Toptomcat

The kind of tai chi that's ideally suited for physical therapy and injury rehabilitation isn't exactly the same kind of tai chi that's good for fighting. There's some overlap, but not a great deal.

They don't say on their Web site that they teach some uniquely German form of grappling, just that dudes in Germany recognized their ability as masters.

On the Korean side there's ATF taekwondo, as well as Tang Soo Do, Soo Bahk Do, Kyuki Do, Chuck Norris' hybrid style Chun Kuk Do, the Muay Thai/TKD hybrid Kun Gek Do/Gwon-gyokdo, Choi Kwang-Do, Kuk Sool Won, etc. etc. It's just that few of them are as visible as TKD due to its promotion by the South Korean government. On the BJJ side there's the split between what's now considered to be 'mainstream' BJJ, which is virtually all ground fighting, all the time, and a curriculum that hews somewhat more closely to what the Gracies themselves teach, which adds some very basic standup strikes and focuses a bit more on throws. There are also the 10th Planet people, who have also taken some pains to distinguish themselves from ordinary BJJ, and there's a rather quieter split between those schools that practice mostly with the gi and those that practice mostly without. Only when you're on the outside looking in do either appear monolithic. While I don't know as much about Muay Thai, I imagine the same is true there as well.

For certain values of 'traditonal'. Certainly there was and remains an old guard who wouldn't wear a blue gi at gunpoint.

I think a big part of it is that the Japanese can't make a good unarmed martial arts movie to save their lives, though. It's not just 'Panda', it's that there have been an unyielding stream of Chinese martial arts flicks seemingly ever since the first dude in Hong Kong to get ahold of a movie camera. On the Japanese side there's 'The Street Fighter', and then for the rest of Sonny Chiba's movies they have very slick, well-executed choreography with a seizure-prone rhesus monkey behind the camera , and then other than that there's nothing besides maybe Kuro-Obi.

Spar with a resistant partner who has a good, protective pair of goggles on. See how often you can get a straight shot.

Yeah, I've gotta agree there. Competing in an open format with as few rules as possible while retaining a reasonable degree of safety for the fighters- modern Unified Rules mixed martial arts, in other words- is an excellent laboratory to determine what works and what doesn't.

There are some unspoken assumptions in that question that make it impossible to answer simply- mainly that there's a meaningful and useful distinction between a 'simplified' or 'accelerated' style and one that 'takes years to master'. I'm not really in the mood for the long version. Get to the Roy Harris school, man. It's head and shoulders over everything else you're looking at.

Looking over the Web site further I'd have to say that it would be the one school out of the list that you gave me that I'd avoid at all costs. They seem almost exclusively focused on the spiritual and esoteric over the physical, which is a bad formula for effective self-defense.

I don't know this guy from Adam, but saying that the Southeast Asian boxing systems of which Muay Thai is a member are significantly different from what's typically been known in the West as 'Asian martial arts'- karate and kung fu- is a perfectly legitimate observation. Additionally, the primary virtue of an instructional tape shouldn't be that it's fast-paced and entertaining- if I want that I'll watch 'Enter the Dragon'.

All those styles you listed over at MOTW sound interesting but I can't find anything about them on the actual Web site. It has a great deal to say about its founder's credentials in neuroscience and comparative religion, which strikes me as decidedly beside the point. I'd avoid it. The ISDC people look okay. They sell themselves enthusiastically but not to the point that it raises red flags for me. The credentials of the guy running Defense360 look a bit weak to me: the Marines care much, much more about marksmanship than about unarmed combatives, thus a background in Marine combatives isn't terribly impressive from a technical point of view. He'll know how to get his students in shape, though, and the marksmanship training is a good idea. Roy Harris has an excellent all-around reputation: if the school you can get to is a legitimate Roy Harris affiliate then that would be the one I would pick. Whatever you end up doing, I would supplement it by buying a gun and taking some classes in how to use it. Not just standard work on the range- combat marksmanship classes, stuff that teaches you how to use a firearm under pressure.

Could you provide a little more context so we know what you're talking about?

