Martial Arts in the Playground

[Spiryt]

That's needlessly antagonistic. I meant it as a restructuring o my point, not an accusation. Sorry.

That's not antagonistic?

Sparring is definitely not really necessary for building what we would call 'base' athletic/conditioning function, I was agreeing with you.

You are changing goal posts here. It was never about replicating having someone being unpredictable and intimidating, it was about whether it could yeah you anything. You said, for example, karate knife disarming techniques are bull, and implied you could not learn to counter a knife through kata alone. I know this is untrue. I also said that sparring was good, and it woul help. My point was that cerebral training is not a waste of time. My point is that there is a difference between training, and doing moves in the air.

Well, I'm not. I never said 'cerebral' was waste of time either.

Original point was that one can learn to 'fight' (whatever would that mean) without hard, full contact sparring.

And that would be really extremely hard, there will be, certainly, singular people that have it in their "blood', so they don't need to actually learn to go hard and endure it mentally, but they will be in minority.

And you absolutely cannot learn to counter knives trough kata and whatever alone.

All this stuff is pretty dangerous myth, actually, if someone actually believe he can do it.

Defending against knife unarmed is extremely hard no matter who you are, and if definitely would take a lot of training - 99% of karate and other kata and demonstrations out there are horribly disconnected from reality - with one guy attacking with 'knife' in a way that the defender is expecting, drilled against etc. He performs so nifty trip and everyone is happy...

Actual experiments with knife substitutes leaving color on clothing, with wielder being just aggressive and willing to stab/hack at will end with 'blood' all over...

Even something as simple as boxing's jab can crush a man's wind-pipe.

Well, for that matter, jab actually tends to be hardest thing to sufficiently master for 'average Joe'.