most complete fighting art

[NyteShades]

Or in the case of TKD, forms were away to practice during the Japenese occupation.

[Drunken Monkey]

now i always thought that tkd was developed/organised by choy hung hi while he was in the army?

 

wasn't this after the occupation?

[Tal]

you ask again why it has to be intentionally hidden. read my first post on this, i think i explained why the old masters wanted to hide techniques. people havn't just forgot; they were never told in the first place. thankfully there are people out there who strive to make sense of the kata and then make known what they find in their schools, books and videos. whether its a way of keeping students hooked is irrelevent; if the techniques are hidden they are hidden. if someone wants to use their knowledge of these things to 'hook' students thats up to them.

 

they are training forms, but they train you to fight. once you get through all the misleading parts of the kata and discover what its really supposed to represent, you get a set of extremely effective fighting combos. obviously you don't try to perform a whole kata if you get into a fight but little chunks of kata can be useful. kata has other purposes too, but one of its purposes is to provide a set of techniques that you can apply in combat.

 

i've used kata on the street and its worked. not whole kata, just two or three steps of kata. for me, its really the pressure points that makes it work. the points attacked in the first movement ensure that my opponent is positioned correctly for me to execute the next movement. the problems arise when you interpret the kata incorrectly. you get a movement that is actually a representation of your opponent's action, and you try to include it in your combo and it screws things up.

 

i would agree that kata/forms are a way of organising training, but they are not just that.

 

they are both fighting and training forms, although they are primarily training forms. but they train you to fight. and my saying that kata hides techniques stems mainly from history and the things the formulators of the kata had to consider when they created them; namely, not letting rivals discover their best techniques.

[Drunken Monkey]

well i always thought that the originators of karate were always learning rom each other and discussing with each other anyway?

 

all of this hiding stuff doesn't sound very japanese to me.

[Drunken Monkey]

but then i stress again, my only experience with forms is in chinese styles where forms are just training methods that don't aim to simulate fighting.

[Tal]

the orginators of the very earliest karate, which was actually ryukyu kempo would have learnt from eachother as with any MA. however, after time, rival schools of karate develop and they want to hide their techniques from eachother so one school cannot have an advantage by knowing the techniques of another.

 

its not japanese, its okinawan. the okinawans believed themselves racially and culturally different from the japanese and wanted to keep it that way. when they brought ryukyu kempo to japan, they quickly removed material and continued to hide techniques so the japanese were essentially learning a different art.

 

i don't really see what's not japanese about it anyway. samurai schools liked to hide their techniques from eachother, although not in the same way.

[NyteShades]

Ok let me clarify. From what I have read, and I'm not saying that it is 100% accurate, but during the occupation farmers were not allowed to practice the Martial Arts. So some developed forms as a way to practice their art. In other texts I've read, Tae Kwon Do is nothing more than Japenese karate but nationalized for Korea. Then again I've also heard that some of the kicks in Tae Kwon Do were also developed to knock riders of horses. Maybe this is just Myth.

 

It's the same with weapons like the nanchucks, the sai's, and a few others. They were gardening tools that were adapted to self defense as farmers were not allowed to have weapons. However I believe it was Japenese farmers that created these times of weapons.

[Drunken Monkey]

this has been said elsewhere but sai are not farming tools.

 

as for nun-chucks being rice flails, i can't say that anyone invented them cos the chinese have that weapon as well.

 

as we all know, it was the chinese who taught them the martial arts.

[Tal]

i don't know much about the korean styles, but hwa rang do was very much like karate i think, but tae kwon do which was developed from it is quite a bit different.

 

most styles have high kicks to be used against mounted opponents. that is what most flying kicks are designed for.

 

i would say farming rather than gardening tools , but many 'martial arts weapons' are very much improvised. nunchaku weren't invented by anyone in particular. they are just a generic threshing tool. in europe we had the flail which was like a nunchuk but one end had a spikey ball on it. most of these improvised weapons aren't that great against a sword, spear or halberd. the nunchuku/flail is quite effective because of its trapping and disarming qualities.

[WhiteShark]

If anyone still cares about the original post topic I'd like to nominate Shidokan for most complete Art. It incorporates throws grappling kata and kickboxing and advanced students practice Kendo sword sparring for you weapon fanatics. A Shidokan tournament includes rounds of bare-knuckle Karate, Kickboxing and NHB-style Grappling.

 

"The Triathlaon of Martial Arts"

 

http://shidokan.com