vs. unarmed sparring, and other drills to condition students for potential self defense situations. Being an instructor level pracitioner in Wun Hop Kuen Do is essentially a research position; he would train against guys who would attack him in earnest with a real knife (having worked his way up after years of training with a rubber knife with a chalked edge) to make sure that his techniques actually worked as advertized. Is it reckless? Of course, but when the product you’re selling is defense in potentially life-and-death situations, and your techniques aren’t effective, you’re putting all your students at risk.
Sifu Jason is also one of the more active participants on Bullshido, and many of their style vs. style matches are hosted at his school. When it comes to demonstrating real life effectiveness in martial arts, I think he’s pretty effectively shouldered the burden of evidence. And because lives depend on it, and they’re passionate about what they do, that’s how seriously serious military instructors take their styles too.
Present day MMA is probably not far off from the optimal on-on-one fighting style without street clothes in a ring with no rules. But if MMA fighters optimize for personal combat of that type, and display the same sort of uncomprehending helplessness that many of the strikers did back in the earliest days of the UFC upon being brought to the ground for the first time as soon as they run into a fight with multiple opponents or a knife, then the training is not well optimized for self defense.
I wouldn’t put Krav Maga into the same category as Wing Chun; it’s essentially Jeet Kune Do under another brand name (or Jeet Kune Do is Krav Maga under another brand name, since neither particularly owes its existence to the other.) To the best of their abilities, Krav Maga instructors test the performance of their skills under as close an approximation of the circumstances they expect that their soldiers will need to apply them as they can contrive.
Krav Maga as taught to Israeli soldiers might be some such animal. The scam with the same name where you get an instructor’s certificate after a brief workshop which allows you to rip off the gullible is pure bullshido.
Present day MMA is probably not far off from the optimal on-on-one fighting style without street clothes in a ring with no rules. But if MMA fighters optimize for personal combat of that type, and display the same sort of uncomprehending helplessness that many of the strikers did back in the earliest days of the UFC upon being brought to the ground for the first time as soon as they run into a fight with multiple opponents or a knife, then the training is not well optimized for self defense.
I’ve got no argument with this, although styles that train full-contact for multiple attackers or knives are very few and far between,
Krav Maga as taught to Israeli soldiers might be some such animal. The scam with the same name where you get an instructor’s certificate after a brief workshop which allows you to rip off the gullible is pure bullshido.
Agreed. Even the place where I trained briefly, which was run by a couple of former Israeli soldiers, was not on the level of instruction of some of the other martial arts dojos in the area. You can make a competent fighter with a few months of hard work, but it takes years to make a serious martial arts expert, so when it comes to military arts I tend to categorize the military instructors quite differently from the instructed.
Both MMA and BJJ are seriously flawed if one is potentially facing more than one adversary. Knock down and disengage is strictly superior when you run the risk of getting kicked in the back of the head by adversary n+1 while you are busy putting a submission on or pounding adversary n from close range.
I wish there was a Krav Maga place within sensible distance of me. -_-
I’m actually thinking of going with Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, AKA MMA training school, simply because it’s close and at my current level of training (zero) anything is an improvement.
The “we’re too dangerous to fight” is an easy meme to propagate. But let me just ask you this: let’s just say, hypothetically, that your theory (“maximum damage” masters are “useless in MMA fights”) was false. How would you ever know? Assuming that someone did not yet have a belief about that proposition, what kind of evidence are you actually aware of, about whether the statement is true or false?
Military application of the “maximum damage” martial art, and the restriction of certain training to military personnel, would be solid evidence that it goes beyond what is considered safe in sport.
For instance, I know that certain weapon techniques in Krav Maga are generally taught only to policemen or combat soldiers.
There is a pretty simple way to test this, it’s simply somewhat dangerous and arguably unethical. Take a “maximum damage” fighter, and send them into a number of no rules fights where they can justify using maximum force, and then pit them against MMA fighters in sanctioned matches.
I don’t know of any style that does this, but I did train for a while in a style that does something similar. In Wun Hop Kuen Do (and possibly other branches of Kajukenbo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kajukenbo) being an instructor level practitioner is essentially a research position. You’re required to test your skills in realistic situations, because as a teacher, the danger to your students if you instruct them poorly takes precedence over the danger to yourself. My sifu, Jason Goldsmith, would have collaborators attack him in earnest with a sharpened knife (he worked his way up from rubber ones,) or fight against multiple opponents, in order to make sure his skills worked where it really mattered.
Sifu Jason does prepare people for competitions, including MMA, if they request it, but he makes it very clear that that isn’t really what the style is meant for, and is not the setting in which it’s most effective.
Actually, the martial arts world has recently benefited from a big dose of reality in the form of mixed-martial-arts tournaments. Throwing together fighters from different styles demonstrated that some were overwhelmingly superior to others and unleashed a rapid evolution of technique that blended together the clearly superior methods. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_martial_arts#Evolution_of_fighters
This is sort-of true, but with one really, really big caveat that people seem to forget: any form of fighting that is controlled basically screws large portions of many styles.
