Jeff Reid said:
I've come to some conclusions about martial arts:
A person is more likely to get injured practicing martial arts than not.
Just as people are more likely to be injured playing sports then sitting at home doing nothing.
Older people take much longer just to heal up from the typical bruises received in a higher contact martial arts studio.
All older people take longer to heal up from bruises.
The UFC fights demonstrates what works best in a one on one fight. I'm not sure which methods work best when a trained fighter versus multiple untrained fighters other than the opponents have to be dispatched quickly.
This is quite true, A good striking + BJJ is usually what wins UFC, but in a fight against multiple opponents BJJ like my friend says "dies in the arse".
Size, strenth, endurance, and being able to take punishment matters (working out with weights and doing cardiovascular excersice is beneficial).
Depends what martial art you're doing. Of course endurance and ability to take punishment matters in a fight, but in Aikido and Aikijujutsu the focus is to use the attackers strength and momentum against him, I personally find it hard to do even a single push up, but I can fully throw my sensei throwing punches at me no matter how hard he tries to resist with minimal effort. It's all about moving perpendicular to (or WITH) the direction of force, then using that movement to gain kuzushi (offbalancing) once they're offbalanced you can do anything, as long as you're relaxed and not rigid. After that just small movements like twisting their wrist the right way will FORCE them to throw -themselfs- or have their wrist broken from their weight (Probably more Aikijutsu then Aikido)
Swords beat knives. Knives beat fists. (Assuming that the attacker isn't totally inept).
Not nessisarily, we do many many many traditional moves that are counters to katana, jo and tanto (Sword, Staff and Knife[Shortsword]). Using bare hands for instance an overhead hit with the staff can be countered by simple dodging, then placing your weigh on the staff so it touches the ground, then grabbing the top of the staff and pulling it in your direction, using the staffs bottom which is touching the ground as a pivot point, then simply pulling the staff to a balance break will allow you to gain the staff with any numerable disarming techniques.
Chi only exists in the minds of the believers. As time goes on, fewer martial artists, and full contact fighters believe in Chi.
I don't believe in Chi(Ki), I'm not sure about my sensei but when ever you do what he says that has to do with Chi everything works so much better, during martial art classes I always think about the chi moves despite knowing that it's just clever physics it makes the moves ALOT easier to do.
For instance if you get someone to grab both your wrists (with straight arms, and one foot foward because if you're grabbing someone it's going to be from that distance and you're going to be walking towards them, not just casually grabbing) and try to hold on really hard, be relaxed and very very loose then just lift up your hands so that they're touching their wrists (don't use much force) if you do it right you'll notice their shoulders get higher. My sensei refers to this as "connecting the [ki] circuit" and EVERY, and I mean EVERY move you do does not work in a full on situation (or resistant sparring) unless you do this, if you don't do this it is either much harder to do, or impossible.
Again I don't believe in Ki and Chi, I think it's just a thing that people came up with to explain how amazingly easy it was to throw someone 5 times your size using Aiki techniques. When ever doing an Aiki martial art, it helps tremendously to forget about scientific reservations and just do what your sensei says, be it imagining the ki flowing upto your head or not, it helps.
Aiki means the Unison of spirit, and in all Aiki moves you always move very close to the person, never are you far away.
Also I heard in Aikido you breath in for strikes and out for everything else, whereas in Aikijutsu it's the opposite. Is that right Echo?Edit: For instance in this video [MEDIA=youtube]gdcGB-qSVp4[/MEDIA][/URL] there is a disarming of katana, also a demo of Takumakai Daito-Ryu (The one where the arm is folded up into a sqaure like shape and is very very painfull) Also Kondo-kai which is the mainstream Daito-Ryu (and more jujutsu then aiki).Edit2: Also any move with uses the overhead strike as the initiation move can be used on swords/jo/tanto, as the overhead strike is used to reprisent that motion. Any moved used on stabbing motion initiation moves can be done on jo/katana/tanto/punching. My favourite move that I talked about can be used against punch/knife/sword stabbing as well as any overhead motion.