Well, there a lot of countries like China out there where their government-sponsored training program for their Olympic martial sports isn't all that notable because they have huge government-sponsored training programs for every medal-granting Olympic sport. It's quite common in more authoritarian countries, almost to the point of it being the norm.

What do you want out of martial arts? Do you want to study mostly for fitness, mostly for self-defense, mostly for the social, spritual or mental aspects of it, mostly for its value as a historical/cultural activity, mostly to fight professionally? There's no such thing as a school of martial arts that will be perfect for every student. Tell us what kind of student you are so we can give you better advice.

I don't see why it would ever be unacceptable to retire from either position whenever you wished.

*Shrug* They could make the right choice and make their athletes complete martial artists, or they could make the wrong choice and spend three years sparring. I don't have any control over the day-to-day running of the National Taekwondo Performance Centre, and so see little point in getting exercised about it, and choose to give them the benefit of the doubt until other evidence emerges.

Ha! I like that. It's incomplete at best as ethical advice, but seen in the light of PR it makes a great deal more sense.

I'm taking all that into account. An Olympic-caliber athlete with previous fight experience who's been given the ability to train full time for years with all their training expenses being met by the government can easily meet the standard of forms, technical, and theory knowledge demanded of the average Taekwondo black belt. You're seriously underestimating how much help athleticism and training full time can be to the growth rate of a student if you think otherwise. If someone training under those conditions didn't earn a black belt on a much faster timetable than an amateur hobbyist who attends maybe an hour and a half's worth of classes three times a week- which is, I think, a fair summary of the circumstances of the typical student of TKD- then I would kick them out of the program.

Which is totally reasonable for Olympic-caliber athletes with previous competitive success in other combat sports.

The thing is that the belt rank someone holds is a very rough indication of his skill. To use your analogy again, the professional standards for a nidan in karate are considerably less well-defined than the standards for a law degree. He could be a really smokin' nidan, built like a Greek god, able to fight like three men, perform technically excellent kihon and kata, impressively knowledgeable about karate's history and philosophy, and an excellent teacher. He could almost as easily be a miserable, out-of-shape fraud whose only marketable skill is his ability to con students into thinking that he has martial ability. More likely he has a skillset that lies somewhere between those two extremes, but without getting a far more specific rundown of his qualifications- what specific style and teacher he got his belt under, video of him competing under his style's ruleset and demonstrating techniques and kata- none of us will be able to give you an accurate estimation of whether or not he's worth the money.

The core difference between the two from which all others, including stances, flow, is their method of sparring. Shotokan sparring is fundamentally a martial game of tag- the two participants compete to tap the other in a designated target area. When a point is achieved, they stop and restart. Kyokushin sparring is fundamentally a stand-up fight with restrictions- the two participants compete to knock the other man out or knock him down, throwing techniques continuously. It leads to pretty huge differences in technique and philosophy.

That's not very far outside the norm in a large metropolitan area.

I think rather than judging a martial art on a purely nationalistic basis it's quite fair to look into its history. If a majority of the style's technical syllabus comes from karate, its founders had a karate background, and it retains such recognizably karate-like pedagogical elements as the keikogi and kata, I have no trouble calling it 'karate' no matter how far it may have diverged in other respects- politically, geographically, or terminologically. A style is most essentially defined by its technical syllabus and pedagogical method, not its national origin. If the most essentially defining attribute of karate is that it is Japanese, that means that a group of Japanese people with an exclusively Muay Thai background who open a martial arts school and call it karate have every right to do so. And that's nonsense.

If your martial art is a powerful and functional one, but you have trouble because you're judged on aesthetic principles rather than merit, the answer to that is to compete in a venue that allows you to achieve victory by knockout rather than relying on a judge's decision.

Anyone who's sufficiently athletic to be considered for the Olympic team is certainly more than capable of earning a legitimate black belt in three years. There are two possible meanings of 'fast-track' here: they could just be putting them through a program designed to produce people who will win Olympic gold, but they could also just be putting them in an environment where they'll be intensively learning everything. Without decent evidence that they're being poorly trained it's unfair to demean the program. Also, they're actively looking for people who are competitive champions in other martial sports, so it's not like they'll walk out of the program in 2012 knowing nothing but how to score in Olympic taekwondo.