Feh! Typical response from the Chair Force. I don't know, there's always just something really satisfying about artillery barrages in my opinion. That or MLRS in a pinch if there's nothing better.

Hahaha, sorry, I just found this hilarious inserted in here. Good one, Mister. Campbell.

As to favourite martial arts: in SR, I'd go with Pentjak Silat. IRL, goju-ryu works best for me as it's the most practical fighting form geared towards real life unarmed combat that I've personally learned.

I tried aikijitsu (the fighting form of aikido), taijitsu (the unarmed techniques of ninjitsu), wing chun, silat, and tae kwon do before settling on Goju-ryu. All of them didn't cut it for me because:

(a) the guys purporting to teach aikijitsu and taijitsu were full of crap - like real capoeira, it's almost impossible to find instructors in the real McCoy these days (hehehe, yeah, yeah, especially ninjitsu and all that jazz - hey, I was young and impressionable then! ).

(b) TKD is very good for sport but unless you're taught real life applications for it AND truly master it at its higher/highest levels, you're just going to get yourself killed thinking you can whoop ass with what you learn in class.

© wing chun is fast, fluid, and can be explosively elegant but it has too many trappings of tradition to make it an effective fighting form in real life unless you learn real life applications. I guess the event that really turned me off was when a whole bunch of kung fu exponents (including some top notch wing chun fighters) got their butts kicked in record time when they fought muay thai boxers during a no-holds barred tourney organised by the kung fu community in order to show the world that they were the best.

(d) pentjak silat in its true form (if you learn from a bomoh in Malaysia or Indonesia) is terrifying but I couldn't hack it 'cos it involved a lot of black magic (whether or not you believe in it) and that was something I was NOT about to mess around with.

For me, muay thai learned in Thailand, as opposed to kickboxing, is still the most effectivel martial art in the world today - I just don't have any desire or inclination to put myself through the brutal training regime to become good at it. Until I learn something else, [/I]goju[I] is a close second.

Anyway, I'm not dissing anyone or the martial arts they practise. Just adding my 0.02 nuyen worth.

Hiya, Siege.

Yeah, I think that story made headlines in the martial arts community around the world. I was actually there for the first tournament but didn't bother to attend the second one (all the kung fu guys cried foul over the first one and demanded a re-match - same results). I grew up on kung fu and really thought highly of the art (in its various styles) till that first meeting with the muay thai fighters. I was in my early teens then so I hadn't seen anything like muay thai ... gawd, it was an eye-opener.

Years later, I still have a great deal for people who practise kung fu: my Dad did qi gong, my Mom did tai chi, and my brother did White Crane kung fu but when people ask me, I tell them that it's great for health and competition, not for real life situations.

I agree completely about the incomparable physical training that muay thai fighters go through. Nothing else (that I've seen, at any rate) comes close. That's what I meant when I said I had no desire/inclination to undergo such a punishing training regimen in order to excel in the art - and you do have to go through it to become a good muay thai boxer.

The training acclimatizes a muay thai boxer to real pain. In many of the cases, they deaden/de-sensitize their pain receptors in areas such as their shins, forearms, etc. so they don't really feel the pain when they strike or are struck. The closest I've seen to that was in my dojo and a handful of other schools in which the instructors understood the value of this and tried to incorporate it into their classes for people who turned up 4-5 times a week to train. Even then, my sensei acknowledged that it was NOWHERE NEAR real muay thai training.

No problem - I didn't think you meant any disrespect (and even if you did, it's no skin off my back ).

With regards to muay thai strikes (knees, elbows, shins): you and me, both, mano.

Yes. There are two problems with TKD.
1)It uses strength, if your lacking in it, you aren't going to hit as hard and need something like judo or aikido that use leverage.
2) It is less efficent up close. when I was in college a friend of mine was going out with a munchkin who had just got his black belt and he was spouting off. Well we talked about practical uses and one of our group siddled up and said, well what do you do when a mugger get here?
The munchkin declared "well I'd back up and ...." we weren't listening because no mugger was going to let him back up once they were close enough to grab him.

If you can pick your shots, it can be devistating but someone can pick the range, you lose most of your armament. With judo, inclose is where it's most effective and if someone hold back out of reach, well, you're out of their range too.

All styles were created and to look down on the more recent ones is to limit yourself.
Not saying they all work or are all good but you do have to start some where. Also as to the Jeet Kun Do question. It is not an art it is a phillosphy, where by you take the bits and pices of other arts that work for YOU. I've studied TKD, shoulin kung fu, and Kune Tao. Some realy nice RL techniques in all of them. Some not so. I take the ones that work for ME most of the time. Not all techniques work for me and with all the veriables that happen in a fight they don't work all the time. On the other hand some do.


Thanos

I hate it when people who don't deserve their belts get them.

~J

I tend to pick tae kwon do, to be uninspirational.

However, I've been tempted to pick "Kirk Fu Do," just to get those cool haymakers and double-fisted back smashing attacks Cap'n Kirk always used.

Like me? But they took mine away 'cause I took an.. extended haitus. Yep. I am lame and proud of it.

LOL!

