crimsonking wrote:
So, in answer to my first question a person with superior attributes to available training partners can’t develop a high level of martial skill.
**The answer to your question lies in what it takes to train any competitive athlete. Of course one needs to work against good training partners; one will never reach one’s full potential or the higher levels of performance without that. No athlete does. (Do you think anyone can become a world-class boxer without ever getting into the ring with other world-class boxers?). The Gracies have a saying: “you’re only as good as your training partner.” There is a lot of truth in that. However, not everyone we train with has high-level skills or attributes. So, in that situation, we can still derive benefit from the training but we need to first recognize that to develop beyond where we are, we need to be pushed to perform close to our limit of performance. One way to get soemthing from training with an “inferior” training partner is to manipulate the situation, so that the conditions remove or diminish our superiority and thus force us to push ourselves.
You’ve also failed to answer my second question about training a person with inferior attributes - perhaps you failed to understand the question. I can only assume you believe it’s also impossible for a person with inferior attributes to available training partners to develop their martial skill, while it may still not be enough to enable them to ‘hang’ with them.
**As I said, the answer lies in how any competitive athlete trains. If a person goes to a BJJ class, they are going to often roll with folks that have a wide range of attributes and skills, from grossly inferior skills and attributes to some with superior skills and superior attributes; if you go to a boxiing gym or MT school or etc. you’ll enconter the same thing. This goes on all the time in any competitive athletic field. And they seem to do OK.
Both the scenarios i’ve given are real world examples - sounds like a pretty flawed training methodology.
**Well, it seems to work in the “real world” of the fighting arts and other athletic endeavors. But what we haven’t heard is what you think is a better training methodology.
Regardless - what place DO you believe theory has in martial training? It would seem to me that in either of these unequal attribute scenarios, let alone more evenly matched situations, its pretty unlikely that a single technique like a gaun sao will occur in a repeatable enough way for finer details to be developed. IMO, these finer details make a big difference when facing an opponent with superior attributes.
**As you may recall – well, let me just repost part of it:
"one develop the strategies, tools, etc. of their method. They do that by training – learning the form/technique/strategy/etc., drilling it until they feel comfortable, then putting it into fighting practice. As they progress in this training regimen, they’ll find how to “personalize” the method to suit their individual natural “attribute level” – and they can only learn to do that via fighting practice. "
**This training method is really a cycle or loop (one used by all fighters btw), one “learns” the tool, the guan sao in this case, drills it (and this is where we get the repetitions), and then put it into fighting to see how well that works for me. My fighting experience will cause me to adjust or modify how I want to use that tool, so I will go back and drill it that way. Then I put it back into fighting. It’s a continual process of development. The linked sets don’t tell you specifically how to use that tool. The drills don’t tell you how to specifically use that tool. The theory (kuit, whatever) gives you a point of departure for your own inquiry. In the end, you need to make it your own. There is no objective right way to use the tool (although there are wrong ways); there is only the way that works best for you. The training method I outlined, that all fighters use, is how you do that.