If you go into an MMA tournament and deliberately break someone’s arm, you aren’t going to be asked back. Let alone if you break their neck. Furthermore, non-crazy martial artists don’t even want to: there’s too much respect for that. There are styles that are centered around causing maximum damage as quickly as possible, and they are entirely useless in MMA fights. You’re never going to see a hard-style master being competitive in an MMA tournament, because 90% of what they know is irrelevant.
-Robin
rlpowell, you are incorrect. You are spouting an untested theory that is repeated as fact by those with a vested interest in avoiding the harsh light of truth.
In actual fact, there is no problem with breaking someone’s arm in an MMA fight (see Mir vs. Sylvia in the UFC, for example). It’s also close to impossible to break someone’s neck (deliberately), despite what you may see in movies.
The “we’re too dangerous to fight” is an easy meme to propagate. But let me just ask you this: let’s just say, hypothetically, that your theory (“maximum damage” masters are “useless in MMA fights”) was false. How would you ever know? Assuming that someone did not yet have a belief about that proposition, what kind of evidence are you actually aware of, about whether the statement is true or false?
(way after the fact)
You know what? You are absolutely right that I’m spouting an untested theory. I have since stopped.
The problem is that I see no way to test either side; either what I said or the converse, which you seem to be asserting, which is that whatever comes out of MMA is basically optimal fighting technique.
The only test I can think of is to load up fighters that assert opposite sides of this, and are both highly trained in their respective arts and so on, on lots of PCP, and see who lives.
There are … some practical and ethical problems there.
I do think, however, that neither of us get to spout either side of this issue and claim that we have a well-tested theory on our side. Having said that, I would say your side has more evidence at this time.
-Robin
If that is the claim you are rejecting then I must agree. I have no reason to expect optimal fighting technique to come out of MMA, indeed, it would indicate a failure of optimisation in MMA competitors. As you go on to indicate you are measuring fighting technique as it serves to facilitate survival in one on one fights to the death. The social and physical payoffs in MMA training, competition and sparring are different. Optimising for one instead of the other has the problems of a lost purpose.
Of course “optimal fighting technique” suffers from some rather significant No Free Lunch issues. Optimal for what? How many opponents are attacking you? Do you wish to use your arts to intimidate as well as protect? Are there consequences to killing the opponent instead of incapacitating? How tall are you?
I can’t suggest a better test than this but there is another problem here related to the above NFL considerations. There will be a correlation between the effectiveness of a fighting technique and success in battles but it is not a simple one. You will end up identifying the technique that is optimal for the most physically capable combatants, not the optimal fighting technique in general.
A technique that is highly specialized to steroid pumping genetic freaks but barely usable by the majority of fit and healthy people will get the kills.
I wonder if there’s something like this at work in programming?
This is also quite a while after the fact, but I will note that we do have access to some relevant information on this issue, coming in large part from military martial arts research. Active militaries have significant exposure to data on what sort of techniques are useful in self defense, and they use this as their metric for success. How closely does MMA resemble military based martial arts? I think the quote from one of the instructors in the Krav Maga episode of Human Weapon, to the host Jason Chambers, pretty much sums it up.
How many unarmed combats do you think modern militaries actually get into, and how much of their training time do you think is spent on preparing for this eventuality?
My understanding is that the answers are “almost none” and “very little”. Hence I place very little weight on the fact that military organisations have at one time or another used one martial art or another.
The fact that a Krav Maga salesperson claims that their product is better than MMA for self-defence is not evidence that should shift a Bayesian’s prior probability estimate more than infinitesimally, because they’d say that whether or not they had proper evidence it was true.
Israeli forces use Krav Maga for peacekeeping (“peacekeeping,” anyway,) not just armed military engagements.
MMA has a lot fewer rules than, say, kickboxing, but practically every illegal technique is useful in some way (otherwise there would be no need to have a rule against it,) the matches are fought in rounds, always against a single opponent, with a referee who restarts the action if the combatants reach a stalemate on the ground, in a ring with plenty of space to maneuver, no obstacles or potential improvised weapons, and fighters have months in advance to research each other’s fighting styles and plan countermeasures. It’s not as if MMA constitutes a particularly rigorous investigation into the optimal fighting style for personal self defense.
My own view is that Krav Maga, Wing Chun and similar belief systems use an inverted form of Sagan’s Dragon reasoning. Whatever you cannot test is whatever they claim would allow them to win, hence they always have an unfalsifiable hypothesis that their style would win in MMA.
There were almost no rules in UFC1 yet groin attacks and whatnot that have been hypothesised to be dominant strategies in no-rules engagements failed to perform as advertised and bread and butter techniques like punches, kicks and rear naked chokes were what won. So we have a very limited data set, but based on that set we should place a low probability on the hypothesis that these are dominant strategies.
