I don’t get the “knife disabling” shit in those self-defence classes. If you’ve ever been punched in the face, you should know there’s a fucking low chance of dodging or deflecting one unless you’re anticipating it. Why would you assume you can catch a guy’s WRIST when he’s going straight for your BODY with a fucking knife?
EDIT:
Not talking about this video. He’s right.
Jesus Christ, it’s a fucking knife. You get caught off guard and it’ll be at least 3 fast, consecutive stabs before your brain even registers it. Shit, don’t get me started. I’ve not even gotten warmed up yet lol. I had this conversation with my wife a while back after she joined a fucking commercial gym self-defence class and I still have fucking PTSD from it.
I think this can serve as a confession:
In the end, the only way I could convince her that this is all bullshit was using fucking Hung Kar Fist techniques that my dad tried to drill into me when I was a kid to counter whatever she was trying to pull off on me.
Yes, I had to use shit that can’t be used in real life situations to counter shit that can’t be used in real life situations to convince someone that the shit she learnt can’t be used in real life situations because there was no other way. You don’t know my wife. Her brain works in mysterious ways. Probably spent too much time learning too much fucking math.
And it worked pretty DAMN WELL. And Alanis Morrissette doesn’t know the meaning of the word “ironic”. “Rain on your wedding day?”. That’s not called irony. That’s called “shit happens”. Fuck off.
Pretty much… at one point the hype just made me roll my eyes. Im surprised they didn’t claim it cured cancer. I remember reading articles on how to do them properly … I was like really ? How to do a high rep db row with excesive weight with a little cheat involved?
I’ve gone on a lot of long-winded rants about this before, so I’ll try to just summarize:
The “old school” martial arts can be dangerous, and they were dangerous at one point (ju-jutsu was the samurai’s unarmed combat style, after all), but the issue is they adapted in the wrong direction; as combat became undesirable, martial arts marketed themselves to the general public. Ju-jutsu is the perfect example of this. As it was dying out, judo was created by stripping away all the dangerous techniques so that poor little business men and school children weren’t accidentally ripping each other’s arms off (side note: judo is still a fantastic defensive art. Train it.)
Other arts, such as most wrestling styles and boxing/kickboxing, adapted themselves within their own circles to continually improve as dangerous arts.
I’ve met two or three “traditional” martial artists in my career as a coach. One was a member of my security team, who spent a number of years living in a monastery in China and was just… absolutely terrifying. The few times we sparred I just got ragdolled every which way with the most bizarre techniques.
The other was my old hapkido coach, who would similarly pull off the craziest techniques out of nowhere. One minute you’re trading strikes, the next he’s contorted your wrist in three different directions.
The issue is that the “why” of so many of these older arts has been lost, so no one understands the context of most of the techniques anymore. Truly sad.
I would seriously question this guy’s real background (not what you’re saying, but what he told you).
There are NO monasteries in China that teach you real martial arts meant for fighting. They simply don’t exist lol. That’s what you only see in movies. The Qing government put a stop to that IF they really did and the CCP obviously would never allow it.
What they learn there is wushu, which is, as I wrote above, meant for exhibition purposes.
There’s a reason why the CCP adapted boxing, Muay Thai, Western kickboxing and some kungfu kicks into something called Sanda, which was originally meant for people in the military.
EDIT:
I’m sure you have heard of Yi Long if you’re into this stuff. The dude was from a sports academy that trained people in Sanda but he claimed to be a “Shaolin monk” at first. Even the monks denied this lol.
I confess that I am thinking of turning to the dark side and giving strongman a go!! I further confess that every time I think this the other side of my brain tells me to stop being stupid and that its not a good idea.
You’re right, I should’ve specified that he claims to have spent years doing as mentioned. I have no way of verifying it exactly, but our mutual friends who knew him longer than I did confirmed he did 1) live in China for a few years, and 2) he came back a totally different person.
He already had martial arts experience before going, but whatever he learned from whomever he learned it from made him a handful. He also picked up a lot of “woo woo” mystical stuff while there.
He was also a bit of an antisocial, insufferable prick at times.
I get that he probably got lots of discipline drilled into him if he lived in a monastery and absorbed a lot of Chinese philosophy at the same time. There’re definitely some advantages to that. WRT to the former, it’s like how some people can completely change after just 3 months of boot camp. And shit from dudes like Lao zi can be mindblowing. The dude was a fucking genius IMO.
EDIT:
BTW, IIRC you’re into HK movies? ALL the old HK kungfu movies about the Shaolin temple featured mostly Hung Kar Boxing techniques because they were all choreographed by Lau Kar Leung. The popular ones were all directed by him (like 36 Chambers of Shaolin) or Chang Cheh with him serving as the action director.
There’s only ONE popular one, also directed by Lau Kar Leung, that features Northern kungfu shit. It’s the one starring Jet Li called “Shaolin Temple”. I think there was a quasi-sequel but it sucked.
Evolution doesn’t work so fast that we would get smarter as a collective over a thousand years. We have gathered more knowledge in that time, we educate more people, we live in more comfortable times so we can spend more time thinking, we can communicate much, much faster and with more people.
That can make us more effective at using our intelligence but there really is no reason for us to be getting smarter and evolution could decide it’s better for our survival to be dumber or social media could do the job for us.
Got vaccinated. Started asking stupid shit like the ester length while doing so. Requested a different shoulder because one hypothetically still has scar tissue. Dumbass hypothetical roidhead.
