the rum soaked fist: internal martial arts forum

when it come to politics here, everyone researches and comes up with all sorts of debates on evidence presented

but when it comes to neijia and fighting, and comparing to todays fighters, everyone argues and ignores evidence and only resort to bringing up legends and stories of people from the past.

in order for one to fix a problem, one must admit their is a problem to begin with.

beegs wrote:in order for one to fix a problem, one must admit their is a problem to begin with.

The vast majority of neijia practitioners are practicing for health, not fighting ability. For those people, the fact that few can't effectively fight with it is irrelevant. Most teachers cater to this demand. It isn't a problem.

There are lots of practitioners who say, "Yeah, I want to be able to use this stuff to fight", but few are willing to train it as is necessary to reach that goal - even with the proper instruction. The problem, I believe, is less with the instruction and more with the fantasy/wishful thinking of many a practitioner. For most, it appears to be exercise with an academic /philosophic twist. It is so much more fun to practice to trigrams, 8 energies, blah, blah, blah, then it is to, for example, just to do reps in a gym. And, there is nothing wrong with that, as long as no one misrepresents it as something it ain't.

For the relatively few who REALLY want to be able to effectively fight with it, most of what is being taught as "internal martial arts" is largely irrelevant to developing fighting abilities. The few who REALLY want to use it to fight, find teachers who can teach them to do that, albeit it isn't easy to do so with such a low signal to noise ratio. The problem exists only for a relatively few.

my two cents worth.

i agree with most of what your saying.

problem is that alot of people who arent training realistic fighting, think that they are.

i have no problem accepting people training for health, people dont need to train fighting, i think the people who discuss the fighting and feel the need to compare to todays fighters, are really in the dark.

So what is "realistic fighting"? How do you define it?
Ritualized combat? Sport combat? Unforeseen violent encounter? Military combat? Arresting and controlling by LEOs? High school scrap?
Different objectives require different training.

Also, it's worth noting that there seems to be a sort of "placebo" effect with training a martial art/system, even if you're not training it in an entirely "realistic" way. One British study showed that victims of violent crime who trained just a few simple combat movements for a short period of time were no longer identified as victims by potential assailants due to gains in confidence which translated into better posture.

In other words, if you think your a badass and you walk down the street like a badass, your less of a target for violent crime.
Doesn't mean your a good fighter, of course.

it doesnt matter how you define it at this point, more the point ois that even in the past, the masters who trained for non sport also publically had matches at times to compare skills.

that doesnt happen today, no matter what the objectives , people still need to train under some sort of pressure and agression and we dont even see that in neijia arts evn in training (generally speaking)

I noticed with some of the taichi crowd ( forutnatelly there are a lot of exceptions:))- there exists only 2 stages sometimes 1. not high level enough so my taichi is useless 2. got gigh level - its too deadly to demonstrate in sparring now.

Lack of evidence in the affirmative does not equate to evidence for the negative. Furthermore, evidence has to apply directly to the question at hand, and in most cases it's just not available one way or the other. Mostly, it all comes down to faith, and when was the last time you changed someone else's faith-based beliefs?

lack of evidence in the affirmative does not equate to evidence for the negative. Furthermore, evidence has to apply directly to the question at hand, and in most cases it's just not available one way or the other. Mostly, it all comes down to faith, and when was the last time you changed someone else's faith-based beliefs?

hers some of the evidence we do see








theirs plenty more vids to find, but you wont find one with the opposite result. I think that is evidence enough to acknowledge that once formidable arts are falling by the wayside . Past neijia masters did things in public with positive outcomes in realtion to testing their skills against other arts, what we see now is the complete opposite for many years

these are people that obviously do not spar enough.

Someone who can't keep their hands in front of their face is a master?

Someone who can't keep their hands in front of their face is a master?

unfortunatley many masters never had a fight, you can even master body skills and forms and push hands but have no clue of fighting

this one is funny, drunken kung fu

its very strange how one calls oneself a master but cannot throw a proper straight punch in a real fight.
AND propose to teach students kung fu... it's amazing

Strange wrote:its very strange how one calls oneself a master but cannot throw a proper straight punch in a real fight.
AND propose to teach students kung fu... it's amazing

Is it really all that uncommon? There's no vetting process. Folks can just hang a shingle without any real quality control.

Sometime it is best to leave well alone! One just cannot tell pepole they are misled so just let the good times roll!
It's all good!