I do capoeira IRL, so obviously that's my favorite! For those asking, no, capoeira isn't very useful in a fight. It *can* be pretty brutal, especially in brazil, and some schools teach a more "combat" oriented style, but most of the schools (including mine) teach a no-contact version that I would not attempt to use in a street fight. You gain good reflexes, acrobatics and grace, which is nice to have, but, a person with 5 years training in karate is gonna kick the shit out of someone with 5 years training in capoeira.

Still, we capoeiristas have way more fun doing our stuff than most other forms of martial arts. I sure as hell prefer singing and dancing with hot chicks than bowing all the time and saying Hai! Hai! Domo!

I wasn't really joking. Too many people overlook the Forgotten Martial Arts of the Mysterious West. There's a general perception that because the Western arts are less formalized and less exotic, that they're somehow more primitive or less effective than the Eastern arts. Broadsword is as much a martial art as kenjitsu or escrima or any kung-fu weapons style, and it takes just as much training and skill to do right. It's not just shaggy barbarians bashing each other until someone's armor fails.

And it's a very effective style, and one that I'm quite good at.

Not necessarily... BUT when fighting with Capoeira you really need a lot of space. I used to train Jiu-Jiutsu at the same place where I'm now training Capoeira and the Capoeira class is much smaller because we need so much more space.

Now put the Karate-guy and the Capoeira-guy in a small corridor and the Capoeira-guy is most likely toast in about 5 seconds.

Oh, yeah! There you have it.

Oh, they deserve it, Kage. Everyone earns exactly as much as they have learned. So, in Hot Wheels' example, that TKD guy learned to do some fancy moves flashy enough to earn a black belt and how to shoot his mouth off.

I knew a guy who just couldn't stop bragging about his prowess in hand-to-hand 'cos he had a black belt in TKD. One day at a bar, some two-bit neighbourhood ganger didn't like all the hot air and told the loudmouth to split. As you can imagine, Mr. TKD got all truculent, pulled a pose and egged the ganger on to fight him. The ganger, a skinny little shrimp, just picked up his beer bottle and smacked over Mr. I-Have-A-Black-Belt's head and that was the end of it.

If you've ever been in a true-blue brawl in real life and tried the bottle stunt, you'll know it takes quite a lot to break a beer bottle on someone's head (not like in the movies, bubba). This bottle smashed over Mr. TKD's head, creating a bad gash, and the ganger proceeded to kick the shit out of the prone guy. Had to be pulled off and restrained till the cops got there.

Anyway, what I'm saying is that the guy probably did deserve his black belt after learning all the requisite techniques. He could probably hold his own in a controlled match environment one-on-one but out on the streets ...?

That's completely true. For example, Bruce Lee was an excellent innovator but ALL four of the Jeet Kune Do practitioners I've met to date are nowhere near close to his open-mindedness and don't live up to the legacy Lee left behind.

No martial art has consistently produced the world's best martial artists so I guess that's also a telling fact. Every martial art has its pros and cons, some more than others. I don't hold with learning a bit of the best of everything - that just makes for a lame ass fighter who doesn't have a good foundation to use what the most appropriate response in any given situation.

I do firmly believe that some martial arts are better than others in general. I know we all have our own biases but IMHO, the existing martial arts out there that don't deal with countering other than their own "type" of fighting (eg. strikers vs. grapplers) will eventually burn out if they don't evolve. To me, if you want to be able to FIGHT FOR REAL, the best that you can do today is learn a martial art with a healthy (perhaps proven) history of success that encompasses various aspects of real no-holds barred combat. Learn it and master it.

Hehehe, couldn't agree more! The very first day I started goju, my sensei asked that question of the newcomers: "Why are you here?"

The answer from those who had not learned martial arts previously was invariably: "To learn to defend myself." They got the shock of their lives when the sensei shredded those ideas there and then - they were all made to UNDERSTAND that if they continued with the dojo, they were there to learn how to FIGHT, pure and simple - kick guys in the goonies, gouge eyes, bite ears off, whatever it took to get OUT of a fight on YOUR TERMS. Goju would simply lend them the methods, techniques, instincts, and aggression to do it.

It was a rude awakening for 9 out of 10 newbies and the attrition rate in the dojo was about 90% every year because people came in with fancy ideas of learning how to become Jackie Chan, Jean-Claude van Damme, Bruce Lee, Wong Fei Hung, [insert colourful martial artist here], etc..

I'm speaking from the distinct bias of my own school, of course, but at the place where I trained he would not have been considered to have deserved a black belt. To me being a black belt implies a few things:

1) fairly good combat ability
2) the ability to continue one's own training effectively alone or at different schools; the ability to effectively incorporate new techniques without being shown how to do it by an instructor
3) the ability to judge one's own combat ability, not assume that one's belt will dazzle and amaze people so much that they will fall down at a punch.

So while he may have completed the requirements for his belt at his system, I happen to think a black belt actually means something, and thus don't consider him to have earned one.

~J

edit: Siege, the ability to defend myself means the ability to cause sufficiently massive harm to an opponent quickly enough to prevent them from causing harm to me. In some cases, this means the ability to cause rapid death to the opponent, though that should not be a desired outcome.
Do I pass?