I used to do asset protection, for a US company .. here in the US. Never ever carried a gun, never want to for a living. But I did go though training on threats, and this sort of stuff.

Its bullshit training, amounts to a school that give you a black belt just because you showed up.

You cannot shoot any one under a percieved threat. It better be a monster threat, because as a mercenary you operate under the radar therefore your punishment will be under the radar.

I agree, "collusive" (what you normally see in aikido)practice is useless. Forget about all that stuff they teach about ki and inner power. all it amounts to is good balance, and attacking the attacker.

I do like good discourse about the difference between art and discipline.

MMA is sport, as is kendo (fencing) and there are rules, as in all things. But in real "combat" (rare) there are no rules, and if only we could train like that can we be sure of any thing.

BTW That video below ... is really funny.

In reply to this comment by chilaxe:
Thanks for your response. I think if practitioners are used to their opponent giving them an arm to manipulate and not putting up resistance, they'll be very surprised if they're ever in combat with a determined attacker.

I think the momentum in the martial arts world is in favor of MMA, and the challenge for Aikido in the modern scene is to prove to skeptics it can be effective in that context. Relaxing the taboo against competing with other disciplines would probably go a long way. Also, the UFC has no rules against most Aikido moves, so if they were as effective as they're supposed to be, one would expect there would be at least one UFC fighter training in Aikido rather than the usual striking arts combined with submission wrestling/BJJ.

My concern is just that most people would be better off studying MMA-proven, combat-oriented disciplines .

In reply to this comment by NordlichReiter:
The aikido you see on youtube is demonstration. This Kiai master is not Aikido. He is Ki society. Until you have trained for a class in aikido Hapkido, or any of these types you cant understand that in certain holds you cannot fight without loosing a limb in the process.

I can speak for my school that there are serious students and there are the "I want a black belt type." Most of the time people are "I'm a black belt type." These people diminish the training. In the classes that I attend there are 2 wrestlers(judo), 4 bjj guys, several karateka(Japanese Schools), and 2 boxers. The rest are martial undergrads with no previous experience.

The one thing I have learned in 15 years of martial training, is that you cannot train to win, only train to survive. No situation is a surething, you may think you will win but even then you could trip on a pebble and fall on face.

In reply to this comment by chilaxe:
Don't be fooled. In aikido practice, if you resist the moves they're doing on you, they don't work and it's just embarrassing for everybody. Kind of like this classic vid: http://www.videosift.com/video/Kiai-Master-Gets-Owned

Empiricism is better than faith

Thanks for your response. I think if practitioners are used to their opponent giving them an arm to manipulate and not putting up resistance, they'll be very surprised if they're ever in combat with a determined attacker.

I think the momentum in the martial arts world is in favor of MMA, and the challenge for Aikido in the modern scene is to prove to skeptics it can be effective in that context. Relaxing the taboo against competing with other disciplines would probably go a long way. Also, the UFC has no rules against most Aikido moves, so if they were as effective as they're supposed to be, one would expect there would be at least one UFC fighter training in Aikido rather than the usual striking arts combined with submission wrestling/BJJ.

My concern is just that most people would be better off studying MMA-proven, combat-oriented disciplines .

In reply to this comment by NordlichReiter:
The aikido you see on youtube is demonstration. This Kiai master is not Aikido. He is Ki society. Until you have trained for a class in aikido Hapkido, or any of these types you cant understand that in certain holds you cannot fight without loosing a limb in the process.

I can speak for my school that there are serious students and there are the "I want a black belt type." Most of the time people are "I'm a black belt type." These people diminish the training. In the classes that I attend there are 2 wrestlers(judo), 4 bjj guys, several karateka(Japanese Schools), and 2 boxers. The rest are martial undergrads with no previous experience.

The one thing I have learned in 15 years of martial training, is that you cannot train to win, only train to survive. No situation is a surething, you may think you will win but even then you could trip on a pebble and fall on face.

In reply to this comment by chilaxe:
Don't be fooled. In aikido practice, if you resist the moves they're doing on you, they don't work and it's just embarrassing for everybody. Kind of like this classic vid: http://www.videosift.com/video/Kiai-Master-Gets-Owned

Empiricism is better than faith

You have to find what is right for you. Maybe krav maga can be right for you, its an interesting system like aikido but more intense, the way it is meant to be.
But like all arts they have superstitions. You have to find the Martial part of the art, and forget about the art part. <-
By no means am I saying that Aikido is a good thing, I'm saying that I can do a good sankyo!

