What do you think about MMA?

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You're also essentially learning from the equivalent of a rent-a-cop really with even fewer protections, which means if he's on duty and squeezes someone's trachea like that his odds of going to jail for excessive force are pretty good.

Sure, but I hardly think he would use an inferior technique when his life is on the line, even if the judicial consequences would be more severe. I don't know about US laws, but over here a bouncer would have to mess up a knife-wielding attacker pretty good before a judge would send him to jail. Bouncers are given a lot of leeway. A guy I worked with, a complete psychopath, used to regularly fight with patrons and as far as I know he was only arrested once.

There's always the possibility that he just doesn't have familiarity with Kuntao. The problem I try to run into with even explaining it is a) can't find viable Youtube support to bring words to visual, b) the stuff I'm learning, I literally don't have any place in my imagination to find impracticality in it; I can see a lot of McDojo stuff out there, I remember taking Tae Kwon Do and hating it, feeling like I wasn't learning how to deal with anything or even learning to fight worse, whereas with what I'm learning right now - the specific way we integrate Kuntao, Wing Chun, Kali, Arnis, Chi Na, and even Muay Tai and Jiu Jitsu - even by yellow belt I was feeling much more self-assured. One of my friends referred me to this guy, he himself was on the quest to find good martial arts, if there were any, in my area and he had a lot of people he went to including a pastor who's a black-belt in Jiu Jitsu, my friend himself I think is a black belt by now as well as a black belt via my current instructor, my friend never ran out of great things to say about Kali and to this day but unfortunately while he can find good Jiu Jitsu nearly anywhere (he's down in Miami now) he can't find anyone who can teach Kali right and he's complaining that even the masters down there are teaching some really bad/impractical techniques. My teacher has learned a lot about Jiu Jitsu from my friend but my teacher also has that other guy, the JJ instructor, come in and they're trading info - ie. more detailed Jiu Jitsu for my instructor in trade for him teaching the JJ instructor our system; which the guy and the other senior belt he brings with him are liking it a lot.

I guess this is why I'm having trouble really coming to grips with a lot of this conversation - as in I *know* better than to believe that straight on UFC is stronger in and of itself technique-wise unless they've got some kind of Kuntao or Gung Fu integrated at a minimum. I'll give it that you have much more inherently aggressive meat-headed guys going in there and that's a huge part of fighting but, my instructor is coming from that kind of place as well (albeit our classes aren't 'quite' like that), but I think my main argument is that a lot of these big, naturally aggressive guys you know who are bouncing - if they had my instructor's system they'd still see something pretty close to a night-and-day difference in their stand-up game. I think with the more traditional arts though its not that their useless, its that you have to know which ones have something to be gleaned from them and essentially trim the fat off on your own as they'll have a mix of both very good techniques and very poor ones. If you do meet an instructor who's gone to the trouble of doing most of that on their own and integrating, its a much different thing you're learning. The problem is though, even if you live in some place like London, Edinburgh, or Cardiff, you're likely to find one, maybe two, tops, of these kind of instructors. Its part of why even if I had to get a new job and took a pay cut because of lack of anything good available, I'd still stay here just to continue and finish out my martial arts; I really doubt that I could find the caliber of what I'm taking even in many other large metropolitan areas.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is what I gathered from your previous posts:

- Your instructor doesn't believe in full-contact sparring or rolling
- he teaches 'organ-rupturing' strikes, and that a hard punch in the throat is a reliable way to kill someone.

Those are two huge red flags for anyone who frequently winds up in real fights. He wouldn't have any credibility with the bouncers I knew, no matter how good his stuff sounds in theory. As you said, naturally aggressive meatheads tend to gravitate towards MMA. The training methods mimic real fights much more.

No, he just teaches means of sending/transferring your body weight and where to hit. He's never made a claim in that direction. When he even goes 10% on us though we could infer as much.


No, I'd suggest you're still painting the kind of cartoon character in your mind that it seems you want to see for whatever reason.


Do me a favor though; point me to some videos on Youtube where you'd argue that the alpha techniques for MMA are being shown. I'd guarantee that we already have most of it in our system if its any good.

That is fighting 101. Every striking art/sport teaches that.



And it doesn't mean a thing if you don't practice it against a resisting opponent. I can teach a beginner an arm bar in a couple of minutes, but he will never acquire the sensitivity and sense of timing to get it on an uncooperative opponent unless he frequently rolls.

