would you do powerful or speedy strikes if in a real fight

[sensei8]

In a fight, you don't think "I am going to strike hard" or "I am going to strike fast". You just move, and hope that the skills you have been drilling are effective.

There's a video game I played that seems to make for a good analogy. You program in all the strategies and gear on the spaceships, then you push a button and they get in a fight and you can do NOTHING but watch. Afterward you can describe what you did. In the moment, you just have to hope that you gave your spaceships the right tools.

Every high stress time-crushed situation i've experienced has been like this to some degree. You can explain what you did and why, but every bit of theory is monday morning quarterbacking, and pointless.

In all honesty, the exact location of that voice in your head that ponders these things seems not to be so much the core of your thinking and leader as it is the narrative written by the secretary who takes the minutes. It has characteristics not so much of executive function as of memory encoding; in other words, that internal dialog that you think of as "you" who makes all these theories and discussions is in actuality part of the the process of indexing and filing away the history that describes what you have already done for future reference.

When your head is ringing because you've just been punched in the face is not the time to be calling up the historian to dig through the archives. It's the time to put drills into action and make lots of snap decisions and hope that the historian can make sense of what happened afterward.

This is akin to one of Bruce Lee's quotes...

"When my opponent contracts, I expand, and when he expands, I contract, and when there's an opportunity, 'I' do not hit, 'it' hits all by itself!!"

Letting things become automatic; second nature, without thought.

"Not to think, but to feel. It is like a finger pointing away to the moon. Don't concentrate on the finger or you'll miss all that heavenly glory." That's akin to not being able to see the forest because of all the trees.

Again, excellent post Justice, excellent!!

[Sword Knight]

Just curious peoples opinions on how they would fight if attacked on the street.

Draw my pistol, and pull out my knife