I have been planning on doing some martial arts for a while. With martial arts I mean something which teaches me how to fight/defend myself like kung fu, eskrima, … (other things I’ve seen in movies, read in stories, …)
My reasons for choosing martial arts is manyfold. First because I have the feeling I should do a sport. Movement is supposedly good for body and mind, however I must admit that the mind aspect of it sounds more interesting to me. I have been keeping myself healthy by watching what I eat and drink, and not with sports.
During my internship I have noticed that after a full day’s work as a programmer, my mind is to tired to do anything mentally difficult (like more programming). This is especially the case further on in the week. Monday was doable, Tuesday very difficult and so on. While my mind is spent in the evening, my body has had little exercise.
But as I have little to no experience in sports or fitness I found it difficult to select something so I tried the ‘functional’ approach to selecting type of sport. The one with the most benefits. Most sports have the exercise aspect of it. (not counting things like chess and stuff)
Interesting options to me are: parcours, paintball, martial arts. These because they offer something extra both in a bad-ass way as in a utilitarian way. Running and climbing through urban environment, learning how to handle a gun (and it’s fun), learning self defence.
Martial arts seemed like the best idea as it was more practical(available teaching) and cheaper than paintball. But I bumped into the next hurdle: choosing a ‘style’. There are a lot of different types of martial arts. Many of which I don’t even know what they are or how they differ.
Aikido, Combat, Judo, Karate, Kung Fu, Ninjutsu, Eskrima, Tai Chi, and many, many more. So as I knew most about Kung Fu since I watched movies like The Karate Kid 1-4 + remake, Kung Fu Panda 1-3, and a couple others I can’t recall at the moment. It seemed like an interesting choice.
Next problem is that even within Kung Fu there are multiple different kinds. The 5 animals, the n forms, the whatever… Again choices, so after reading about it for a day or two I put it to rest for a while.
A couple of months later I was reading a web novel* and the main character practices Eskrima and it helped him with knife fighting. This stuck with me for some reason and caused me to look up some martial arts that involve knife fighting. Mostly because it seemed like a good idea to learn how to fight with a knife in modern day society thinking something along the lines of “If I’m going to be in enough danger that I need to fight, it would probably be either a gun-fight or a knife-fight in today’s modern society.” This being in contrast to swords and bows or something. “And as a gun seems impractical, because it is not permitted in many countries and seems difficult to obtain, knife training seems like the best option.”
So I started to look for types of martial arts that practice with a knife. Until I stumbled on this site’s article: ‘Knife fighting lies’* which was quite the eye opener for me… I kept following links and kept and kept reading. It just kept coming and breaking apart all my preconceptions and ideas about self defence with martial arts.
Some points made on this site were: (loosely interpreted, read the actual site to draw conclusions because everything is more nuanced) safety begins way before a fight starts pulling a knife out is more likely to cause harm than do any good you would be better of trying to prevent the fight or doing everything in your power to flee than even considering to fight people that are seriously trying to kill you (instead of scaring you) will not give you the time to get your knife you wil end up in jail if you survive, because you don’t even know what self defence means legally martial arts will not help you in a knife fight
Well just read the article about ‘Knife fighting lies’ and you’ll probably get a reality shock as I did. After that I kept on reading more about the martial arts part of the site. One article* explained 5 different purposes for martial arts: Self-defense/professional use of force, Tradition/physical art/self-discipline, Spiritual/health, Sport/tournament, Demonstration. Which I thought was an interesting way of putting it. (this was after having read a lot of the other articles on the site about violence and self defence etc)
Another article* was about choosing a Martial Arts style. This one kind of crushed my hopes of finding something really good. Because in here the writer explains that a lot of the training available is a generalised/commercialised form that has lost a lot of it’s use in actual combat situations. He goes on to say that it doesn’t really matter which style you choose, as long as you get the full techniques, not the (majority) watered down ones. And after that he tells that everyone believes they are teaching the ‘real’ style. So asking someone is not going to help. This article kind of crushed my hopes of finding a teacher who can teach what I would want to learn. Because I don’t know anything about fighting, martial arts, combat, whatever… it would be near impossible to find a teacher that matches my purposes. And as it is unlikely that I will end up in a situation where I would need to use it, I would be unable to validate it.
So I’ll put it to rest for while… …again.
Maybe I’ll look into parcours next. I saw an episode from ‘The Tim Ferriss Experiment’* about it and it seems much more achievable now. (especially the cat jumps seem like a quick win!)
http://royalroadl.com/fiction/25 Necromancer by Halosty at royalroadl.com http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/knifelies.html http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/four_focuses.html http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/evalMA.htm http://fourhourworkweek.com/tv/