>> ^chilaxe:
The final straw for me when I took Aikido was a move that was something like your opponent is on one knee and has one arm extended in front on him, and you slide your hand hard down the top of his arm to make him stand up and control him with chi or something. I asked the instructor to do it on me because it seemed to be placebo, and when he did it on me I wasn't willing to resist and embarrass him in front of his class.
I watched a friend's black belt test in Aikido. Looked like WWE, with him doing all this crazy stuff that has nothing to do with combat.

The final straw for me when I took Aikido was a move that was something like your opponent is on one knee and has one arm extended in front on him, and you slide your hand hard down the top of his arm to make him stand up and control him with chi or something. I asked the instructor to do it on me because it seemed to be placebo, and when he did it on me I wasn't willing to resist and embarrass him in front of his class.

I watched a friend's black belt test in Aikido. Looked like WWE, with him doing all this crazy stuff that has nothing to do with combat.

The aikido you see on youtube is demonstration. This Kiai master is not Aikido. He is Ki society. Until you have trained for a class in aikido Hapkido, or any of these types you cant understand that in certain holds you cannot fight without loosing a limb in the process.

I can speak for my school that there are serious students and there are the "I want a black belt type." Most of the time people are "I'm a black belt type." These people diminish the training. In the classes that I attend there are 2 wrestlers(judo), 4 bjj guys, several karateka(Japanese Schools), and 2 boxers. The rest are martial undergrads with no previous experience.

The one thing I have learned in 15 years of martial training, is that you cannot train to win, only train to survive. No situation is a surething, you may think you will win but even then you could trip on a pebble and fall on face.

In reply to this comment by chilaxe:
Don't be fooled. In aikido practice, if you resist the moves they're doing on you, they don't work and it's just embarrassing for everybody. Kind of like this classic vid: http://www.videosift.com/video/Kiai-Master-Gets-Owned

Empiricism is better than faith

^ ^ Agreed.

The best self-defense advice I ever got was from a black belt in Karate I met when I was thinking about going to the Naval Academy in Annapolis. His advice?

Always run.

I thought he was joking at first until he lifted up his shirt and showed me the six-inch scar he had going across his abdomen. That was his souvenir from a time when he decided to stick around and use his martial arts skills to teach the attacker a lesson. Turns out his opponent had a hidden knife. The black belt still put the guy down, but came within a fraction of an inch of not walking away from that one.

Most of the time, being aware of your environment will keep you out of trouble, and the times that it doesn't you should be able to get away without engaging. Macho pride causes a lot of needless altercations. Pretty much the only time I will engage someone is if I'm intervening to protect someone else. Otherwise, if the punks want my wallet they can have it. I always carry less than $100 and I can replace all my credit cards pretty easily. It's not worth dying over--and make no mistake, every time you engage you're risking getting taken out by a lucky punch, a hidden weapon, or the guy's buddy that happens to walk around the corner just as you think you're about to finish the job.

For those times when you absolutely can't run, I think BoneyD's advice is sound. For most untrained people, a bare-knuckle punch is simply a surefire way to accidentally break their own fingers or wrist.

The Japanese narrator is explaining what happened (news crew is filming the streets where Al Capone's gangs used to do battle, gets attacked by street thugs, black belt cameraman knocks out 13 people before police arrive and is momentarily detained as a suspect before being let go) as if it is a real incident, but obviously the footage is a dramatic re-enactment.

How did this guy even qualify for a black belt?

That's because you have not yet learned to strike at the core of Google's strength. To find the videos you seek, you must become... a cockpuncher! Have you got the balls?

http://www.videosift.com/video/Trailer-forThe-Onion-Movie

In reply to this comment by MarineGunrock:
Wow, that's insane. I'm confident that I have a billionth degree black belt in Google-fu, so that if I can't find something, it simply doesn't exist on the internet. I tried everything under the sun to find that, but I must have been drunk to miss that. Thanks again.

In reply to this comment by Lurch:
Actually, I just looked for "good samaritan saves cop" and it was the only one that came up. Lucky shot I guess.

In reply to this comment by MarineGunrock:
I saw that you fixed my "good Samaritan" video - thanks a bunch! I tried and tried and tried to find a replacement, but just couldn't. What tags did you use to find it?

i read somewhere just a couple of days ago, that Dolph Lundgren besides being a black belt, also has a PHD in some field of science I can't remember, and a high IQ. The man is a fucking superman!

loaded with explosives?? smokeless explosives I see... balsa? Recognize the wood type by the sound of the crack from a crappy camcorder eh?

