http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76GCudXcFq0

Here's a video we made last Thursday. It's a bokken sparring practice we've been working on. Building slowly, staying safe. The person who gets hit decides how serious the shot was, if they think it would have been incapacitating we call that bout. Grappling is valid, and you can see how many of the movements from classical Jujutsu have application in a practice like this.

The weapon also changes the distancing and movement methods. Anyways, hope you enjoy:

Awesomeness!

Thanks for posting.

Craig

The addition of grappling is great.

Did you ever consider including kicks, elbows and strikes with the pommel?

I think it's slowly heading that way. It's been a really fun thus far. We started without any armor, but our desire to hit harder/faster and not get hurt didn't work out so well. We're taking our time and finding what works best.

This practice has also really informative as far as the use of many traditional Japanese Jujutsu techniques that without a sword/weapon, don't make much sense.

Really looking forward to seeing more, if you decide to post more! It's really refreshing to see traditional arts practiced this way. I hope it inspires a trend.

Unfortunately, most teachers of the "Traditional" martial arts don't have the capacity to open their minds to innovation even within the parameters of their own arts.

Chris does.

It's important to keep in mind every Traditional style was founded by someone who looked outside their original styles and were open minded enough to try new things.

Thanks Tim.
For me their was always a problem with "how does this work". The only way to find the answer to that question was to spar, trying lots of different things. Only through this process has much become clear.

The important thing is, even if I get all of the answers about Aikido that I need, my students must also spar. It's not enough for me to tell them how things "work" they must discover this for themselves.

As far as I see it, there is no way around sparring if you want to really understand your system.

Absolutely. It would seem self-evident and just plain common sense that in order to be good at fighting (the underlying purpose of martial arts training) one would have to actually practice fighting, or at least approximate a real fight as closely as possible with reasonable concerns for safety.

For some reason, in the martial arts this type of common sense isn't always so common.

Chris

Its why I train with Tim - within his teaching I've found the distilled concepts of CMA, classical combative jujutsu and "aiki," and modern Judo and "jits" (with all that that means from BJJ to sub grappling to MMA...).

Over and over I see echoes of teachings I have had from instructors in the former, but made more practical through the latter.

We should get together some day - doing the work you are, you can plug in guns and blades in modern CQC and the commonalities are readily apparent.

It's so funny Tim, because when you "get it" it seems obvious, but I was a dullard myself for quite awhile...

I'd love too Kit! I've done some sparring practices with airsoft, and dulled folders, it's great. I've seen and played with a lot of the Gabe Suarez stuff as well.

I think traditional Jujutsu fits in nicely with modern arms. The only problem is almost no one is training traditional Jujutsu, in a modern alive way.

Exactly.

As for modern, I am speaking more to Craig Douglas' (Southnarc) stuff:

http://vimeo.com/shivworks/videos/all/sort:date

Very cool. My favorite clip? When you shoot that guy in your guard (the ultimate melding of ancient and modern).

Yep - and there are numerous examples of actual "grounded gunfights" that occur....the idea with ECQC is to train for the worst of the worst situations (note that the 2 on 1s are live, not people stumbling over themselves to fall down...)

I have made the point that ECQC presents a window into traditional jujutsu/aiki that no longer exists in large part even within that community: for we train "live," and we do so with weapons - short blades (more of a connection) and pistols (still a connection but manifested differently). While it is tough sell for a lot of the ECQC community (mostly MMA/BJJ/Wrestling types), the echoes are there. I remember one of the early sessions I attended where I guy was telling me about all the time he wasted in aikido: until we got to the weapon retention and disarming portion, where his aiki came out. I know this is something Chris has explored - it is not so much the type of weapon, rather it is the presence of the weapon and the need to control it, whether as the operator or as the target - this comes out all the more when actual PAIN is involved in the training (simmunitions at close range, and hard drone trainers for some of the evolutions.)

As well, the shorter angles and tighter circles necessary for deploying short blades when they can legitimately be taken away, and closing the windows of opportunity (for the opponent) that flowing circles open up is a long way from the way modern aikido or 'modern' traditional jujutsu is often taught - I think largely as a matter of training safety and student retention.

Rather Tim's CMA dead angle, fall-down-where-you-are-standing takedowns and throws become more prevalent. I've talked to Craig about getting together with you, Tim, because you have some similarities in analyses that I'd like to benefit from.

We are hoping to have his Edged Weapons Overview at Mike's place next June - its the same material but with blades, not guns, for the non-firearms crew. Be cool to get you - and you, Chris - up here too.

Does it hurt when you get hit by bokkens with that armor on?

There is no armor on the arms or legs.

Do you practice leg strikes?

I got kinda scared when you guys started to grapple with the swords! I was afraid someone would fall on the sword and get impaled.

This is what im gonna open carry.

Those videos were great Kit. It's funny when I go on a website like Bullshido, and I see people saying things like- the only really effective martial arts are: Judo, Boxing, Western Wrestling, BJJ, and Muay Thai. And I think, most all martial arts systems are really good if you train with them in an alive way, and thats what all of those systems have going for them. The problem with limiting your list to those martial arts, is they only specialize in unarmed situations. If I end up in a fight, I'm most likely going to be armed, so why wouldn't I train in an armed system- Because most of the armed systems don't do anything alive. It used to be a crappy situation. But I think lot's of people are starting to put it together now, and things are getting pretty good.