I wouldn’t put Krav Maga into the same category as Wing Chun; it’s essentially Jeet Kune Do under another brand name (or Jeet Kune Do is Krav Maga under another brand name, since neither particularly owes its existence to the other.) To the best of their abilities, Krav Maga instructors test the performance of their skills under as close an approximation of the circumstances they expect that their soldiers will need to apply them as they can contrive.
I only took a few classes in Krav Maga, but I spent a longer time training in Wun Hop Kuen Do, a branch of Kajukenbo with similar training outlook. Kajukenbo was a mixed martial art before the rise of sport MMA, and developed a formidable reputation in Hawaii at a time when violent street engagements were common. My own instructor’s teacher (Grandmaster Al Dacascos, father of the martial arts movie actor Mark Dacascos,) reminisced about how back when his old school had a white pants and white shirt dress requirement, students from his school would actually go and beat up sailors and steal their pants to wear in class. This is not a style that developed in isolation from regular exposure to evidence of what works on the street. As a side note, some Kajukenbo schools train professional MMA competitors (such as the one where Chuck Liddell trained.)
When I did full contact sparring with my instructor, he would indeed usually finish matches by submission. Having trained for a while in BJJ as well, while I was never able to submit my instructors using legal techniques, I often found myself in positions where I could grab their testicles, gouge their eyes, manipulate the pressure points under their ears, shove a thumb into the base of their windpipe, etc., and they would tell me that while those techniques were effective in a real fight, I wouldn’t be allowed to use them in competition. Trying those against Sifu Jason, my Wun Hop Kuen Do instructor, he’d simply shut me down because he was used to dealing with all of them. He trained and used his techniques in MMA rules fights (Krav Maga practitioners often spar this way as well,) but he would also do heavy contact multi-man sparring drills, weapon vs. weapon sparring, weapon vs. unarmed sparring, and other drills to condition students for potential self defense situations. Being an instructor level pracitioner in Wun Hop Kuen Do is essentially a research position; he would train against guys who would attack him in earnest with a real knife (having worked his way up after years of training with a rubber knife with a chalked edge) to make sure that his techniques actually worked as advertized. Is it reckless? Of course, but when the product you’re selling is defense in potentially life-and-death situations, and your techniques aren’t effective, you’re putting all your students at risk.
Sifu Jason is also one of the more active participants on Bullshido, and many of their style vs. style matches are hosted at his school. When it comes to demonstrating real life effectiveness in martial arts, I think he’s pretty effectively shouldered the burden of evidence. And because lives depend on it, and they’re passionate about what they do, that’s how seriously serious military instructors take their styles too.
Present day MMA is probably not far off from the optimal on-on-one fighting style without street clothes in a ring with no rules. But if MMA fighters optimize for personal combat of that type, and display the same sort of uncomprehending helplessness that many of the strikers did back in the earliest days of the UFC upon being brought to the ground for the first time as soon as they run into a fight with multiple opponents or a knife, then the training is not well optimized for self defense.
Krav Maga as taught to Israeli soldiers might be some such animal. The scam with the same name where you get an instructor’s certificate after a brief workshop which allows you to rip off the gullible is pure bullshido.
I’ve got no argument with this, although styles that train full-contact for multiple attackers or knives are very few and far between,
Agreed. Even the place where I trained briefly, which was run by a couple of former Israeli soldiers, was not on the level of instruction of some of the other martial arts dojos in the area. You can make a competent fighter with a few months of hard work, but it takes years to make a serious martial arts expert, so when it comes to military arts I tend to categorize the military instructors quite differently from the instructed.
Both MMA and BJJ are seriously flawed if one is potentially facing more than one adversary. Knock down and disengage is strictly superior when you run the risk of getting kicked in the back of the head by adversary n+1 while you are busy putting a submission on or pounding adversary n from close range.
I wish there was a Krav Maga place within sensible distance of me. -_-
I’m actually thinking of going with Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, AKA MMA training school, simply because it’s close and at my current level of training (zero) anything is an improvement.
-Robin
Military application of the “maximum damage” martial art, and the restriction of certain training to military personnel, would be solid evidence that it goes beyond what is considered safe in sport.
For instance, I know that certain weapon techniques in Krav Maga are generally taught only to policemen or combat soldiers.
There is a pretty simple way to test this, it’s simply somewhat dangerous and arguably unethical. Take a “maximum damage” fighter, and send them into a number of no rules fights where they can justify using maximum force, and then pit them against MMA fighters in sanctioned matches.
I don’t know of any style that does this, but I did train for a while in a style that does something similar. In Wun Hop Kuen Do (and possibly other branches of Kajukenbo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kajukenbo) being an instructor level practitioner is essentially a research position. You’re required to test your skills in realistic situations, because as a teacher, the danger to your students if you instruct them poorly takes precedence over the danger to yourself. My sifu, Jason Goldsmith, would have collaborators attack him in earnest with a sharpened knife (he worked his way up from rubber ones,) or fight against multiple opponents, in order to make sure his skills worked where it really mattered.
Sifu Jason does prepare people for competitions, including MMA, if they request it, but he makes it very clear that that isn’t really what the style is meant for, and is not the setting in which it’s most effective.