Welcome to Gaia! ::

I prolly spelled that wrong.
But whatever.

Okay.
So, I'm almost a black belt in TKD.
But the other day, my very realist and critical friend was like "Martial arts do s**t. I can have a gun or a knife and you'd be dead"
I'm like "With the gun, you're right. Unless I could deliver a quick inside kick and knock it out, I'm dead. But with a knife, I can reverse it to hit your stomach"

He's like "Really? Lets try" and he pretends to hold a knife. I knew the techniqe to make it backfire. But he was moving. My teacher never told us what to do in this situation.
So I realized something.
I can do s**t. I can't defend myself in a realistic world.

BUT.
I'm not going to stop.
It only made me realize that I need to get better.

I think that TKD is useless to a low-level practitioner.
There's only so much a snap kick can do for you.

I realize, though, that if you train correctly, a single kick can bring your opponent down.
But then again...
Yeah.

So, I just wanted to share that with you. 8D

I have no idea how that slipped my mind. xD
Thank you very much.

Congratulations...You've just realized on your own the inadequacies of most Traditional Martial Arts (TMAs). I briefly mentioned about this in the other thread of yours but I'll expatiate here.



Hylonomus makes a really valid point. Most serious "street" encounters are likely to involve a weapon and a lot of self defense minded martial artists train with some perception of an encounter with weapons involved. Yet IMHO martial arts (w/ the rare exception presumably) generally are not effective means of contemporary self defense. I really believe the idea of learning martial arts for self defense is a naive fantasy. Not to say that defending yourself w/ martial arts is impossible (in which case, alive arts tend to have a better success rate than static or traditional styles) but rather that it's realistically impractical in today's day and age. If you are someone who lives in an environment where it is probable that you'd be assaulted, there are just as effective and much more practical means of self defense (mace being one example) than what Budokan Karate or _ing _hun or whatever martial art (even alive arts like Muay Thai and BJJ) could teach you.

However, very few martial artists are able to accept this. Rightfully so, nobody wants to realize that the time they've spent learning has been wasted on techniques and training that are ineffective. In fact, prior to Bruce Lee and more so the Gracies and the advent of MMA, the martial arts world was blissfully ignorant of their ineffectiveness...After all, they don't train to hurt people, they do it for "self defense" and as such, there was no real outlet to gauge the effectiveness of their training outside of light contact sparring (which still doesn't act as an effective means of practice for those highly touted "illegal techniques" that TMAers are so quick to point out). The UFC quickly made an example out of the ineffectiveness of training for most traditional martial arts.

Good for you for your epiphany, however you're still being somewhat naive and coming to the wrong conclussions, let's analyze:



You see this in movies all the time but do you realize how difficult it actually is kick something out of someone's hand? Try it, tell your friend to hold something gun shaped or atleast something w/ a handle and try kicking it out of his hands. Consider that someone who's got a gun pointed at you will likely be gripping it w/ a visegrip since it's a matter of life or death. Not to mention that the average reaction time is a quarter of a second, you'd have to somehow kick faster and travel a distance much longer than the distance he has to squeeze his trigger finger to pull the trigger.



I'm going to assume the technique you were taught was taught statically, meaning you started from a decent distance away and your partner thrust his knife out (once) and held his arm out while he let you grab ahold of him and disarm him correct? The same way most traditional martial arts teach it right?



Here's where you really should reconsider. So you think that because you couldn't realistically use a disarming technique on your friend's resisting attempt to knife you, you're the one at fault and that if you only just practice it more you'd eventually get so good that you can pull it off so fast and effectively that it can work. Well yeah, if you do continue to practice it in the manner that you were likely taught, you will get faster at doing the technique. However, it still likely won't translate effectively because it's not the martial artist at fault, it's the technique and the training of it that is at fault. Continuing to practice a static technique will teach you how to do a static technique, it will not however teach you how to realistically defend against someone who's intently trying to knife you. How can it? Practicing against a static opponent who's not moving and not resisting you is nowhere nearly the same (as you've come to realize) as practicing against an opponent who's actually moving and actually trying to knife you. Can you honestly tell me that someone on the street is going to step forward into a forward stance and thrust at you once, leaving his arm out for you to grab and disarm him? Too often, TMAists THINK they have experience handling a street fight/self defense situation, yet they train statically in unrealistic ways, so in reality, they actually don't have experience handling a street fight/self defense situation because they don't train against real resisting "alive" opponents.



True, it can, so can a single haymaker of a punch, but do you truly have an understanding of the dynamic spacing, timing, and motion to be able to effectively deliver that technique? Alive training such as sparring teaches you this, static drills do not.

So here's the bottom line: If you're looking to learn martial arts for self defense, you're IMHO barking up the wrong tree, especially if that tree is a TMA that emphasizes static training. There are far more factors to a street fight/self defense situation outside of just the physical act of fighting that most martial art schools won't teach you (such as the really nitpicky legal definitions of self defense and the legal rammifications of assault). I say forget about learning martial arts for self defense because it's just not really practical (there are plenty of people who go through their lives without being in an actual physical confrontation and if you're someone who is in an environment that is prone to violence, then there are more pragmatic alternatives of self defense). If you want to learn to fight, you're best bet is IMO a martial art w/ a sport form of fighting (sport being a "safe" evolution of warfare), that or continue learning martial arts for other benefits, just realize that you really aren't likely to be a good fighter learning primarily w/ static forms of training.

Now you will either react in two of the following ways: 1. Denial, you'll come up w/ excuses and claim that your martial art trains differently, childishly ignore the bulk of my logical deductions and keep on living in your naive fantasy (which is to to deny the results of your expirament of how effective your martial arts training really has been) or 2. Reconsideration, you'll take a hard objective look at your martial arts school and your training thus far, actually digest what i've said like a mature person would, and reconsider your motives for martial arts and if chundokwan taekwondo really is for you.