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.: Not a Pain Free Day
Yesterday, while on my way home from work I was caught by another attack. I kept my composure well, I think. By the time I got home I was cross-eyed with pain so I just stumbled in. I’m getting worn out, I’m not sleeping well anymore, and I’m pretty constantly dealing with a headache and pain in my joints. I pulled a muscle in my shoulder in training last week and the pain has been creeping up to my neck. Man, I’m all kinds of sore. Sorry for the whining, but I’m getting a little desperate.

.: Martial Art vs Martial Sport vs Combat
After more than a decade and a half of practicing and teaching Kung Fu (Choy Lee Fat) I have grown bored of it as a martial art. The more MMA I do, the less I can take Kung Fu seriously as a combat discipline. It’s great as a sport and an art, but it inefficient as a combat discipline.

Any combat discipline can be an art depending on what level of expertise, accuracy and perfection you can achieve, but primarily, a martial art doesn’t concern itself with applied combat. It’s more about perfecting techniques; theory as opposed to practice. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s all about what you want.

A martial sport is a sport based on one of the traditional martial arts. I would count that what I do with Kung Fu is more a martial sport than a true combative discipline. It focusses on techniques, but not necessarily perfection. It focusses on strength and conditioning, but not really on fighting, no matter how much sparring you do; if you were to ever catch a properly connecting low-kick from a well trained kickboxer, you’ll most likely fall to the ground in shock and pain. And the kicker; the kickboxer has probably been training half the time that you have.

A combat discipline focusses on practicality. There’s no death-touch palm strikes. There’s no complex finger locks. There’s only direct strikes, grapples, chokes and locks. True combat is too complex, too fast and too fluid to do anything too complex, no matter how good your muscle memory has become. That shit only works on untrained opponents. Try to do Aikido when someone has smashed your nose in. Try to do a butterfly kick while someone’s shooting in for a double-leg take down. Try your mea lua de compasso while someone’s given you two or three low-kicks to your lead-leg.

Things might look good in the gym or dojo, and it might be a great sport to excercise at, and there’s a purity to achieving the perfection of one particular technique…but you’re going to get your ass kicked in a real fight. I have a respect for all martial arts and sports, but I would like for people to be realistic about it. If you train Ninjitsu, don’t tell me how deadly each and every technique is when you have never applied it in combat.

A great example of a true martial artist is my friend Dennis. He’s super-technical, he knows his art, which is Aikido, and I can imagine him perfecting his techniques to razorsharp perfection. A great example of someone who practices a martial sport is my Kung Fu buddy Tristram, who uses Kung Fu as a vehicle for his cardio and strength conditioning. I fall into this category, too. It’s hard to find a good example of someone I know who does it in order to be a fighter, efficient and effective. There’s one guy in my MMA class who is all of that, but I forget his name. Otherwise, I don’t think I know anyone who is really in it to know how to fight. (Not even you, Jim, you do it for sports and masochism.)

.: Computer Voting
I’ve been listening to an audio-version of Bill Maher’s New Rules: Polite Musings from a Timid Observer, which is basically a collection of a bunch of New Rules… stuff that he does on his show Real Time with Bill Maher. Most of them are funny, perhaps even chuckle-worthy, but this one made me laugh out loud in public transport, drawing stares from the people around me.