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Comment by ncphillips | Hacker News Reader

The complaints are usually made against the training methods not the moves. Aikido moves are hard, the training partners response is usually rehearsed, and there’s much less focus on competitive sparring. It’s hard to learn something for real when the reactions are rehearsed. Other self defence focussed martial arts (Judo, Brazilian jiu-jitsu) have a lot more emphasis on live sparring. I’ve done all three at different points in my life. Only as a jiujitsu practitioner am I confident that I could handle myself without injuring the other party.

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What's even better is that there is no longer the need to theorize about which of the martial arts work and which don't, because we already ran that experiment (UFC). Turns out that what actually works is a combination of kickboxing, wrestling, and jiujitsu. Everything else is just basically hollywood acrobatics.

UFC is a contrived scenario as well. A "real" environment is rarely so uniform or open. Jiujitsu is the best approach for the Octagon because most fights in this kind of environment end up on the ground, and ground-based grappling is what this art is optimised for.

I agree, most fights end up on the ground, and that is what jiujitsu is optimized for.

Most fights where it's two guys going at it while bunch of other guys stand around yeah ...

In the real world, if you want something really effective without any pretensions to being a sport or an art or anything, do Krav Maga.

I’ve done Krav for years, and while the principles are strong the lack of sparring makes it nearly useless in most real combat situations. For example, we’ll drill kicking someone in the groin repeatedly on pads but ignore the fact that it’s actually really, really hard to land a kick to the groin of a resisting opponent. I’m glad that I have the striking experience I’ve picked up from Krav, but I’d trust my jiu jitsu training way more in a real fight.

It's a key factor - if you are fighting more than one person then you don't want to go to ground!

If your goal is to beat another guy in a cage, you may be right. But many "self-defence" situations in the real world rely much more on your approach and behavior. De-escalating a situation verbaly is the prefered way of "fighting" your opponent, at least to me.

If you want to fight for real, look at aggressive combat styles, like Krav Maga or Systema, which try to deal as much dammage as possible, in the shortest ammount of time, without considering the concequences to the opponent (= possible death). By the way, these are banned in UFC, beacuse they are too dangerous to the opponent. UFC is still a spectator sport.

Note: I'm an ex aikido practitioner and a current krav maga practitioner.

the "my art is too dangerous" argument as been disproven so many times, many of the BJJers would happily fight any of the krav or systema guys ( and have done ). The thing most of the "my art is too dangerous" guys fail to understand is becomes hard to do anything "effective" with someone who knows what they are doing, who works on establishing control and position and then works at finishing. It's a hard progression to stop if you don't know what they are doing.

> But many "self-defence" situations in the real world rely much more on your approach and behavior.

Correct. Self defense should more or less follow this pattern:

1. Situation Awareness (being aware of danger)

2. Avoid (leaving before trouble occurs)

3. De-escalate (using words)

4. Evade (run)

5. Force

“Systema” is Russian aikido dressed up in a bunch of mysticism about how it’s ~so deadly~; there’s no meaningful distinction between the two. Krav is some useful principles crippled by the lack of sparring in most (but by no means all) schools. I’ve trained both Krav and BJJ (and traditional karate), and the only one of the three that I think would be actually useful in a fight is BJJ because I actually DO use it in combat situations as part of regular training. Fighting someone is a physical task just like any other, and like any other physical task the more practice you have doing it the better at it you’ll be, no matter how good the theoretical aspects of a different art that doesn’t get that practice are.

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