It was, yeah. He threw a lot of punches and a few kicks. He didn't run out of gas. He blitzed the other guy. And he was quick. Not to take anything away from silat, but aside from his movements before and after the fight, you could have told me he came from any of a whole pile of systems, and I'd have had no reason to doubt you. None of which is bad news for silat. At the end of the day, a representative of their style showed that he could compete in the (admittedly low level) MMA format. And that should always be given due credit. I guess my point is that styles feature a lot of very characteristic movements. If I'm watching forms, I have no trouble telling a goju kata from a pencak juru from an arnis sayaw from a wushu set. But a competitive format has a way of distilling things until what's left are the high-percentage skills that tend to be common among many styles. In this case, I clearly saw a front kick, round kick, and a whole lot of regular ol' punches. Stuart
I literally had no idea which one was the Silat fighter until he did that low posture thingy when all the fighting was actually over.
As far as this idea of mixing styles, I do agree with the idea of having a foundation up to a point. Style is just someone's effort to organize the information he has. Other people stick with that organization because it makes sense to them. Over time, it becomes an established style. So that makes a nice, prepackaged foundation. And often, the concepts in it hang together well because someone who knew what they were doing made those decisions and organized his work around principles that he understood. None of which is to say that you can't do the same thing without a strong foundation in one particular art. The problem is that, often, when people are mixing a lot of different arts, the emphasis is on putting wing chun this with muay thai that with karate the other. It's not on the actual principles behind it. So the person is still getting hung up on the stylistic specifics. It's just that he's added the complication of having to switch rapidly between one set of stylistic differences and another. You need some clear, consistent set of criteria around which to organize new information. That could be a style. It could be a competitive format. It could even be a physical limitation. (Think Bill Wallace. The guy's whole foundation is built around a gimpy leg. Obviously he has a strong karate background. But what makes Bill Wallace different from any other karate fighter is that his approach is largely organized around the limitations of one leg and the subsequent awesomeness of the other one.) The ability to organize information around a foundation is always going to depend on how closely one resembles the other. Incorporating boxing into FMA into muay thai is pretty straightforward, to me, because the points of commonality outnumber the points of difference.
hm... i find this interesting. maybe the idea of "styles" is more prominent in striking for those reasons you've mentioned. with grappling arts concepts are very much the same, only rules change.
I'm not so sure. You can certainly find stylistic differences. But when you talk about actual mechanics, I still think there's not that much difference. You'll find styles that might emphasize power over variability and vice versa. But among styles that emphasize variability (by that, I mean the ability to throw different kicks without putting the foot down, feint with one movement and throw a different kick, etc.), the kicking isn't going to look vastly different. Savate and taekwondo, for instance, have a lot of points of commonality. Muay thai and kyokushin, likewise, but with regard to strong, committed kicks. So it's the concepts you're trying to embody that dictate form, to my mind. Does that make any sense at all? I might be yammering on a bit.
yah makes sense. the game plan is different and the principles used maybe emphasised to different degrees but they still have the same basic principles. thats why everything looks like fighting in a fight
I think transferring form into a fight falls into two camps. Some think that the actual physical "shape" a fighter uses (techniques, postures etc) could or should come through when fighting ubder pressure. Some think that principles should come through instead and a fighter can look nothing like a "form" and yet still be using that form to fight in some way. I'm still not sure where fall in that sort of debate. Nearer the latter I think. Iain Abernethy teaches that Karate kata are memory aids that use techniques to illustrate principles. He teaches how to use those techniqes via bunkai but the important thing is the principles rather than the techniques. As such a Karateka could use principles taken from a kata in a fight and yet look nothing like what we'd expect a Karateka to look like (they wouldn't physically look like they were doing a kata when fighting). I'm not sure if this silat fighter is displaying the principles of silat while still looking like an aggressive, but limited, kickboxer?
Good points PASmith. I like the idea of using kata to instill principles, it is a right way of looking at it. For me, when I train the jurus I do nothing but trying to train principles. Jurus are not techniques, never meant to be. I used to train a technique based style and got dazzled by the literally hundreds of techniques I had to learn for a lot of different situations. If someone attacked with left I would do technique number 1, if someone attacked with right i would use technique 4, number 6 on a straight front kick, 9 on a roundhouse kick. Etc. etc. It's nonsense, why? You don't have the time to choose the appropriate number when you get attacked randomly in a fight. You have to decide in a split second. So I started getting into sparring more which did something completely different. There was a big gap between sparring and training the rest of the system.... strange. That's why i liked Silat so much when I switched over to it, it's usually principle based! Now if we don't do that anymore but just train techniques and afterwards use sparring to do something completely different, we are nothing different than any other MA that switches over to pseudo kickboxing. I'm not saying it's not effective, but why call it Silat then? Train the principles in the forms, and in the fighting applications in random attacks..then you are doing the same thing all the time. Train the way you want to fight. Taoizt, you've already been warned once about violating the policy on masked profanity. Please reread the terms of service to which you agreed when you joined MAP.
