Yes, we didn’t talk about weapons yet. Or dirty tricks that can help you win a fight and to watch out for. Or running away, which is the best self defense technique ever.
I don’t want to detract from your points, which I agree with, but those guys in that video were passing up kill opportunities.
The Great Shout!
The pig-woman dropped her pipe. She rose in a swift, blurred movement that startled Raederle. The vagueness dropped from her face like a mask, revealing a strength and sorrow worn into it by a knowledge of far more than Raith’s pigs. She drew a breath and shouted, “What?”
The shout cracked like lightning out of the placid sky. Raederle, flinging her arms futilely over her ears, heard above her own cry the shrill, terrified cries of rearing horses, and the breathless, gasping voices of men struggling to control them. Then came a sound as unexpected and terrible as the pig-woman’s shout: the agonized, outraged protest of the entire pig herd of Hel.
You are perhaps misunderstanding me. When you say “street fights” you’re talking about variations of sexual dominance displays, right? Where nobody is intended to actually die? Those are tournaments; there are rules. BJJ is a great set of techniques and exercises for performing in that arena.
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Well, as a humble arm chair practitioner working on my inevitable deadliness watching youtube videos, I feel fairly certain I have found the perfect fighting art in Master Kens Ameri-Dote. To wit:
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No, it will also dramatically increase your odds of surviving a real street fight for reasons already mentioned.
Edit: My instructor has made explicit that there is a distinction between BJJ as an art form/tournament skill, BJJ techniques used in MMA, and BJJ techniques that are useful for street fighting. @anon89609066 nailed it when he said it’s not about the art but about the techniques derived from the art and how they’re applied.
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Came to say this! The Tai-Chi guy in the video may be technically proficient but he clearly knows fuck all about actual application.
Lol, that too!
Chen style is the most obvious about it. The others you pretty much have to know at least one or more other martial arts to be able to “map” the movements to something effective. Most styles of martial arts have at least 3-4 useful applications for each technique, beyond which you’re doing a different technique! Conversely, Tai-Chi (any style) tends to have half a dozen or a dozen possible applications for each movement. I’d say it’s one of the purest families of martial arts out there, but as a result requires a lot more practice to really be effective. In other words a much higher bar to entry (use in a real fight) than other arts.
Well said!
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Oss. BJJ is the hardest workout I’ve ever had. When you roll 10 or 12 six minute rounds back to back, you develop a stamina that I have not experienced in any other martial art.
Also, to echo your comments… there’s tournament BJJ for points, and then there’s the real BJJ. Both are valuable, because the points style teaches you to always be looking for how to advance your position, no messing around. Street style teaches you more practical stuff like bury your head in guillotine; don’t armbar a dude in a fight if there are other dudes about to kick you in the head… stuff like that.
For your comment about other schools vs white belts… hrm… since we don’t do a lot of striking it’s hard to compare. The only time I have trouble with “a new guy” is if he’s really large and squishes me before I can respond, so I’m just stuck there waiting for him to make a move. But he can’t do anything because he doesn’t know anything, yet I’m stuck under his body weight until time up or he decides to try something. Kind of annoying but not really a big deal.
Typically, though, we don’t have a lot of buttheads walking through the doors. People are pretty humble on entry, because they look around and see a wash of color on the mat and know they better behave.
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The elephant in the room about Tai Chi is that it teaches you how to shift your weight no matter what might be going on up top. It is essentially slow motion boxing. For that reason alone, it’s worth knowing at least a little bit about it. When you push-hands with someone who practices every day, you cannot touch them. They are like water: hardly there and then crashing into you all at the same time. It’s amazing. But frustrating. It looks like someone is just doing a dance. Really, they are feeling every movement.
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The corollary to that is it teaches you to coordinate your muscles. When you can stretch a short form out to 45min or an hour without breaking a sweat then you’ll become faster and more powerful than you ever imagined! 
(For the curious that’s moving at a rate of no more than a few millimeters per second and is a useful exercise in any style.)
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I’m going to invent something like an electric eel suit that makes a force field all around me so I can stand there doing 1/1000th speed repulse monkey and it actually works… they touch me and are thrown backwards with the white hot force of a thousand suns.
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Saving this to watch later - I’ve been wanting to see something like this for a while.
I really do recommend that sword defense video, if you didn’t watch it yet.
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Yeah, I love it. It’s a classic. Thanks!!!
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This.
And a good teacher gets even most of the idiots to realise it.
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Pft a year? These elite students did it in six months.
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So much this… luck, chance, freak accidents, etc. play a huge role in any kind of combat, no matter the size or scale…
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Really awesome video on the early days of bjj in America here:
Skews heavily toward the Helio side of the Gracie family, but is absolutely fantastic.
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The little nod at 3:44… lol
