[QUOTE=HumbleWCGuy;980125]What you are saying rings pretty hollow. You are trying to turn me into some sort of a straw man to knock down. I am sorry but the street-sport dichotomy exists irrespective of what you think just as their are obvious differences between cats and dogs. Ring effective isn’t the same as street effective although ring effective is a key component street effectiveness. One can have all the attributes and ring skill in the world but it is necessary to have the body of knowledge that gives you the best chance to survive a knife fight, gun attack, multiple attackers, and so on.
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You keep trying to create a dichotomy that isn’t there. You could point out that there are differences in all venues of fighting – the cage is different than the ring, for example. You try to point out that emptyhand fighting doesn’t prepare you for weapons – well, duh!
let me refer to a concrete example from my own experience where I was just trying to survive the legalities of the situation with 50 witnesses.
Someone who I deem to be a pretty weak fighter attacks me in a drug induced rage because I attempted to break up his fight. What should I do?
- Beat his face in ring-sport style and risk jail?
- Use some chin na that would never be useful in a ring setting to incapacitate him util the police arrived?
I chose to stay way on the good side of the law and used chin na.
Why spend the time learning and training something that is - by your own admission - not sound so that you can use that against scrubs and then spend time training stuff that is sound that you can use against good people? Why not just train sound, solid fundamental fighting skills? If you are a trained, skilled grappler, you could restrain someone - particularly a drunk scrub - without beating in his face. You don’t need crap like chin na to do that.
I could go on.
Now… as I have put it to throughout this thread, please explain to me how I am at a philosophical dead end because I teach chin na which has marginal ring effectiveness as part of my curriculum?
In wrestling they have a term “junk”. Junk is stuff that works at a certain level of wrestling but fails at higher levels. All competitive activities have this. It’s the stuff that works not because it is good, solid stuff (which will work against anyone) but because your opponent is poor. What you are essentially asking is why not train junk?
The simple answer is becase you don’t need it (if you have the good stuff).
Should I ignore the dichotomy and tell my students that they should have no problem getting off standing locks and rudimentary trips against an mma fighter? Should I stop teaching chin na because it isn’t ring effective? We practice these techniques with the same intensity that we would our ring techniques, although much of our chin na entries are predicated on using the mistakes that street fighters make.
There are several problems with junk. One of which is that it begins with an assumption that your opponent is a scrub – in other words, you begin by underestimating him. Do you think this is a good idea on “the streets”? What if you assume he is a scrub, try your junk and find out the guy has had some training – now the junk has put you in a bad place (you are doing something silly against someone who knows what he is doing). Why not start with the assumption that he is good, that he will have skills, and go from there? As I said, you can do the same things with good, sound stuff as you can with junk.