Robert. The bokkens hurt much less with armor on. I was getting some pretty good bruises there for awhile, the armor made that all better. We don't strike the legs for now- I personally worry about legs, in particular knees, I'm working on some armor for them though, because once we ad Jo (short staff) there will be leg strikes happening. No one has been impaled yet, thank goodness. I think open carry swords, or at least machetes are pretty common in lot's of places!

Chris

The problem is "effective for what?"

MMA/component arts, as you have described, ARE the standard now if only for the reason you already noted: they are the only arts that train "live." That becomes the standard for that reason alone. More often than not, for many situations that the average practitioner engages in, all they will really need is one of the above and simply be fine. Indeed, most people are better off training Judo/boxing/muay Thai/wrestling/BJJ because even though there are some major gaps in those arts due to training methodology, they are far better than what people view as "combative" arts, be they modern or traditional, for the main reason that they train against an opposing will.

The problem with these arts is that they specifically are NOT self protective, let alone armed-combative in a professional sense. All the critical elements of the latter kinds of encounters: awareness, asymmetric engagements, unfixed and unknown environments, decision making, force articulation, liability, follow up TTPs, etc. are completely removed.

Most of those things are not trained even in combative arts, let alone sportive.

Few disciplines actually combine these things. Frankly I have NEVER seen another discipline that trains with legitimate opposing pressure AND integrates blades and firearms. Most give up one or the other. I have seen some that will train force on force with firearms, but then drop the force on force when it goes to combatives, or that engage in combatives with soem force on force, but don't integrate realistic weapons work - it turns into flow drills and cooperative exercises or dueling. The latter are important building blocks, but you need to get to opposing pressure quickly to train realistically.

I agree that elements of the traditional arts do come out in legitimate combatives, especially when weapons are truly integrated, versus practiced "also."

A major issue self defense wise is that when this kind of thing is done, it is almost always in a dueling format (i.e. Kendo, Dog Brothers). Self defense/self protection/armed professional application is not at all about dueling, and at some point you reach a point of diminishing returns when the primary training methodology is dueling.

In JMA terms, self defense is much less about kenjutsu and jujutsu than it is about iaijutsu and torite or kogusoku.

Dueling is a good word for it. I always say "One-on-One" but, I think dueling much more nicely illustrates the point. How often is the fight you get into going to be a duel? How much more likely will other people, objects, and other surprises arise in your self defense situation?

I like to use:

Surprise
weapons
Environment
Numbers

as my main areas of important training for self defense- those areas are all eliminated from "dueling" systems. This is natural, because in a dueling system, the purpose is to find out who is better at a specific skill set in a specific controlled situation. Fighting by it's nature is uncontrolled and unspecific.

All kinds of training is great. I learned more about live interactions in one week of BJJ than I did five years of Aikido. But there are so many areas of training out there that are being ignored by the modern martial artist.

And yet how much training, even self defense, is conceived of and administered in the duelling paradigm?

Most instructors are not trained to do stress inoculation and scenario based training outside of physical skills, and it takes a lot of time and resources to do correctly, which most martial artists are not interested in doing - they would rather play samurai, Filipino Commando, or Taoist Warrior, or prepare for the Zombie apocalypse; plenty simply would rather get to the skills that will win in competition.

Not that there is anything wrong with any of that, so long as it doesnt get conflated with self protection or practical skills. There is a Venn diagram like crossover, but very little discussion as to what is actually in that intersection.

This is a really interesting discussion. There's a discussion on the Judo Forum that gets into what Judo is about, how a lot of beginning student are attracted to it for self defence skills, and some stories of how Judo has worked well on the street even if the main goal of the art is not street defence (a certain amount of defensive/offensive skill being the by product of the training).

And then there are those martial arts where the main focus is to function on the street, but under deliver due to the way it's trained.

I think that's what I find so exciting about what Chris is doing... Making a battlefield? art alive and functioning again... Essentially saving the art from extinction (i consider martial arts that are not actively used, to be extinct, even if they have a large following that dont practice realistically). It must take a tremendous amount of work to figure out how to go about taking a martial art that has good principles and techniques and work it into a program where realistic skills that the art is meant to develop, are developed.

It seems like someone with a good amount of non cooperative sparring experience will be in a much better position to figure out a program to bring these arts skills back to life.

So a question for Tim or Chris or anyone else. If you have experience in sparring or grappling... Is it realistically possible to take an art with good techniques and principles, that doesn't already have a sparring component in it, and create a sparring program for the art? Or do you need to have a teacher to show how you'd integrate in art into sparring?

Tim, since you had already practiced arts like Xingyiquan... Under teachers who had sparring worked into their programs, could you just go to teachers who had good arts, but no sparring programs, and work their techniques into the way you were already sparring?

Tim or Chris or anyone, do you think the best way to create a sparring program is to isolate the development of certain skills (sparring with only hands, or feet, or wrestling...) in the early stages, before combining them all together?

I suppose what Chris is doing kind of answers the questions already, but I thought I'd throw them out there anyway, even if it stands as rhetorical.

Anyway, I'm very impressed with Chris's work.

One key point would be that it isn't sparring.....

Its a different training methodology altogether. Just because there is a "live" element doesn't make it sparring.