I would give this guy the benefit of the doubt, folks. First of all, he's doing an airborne 540. Second, he is wearing a black belt. Now, you dont even see a lot of black belts doing airborne 540 triple kicks, so, you can think, hey - he is probably pretty damn good. Third, you will notice he is pretty fast. I bet that leg coming full circle at that speed has more than enough power to break a board and throw some confetti (the confetti flies in the direction of the kick mind you...) or do you think they aim the "explosive" charges to shoot the confetti in the direction ofthe kick?

That's a black belt board break. Don't know which level, TKD for sure.

"Street fighter with no credentials"???? *cough, cough, cough*. Think again, my friend.

This is a fight between BJJ black belt, MMA fighter, and UFC former champion Royce Gracie and Five Animal kung fu teacher and now 34-21-1 MMA fighter and BJJ practitioner Jason Delucia, taken from one of the Gracie Jiu-Jitsu in Action videotapes.

As a BJJer myself, I intentionally didn't sift any of these challenge matches, and I'm not sure how I'm going to vote yet. I believe that BJJ fighters standing out in high-level MMA competitions through their superior groundwork skills is far more convincing of BJJ's effectiveness than these clips from the BJJ in Action tapes, which amount to little more than propaganda films.

Not to mention, nowadays, these kind of things tend to give BJJ a bad rep, not a good one.

Yikes.

*sigh*.

While it is true that the Gracie family made submission attacks famous by representing Brazilian jiu-jitsu (BJJ) in mixed martial arts (MMA), everything you just posted is - and I almost never say this - completely ignorant of the sport and martial arts as a whole.

Submissions were not brought into "the sport" - and by this, I assume you mean MMA - by the Gracies. The Gracies, as I wrote in my BJJ sift, took the judo/jujitsu taught to them by Mitsuyo Maeda and developed the newaza groundwork into a new system, focused on establishing positional improvement and dominance before the application of submissions. It was this conceptual change from the general judo mindset of throw-and-fall-or-scramble-to-position, rather than the submissions themselves. Judo, for the most part, has all the submission BJJ does, it just generally doesn't train them as much or as well. So really, the submissions were brought into the sport by judo, which was brought into creation by Kano through adaptation of the teachings of jiu-jitsu. If you want to argue about fighters using the submissions, sure Royce Gracie made use of them famously in UFC 1, but the first UFC tournament was set up to ensure no other submission grappling styles, including judo, was entered to make a clearer differentiation of style versus style, among other reasons. When such fighter picking was stopped, submission fighters from many styles sprung up in MMA competition.

If you're not talking about modern MMA, then consider the fact that pankration from Greece in 648 BC was the first Western MMA competition, and chokeholds and joint locks were widely displayed and documented.

Consider that catch wrestling can be traced in nearly every culture, from Lancashire catch-as-catch-can wrestling to the US hook wrestling to the Indian pehlwani.

Or you might even be referencing the infamous gong sau of China, where kung fu masters would challenge each other for the rights to open schools in villages or cities, matching style versus style, starting from millenia ago and continuing to the present day. Of course, dubious as the documentation surrounding those matches were, and as stupid as kwoon-storming is, there have been accounts of Chin na masters defeating other strikers through armbars and rear naked chokes.

As for "ruining the sport", I can only assume you're talking about the present version of MMA, as represented largely by the UFC and Pride FC (which have recently been merged as one organization. The UFC and Pride, as you may know, evolved out of the Vale tudo competitions in Brazil and Japan, which when brought to the US were imitated and televised. Of course, you should also be aware of the fact that vale tudo tournaments were largely organized by Helio Gracie, the original creator of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and his descendants. The UFC was created largely as the brainchild of Rorion Gracie, Helio's eldest son and BJJ black belt, as well as Art Davies, one of Rorion's student. In fact, according to many inside sources who were present for the UFC's founding, it was created in a large part to showcase BJJ for the US, just as Pride FC was created in a a large part to showcase Rickson Gracie, another one of Helio's sons, versus Nobuhiko Takada, a famous Japanese shoot-wrestler and mixed martial artist who also trained in a form of submission wrestling. So how exactly do you figure that modern MMA, which exists largely because the Gracies wanted to showcase the effectiveness of submission fighting versus pure striking styles, is somehow ruined because it did exactly that?

