the water, the water is running
Rocking up like a marvel cinematic universe cameo after all this time
I cannot overstate how much I enjoy martial arts practice. I was a fat, clumsy nerd in grade school and martial arts literally changed my life. While I did manage to make my countryâs national team once back in the 80s I was never really a high-level athlete and always had to work thrice at hard at everything to just keep up, but that just made the challenge more personally satisfying. Still, I never deluded myself that I could make a living thru the arts. It was instead, what kept me sane after my day job in engineering. The people who were dedicated competitors or making a living out of being instructors tended also to become more and more narrow in their focus. Their practice and instruction tended to exploit the particular rulesets and to emphasize athletic conditioning, all for good reason, sure. You want to get better at what you do. But I always felt that sometimes, particularly in MMA circles, the kind of broad-interest sorta-hobbyists like yours truly often had something to contribute. I have actually beaten people training for local events doing just the experimental things one dabbles in precisely because of that broad hobbyist outlook. And sometimes the over-specialized people need an occasional reminder to go back to basics or to look sideways.
Of course, I live in a place with very poor general MMA/BJJ/MT levels, so my personal experience may not be the best thing from which to generalize, at all.
Still, I am nowhere healthy enough to compete at any level anymore, but the hobbyist love remains and sometimes I try to help out at least as a semi-static live target, so maybe we are still useful in some fashion.
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I think the issue is that none of us are really curing cancer. So to be really good at martial arts is cool and all that.
But if you are trying to impose a status that you have effectively made up on to other people who may not share your values.
Then you can take that and fuck off.
I for example am excellent at delivering letters from a motorcycle. I donât run around expecting anyone else to care.
This is an interesting turn of phrase.
One wonders about how that would be defined, and measured, and how the conditions of non-transitive elements and conditions apply.
For that matter, what is a martial art, how do they differ from combat sports, or real violent practices, and in what circumstances is a martial art applicable to violence, in practiceâŚ
The whole dynamic is kind of man made. So determined by whover believes in it i suppose.
Which is where this pro fighter vs hobbyists and who has more right to martial arts space kind of comes from.
Joey swoll does a thing on the same dynamic between gym influences? i guess.( not sure what they are called) and casuals and who has more right to gym space.
The part I found interesting in the clip was how he teaches people his weakness or what he needs to work on, creating an environment where he can simulate situations over and over again in different scenarios (different people are going to react differently). Based on his competitive results it seems to work well, even with people who arenât pro. That approach can expand to other aspects like security simulations or red / blue team approaches / simulations. Itâs a really clever approach.
The hobbyist related to the energy, people who where there because they were having fun, not because it is their job. I think that also relates outwards, work with people who are passionate. The best people i know are those that do their job after hours because itâs what they do.
I think whether or not anyone has an opinion on what i do in my spare time, and whether or not i should be doing it, if iâm noob or not, has nothing to do with me. They can have any opinion they want, i rate progress on whether or not iâm better today than i was yesterday. I do it because i want to do it. People are going to be a head of you, or behind you, focus on your own improvement and progress. Comparison is the death of happiness âŚ
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What does that mean?
If you rode a push bike Iâd be more impressed
Here anyway. Pro fighters and hobbiests have to share the same room. And the instructor time.
So if you are some big gun super fighter. You still have to work around (or with) the soccer mum.
Oh, I see what you mean, or meant, know.
You mean access to a training facility, or training facilities.
Yeah. Or even acces to social status I suppose? Or an equal opinion.
Which is probably why BJJ black belts get away with being so rapey.
I did a write up of over 200 current martial arts and combat sports coaches who were sexual predators.
There was a wide representation across the different combat sports, and different martial arts.
BJJ, in fact, was on the lower end. However, I suspect that is because they are a small percentage of the over all martial art coaches, although they certainly gained a lot of numbers in the past 20 years.
I did make a point to run every registered BJJ black belt with the major orgs (a few thousand BJJ black belts) against the US national sex offender registry, although beltchecker.com did not exist at that time.
I also suspect that the more adherence to Japanese style or Asian style culture, rank belt systems, âdonât question authority figuresâ, and the more âloyaltyâ cult dynamics are at play, the higher the rate of occurrence, and the higher the rate of cover up.
So, I strongly recommend that Japanese authority culture trappings be considered to be rejected, as they create some vulnerabilities, and negative outcomes.
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BJJ is becoming the modern day vision of Judo?
Black belts for everyone!
But in reality, one particular guy, who is now dead, tried and partially succeeded in doing the same sort of thing with Judo, or order to popularize it, and of course, line his own pockets.
Still, some of the driver material was good.
OT, ,butâŚ
You mean driver/roller/ etc. terminology?
The Good Ole Phil stuff.
We take and took the Good.
Phil cribbed all his âgood stuffâ, my friend. You are aware of that, right?
Rollers/drivers, power hand, locking hand, all that stuff.
What would Solomon, and those he crib noted say?