How often do you see an advert or website claiming something like, “Best Street Fighting Style”, “Ultimate Street Fighting System”, “Scientific Street Fighting”, “The Art of Street Fighting”; or words to that effect.
Many martial arts, and I would say especially the more modern arts, like to emphasis how practical and effective they are and give themselves more kudos by emphasising “street fighting” over all other aspects of martial arts. Some routinely position themselves as superior by deriding traditional martial arts; emphasising how they’ve taken out ritualistic movements, don’t waste time with Kata/forms/patterns, don’t march up and down punching/kicking the air, don’t train for scoring points at competitions, etc; they just (allegedly) get straight to the real 100% practical, functional, better than anything else that’s ever been street fighting system. It’s amazing how many best systems there are out there 🙂
But one of the things that often makes me cringe, is the emphasis on “street fighting”!
Simply put, street fighting is illegal. Continue reading