And finally, you have absolutely no idea about submission grappling. If you think getting a submission hold is a "basic skill" that can beat anybody, and the sport now revolves around using and avoiding those holds, then how do you figure that only one of the five current UFC title holders is a well-known submission specialist, and even HE won his title fight two days ago by knockout? If it's such a get-out-of-jail-free card, why doesn't everybody just use those magical subs? How come sprawl-and-brawl and ground-and-pound are becoming such dominant strategies of fighting in MMA fights? Oh, and what did you mean by "strength, skill, stamina or fighting spirit" having no effect on submission grappling? Superior skill, strength, stamina, and fighting spirit is what submission grappling is all about. The fighter with the greatest combination of all four will win, just as with any other art in MMA. Look at Yuki Nakai, the grappler who continued a fight despite being eye-gouged illegally to the point of complete blindness and yet continued on not only win his fight by submission but also fight AGAIN the SAME night against the most feared grappler in the world at the time, Rickson Gracie. Look at Ronaldo de Souza, aka Jacare, who had his arm broken in a fight but continued to fight and win. Heck, look at Rickson Gracie, who is well-known for having an insane cardio routines involving sandy beaches and mountain running. Or any of the MMA athletes at the top of the sport, who train and spar and weight lift and run and work out for hours on end each day and every day so they can become strong and build up endurance and improve their skills, all thanks to their fighting spirit and determination to be the best.

If you doubt me on any of those facts, just get yourself to a real, honest-to-goodness MMA gym, and tell the first MMA fighter you see that submission holds are ruining the sport. Seriously. I'd like to know what happens.

Do you know why I'm annoyed by your comment, Enzoblue? I'm annoyed because training submission grappling is not fucking easy. It is hard, painful work to train. It is expensive as hell, in terms of money as well as time and effort. I am shit-awful at it, and my only goal each day I step on the mat, which is every damn day, is to suck a little less than the day before, and sometimes, like today, I don't feel like that's happened, and I haven't been able to move my neck in certain directions for days because of a neck crank that got cranked on too hard. And yet tomorrow, I'm going to put on my smelly, sweaty gi, get in my friend's carpool, and go roll around on a mat with large, sweaty men who outweigh me by over 50 pounds on average for several hours, and come back tired and sore and cranky. (Hah, pun, get it? It's a joke because my spinal column isn't functioning properly.) And I'm happy with all of that, from the musty gym smell to the same old jokes my friends make about me being gay that they've made for years, because through my training I know I am acquiring a skillset that is not available or acquired in the general public, and yes, I do take pride in what I do because it is a part of my life and part of who I am, and also there's the fact that my training and dedication can and have helped me to choke fools out who are deserving of it, just as those things have saved the lives of friends and acquaintances who were attacked in ghettos and Iraqi villages. And yet here you come to say that I, along with every other MMA competitor who has devoted far larger amounts of their life to perfecting the art of submission grappling, am ruining the beautiful sport of mixed martial arts, a sport that I am, as well as those competitors far above me, dedicated to as well and one that I do my best to represent well in the public eye. No. I'm sorry, but I'm not going to let you say that, because you're wrong.

Consider this: the UFC and modern MMA changed what "one would actually consider fighting". People used to think those flicky, chambered TKD kicks would hurt, or that they could just avoid a takedown attempt with elbows to the spine, or even in later years, they could just fight out of guard. The sport has evolved, and anybody who has a half a brain can see that a good MMA fighter needs to train to fight out of the three ranges that have been established through the test of the fight, standup, clinch, and ground, as well as be able to strike, grapple, and submit from all three ranges if necessary, as well as defend against an opponent's attempts to do so to oneself. Submission grappling is part of the sport out of necessity, not because it's what people (and by that I mean Westerners) think of when they think about fighting, or because it looks pretty - it's in the sport because it works. The skills and abilities trained in sub grappling allow a more skilled fighter to beat a less skilled opponent, given reasonable size comparisons, just as with every other martial art that has been used with success in MMA. The concept of MMA is the extension of Bruce Lee's philosophy of Jeet Kune Do - take what works, and lose what doesn't. So in reality, sub grappling being used to win fights in MMA is really part of the evolution and development of martial arts, in fact it embodies what MMA and the development of effective martial arts is all about. And if that simple fact offends, then perhaps you don't understand quite as much about MMA as you might like to think you do.