Fighting isn't nearly as complicated as traditional martial artists make it out to be; stand up will generally be dominated by the fighter with the best hands, while the grappling aspect will most often be dominated by the fighter who can get the positional advantage. Athleticism and toughness are the other variables. You practice by sparring against people of your own skill level and you move up as you get better. As with every activity that requires you to overcome a competitor (be it in the ring or against a real life attacker), competition breeds skill and weeds out the stuff that doesn't work. In TMA this is completely absent; you learn a fixed set of techniques and you don't evolve them and you don't actually learn which of them work best for you by applying them in different situations.

You seem to think that I have no clue what traditional martial arts are about. I have trained in and studied enough traditional martial arts to know what I'm talking about. As a matter of fact, the reason I am so ardently defending MMA is precisely because I am so familiar with TMA. You, on the other hand, have you ever taken the time to lace up the gloves and spar against a 260 lbs. roidhead in your local MMA gym? It might shatter a lot of long-held beliefs that you always took for granted.

I actually want to do that in a few years time once I get my blackbelts in Kuntao, Kali, and Wing Chun. I know for certain that the pace is different, that I probably will eat some pretty good punches early on just because its a much different pace, however I'm quite confident in my training that after a few months I'd be looking great in the ring, lucky shots would be few and far between, and that nothing I've learned from my current teacher would work to my detriment. Even if I can't hit C1, C2, throat, neck, etc. or deliver elbows in certain ways - we have enough other tools that I'm okay with it for the sake of building fighters' intuition at the full contact level.

OTOH I'll clarify - my teacher wants to train all types and because of that we don't do full contact sparring; he's specifically against touch-sparring on the grounds that it puts people in the habit of not sending force through. We've got FBI, local law enforcement, even Sky Martials in our class, and I get the impression that regardless of whether they're making full contact or not they will not be in any kind of world of hurt with the techniques they're learning if they have any kind of common sense at all that if you're in a real fight you really need to be violent and overbearing. Obviously if they do the stupid thing, that a lot of pedestrians do, of punching and then pulling back to see what the results were or if they're okay, that they'll get their arses kicked. Thankfully I don't think we have too many people in our class who are that dumb or who would try to do a semi-complex throw or takedown on an opponent who's fully healthy and who they haven't landed several good strikes on already.

It's still worlds different from TKD or any of the stuff my parents pushed me at as a kid. That stuff I felt vulnerable and like my strikes wouldn't work, with this I feel like my strikes could own someone easily. I might not have the full contact practice yet on people rather than standing bags but I know if I made contact it would do some real damage.

I do it as a hobby and to stay fit.
Nothing professional though, no going all out (although I do get into the ring and trade punches and all, just not looking to "kill"). Still, it's fun, demanding and keeps chalenging me (random minor injuries occur, but hey, it's inevitable, and they are really minor... so far).

Surprisingly, I don't have such a big interest in the sport (or in any other). I'll watch a fight or two, but I can't sit through an entire UFC, nor will I ever attend to a live competition, with so many screaming, cheering people.

I love MMA it is one of my main special interests.

As this bears on I feel kind of bad about how I phrased things in my first post. I think a better term for my distinction - MMA (mixed martial arts), MTMA (mixed traditional martial arts) or better MITMA (mixed integrated traditional martial arts). All of the above are as strong as your instructor though so getting that right is paramount.

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Last edited by alex_br on 27 Apr 2012, 11:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I'm just going to say, from reading a few posts, I noticed there was mention of poking the eyes, groin shots, and other "Cheap shots" I'll call em, being used in a real street fight. Unless you are 100 percent confident you can beat that person, or run away after hurting them those ways, it's a terrible idea to do something like that. Those are the sort of actions that can turn a typical scrap into a murder scene.

Yeah, they're typically things that you'd do if you're trying to go the other route and turn what would have been a murder scene (you) into running away or subduing the person when you can't run. Clearly if someone does do something like that though they really need to keep pounding on the person, not step back and see if it worked or not while the other person regains their focus.

There are some gross misconceptions about those killer shots, dim maks whatever.

The chance of you poking an eye against a reactive oponent is really slim. And even if they weren't, poking an eye is really taking the fight to another level, so be very careful.

Last edited by alex_br on 27 Apr 2012, 11:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It seems like the progression is getting into someone's guard or attacking their guard, stunning them, stunning them harder and harder, using each reflex reaction to line one shot into the next, and really nothing complex is much an option until they're pretty much gone upstairs but possibly still standing. Also, doing dim mak (ie. strikes to the head, neck, throat etc. supported from the other side) its quite a novel situation, in the worst possible sense, and its *never* something you'd do in anything like a normal circumstance. For it to even make sense they'd not only have to be out to kill you but they'd either have to be of the variety that they'd never stop or, alternately, there are five people trying to kill you and you need to make a blatant example of someone - fast.