All excellent points. And, in addition, you get many other beneficial side effects: improved sense of balance and body awareness, situational awareness, realistic appreciation of how dangerous fighting is and how easy it is to get hurt, stamina, and more.
I could support kids learning boxing if it was limited to body blows. With what we are learning about concussion, it seems to be more and more understood that blows to the head are never OK. Maybe you still need to teach defense against head blows, but they should probably not be allowed in competition. Getting battered in the head until you cannot stand up or respond should be right out.
One of the biggest misconceptions about boxing training is that it involves repeated blows to the head.
Boxing _competitions_ may. But boxing _training_ involves form, combos, reflexes and defense drills, and lots of conditioning. The most contact is "touch" drills, where you may touch your glove to someone with no force behind it. These drills are for intermediates to prepare for sparring, and I've never seen someone get hit too hard there.
Imagine if karate involved untrained people just kicking eachother hard enough to injure themselves / someone. That seems silly, yet that's what we imagine with boxing.
Thanks for clarifying. I don't have experience with boxing myself, but yes I was mostly talking about competition (i.e. fight to knock-out) and it makes sense that training is more about the skills you mention.
Totally agree. And some other sports, especially soccer (football outside the US) are also risky for the brain, because practice involves repeated heading.
The problem is that out of this concern, some martial arts disallowed head blows in competition, only to fall out of grace due to how "unrealistic" they are in terms of self defence.
A large number of people who start practising martial arts, does that out of a self defence concern, maybe they have been bullied at school etc.
I don't have a solution to this problem (possibly head gear, but recent studies seem to indicate that it's not effective and might even make things worse)[1].
Of course one possible solution would be to mainly promote grappling-based martial arts, like BJJ or amateur wrestling, but then in a self defence optic you would still need some striking practice, at least in order to learn striking defence.
Replying to myself: in striking arts, one great solution is promoting a culture where light sparring (e.g. Thai style sparring) is preferred to hard sparring (e.g. Dutch style sparring). In most combat sports, competition is not that frequent and more than 99% of the time a practitioner would be doing either technical training or sparring.
You've perfectly described every martial arts gym / training session that I've been part of. Touch / light sparring is reserved for intermediates, and reflex / defensive drills are a strong prerequsite, and under no circumstances is anyone allowed to go "full speed".
Even in the grimiest of boxing gyms, unless you are explicitly training for a competition, I have never seen this rule violated.
There are martial arts where even in competition, concussion is relatively rare. E.g. grappling sports like Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu don't usually involve impacts of that intensity, to the head or otherwise.
Football has more concussions than boxing, because it has more full speed competition than boxing. Almost nobody does in-the-ring boxing, they just learn.
And soccer has the most injuries of any sport, according to an ER doc (who treated me for a football injury).
Is it possible that it's the most widely played sport (and some of the least protective equipment) so they'll see the most people but it might not be the highest per capita?
That said, I know a kid who somehow lacerated his kidney and had to spend time in the ICU. At least two others with concussions.
Masahiko Kimura was famous for knocking people out with his osoto-gari.
Helio Gracie thickened the mats for his match with him to prevent this. By all reports Kimura threw him around the ring before finally switching to ground-work for the win (And after winning with a reverse-keylock, that submission was named after him in BJJ).
BJJ has another problem -- at least for little kids who are taught to choke. That could lead to death if they try applying the skill they learned in an unsupervised setting.
In principle, I want to agree. In practice, I think the vast majority of martial arts schools are nothing more than glorified day care facilities with a side of calisthenics.
They don't constructively do anything to actually teach those issues of control and discipline to the students. It's not enough to give people the skills and then expect them to learn from experience the restraint necessary to not use it. They don't do anything at all to prepare their students for the realities of what it means to use violence against another human being. It is an emotionally traumatizing experience.
Nothing like that was ever mentioned in any of the schools across multiple styles that I attended. All that was discussed was the potential of an "unfair" legal ruling if your attacker decided to press battery chargers against you. There was always an implication of "be careful when looking for a place to use these skills", not "avoid it completely, except on completely unavoidable threat to life and limb."
"They don't constructively do anything to actually teach those issues of control and discipline to the students."
At least when I was growing up, it was always the kids who took karate that were quick to fight, or talk smack. So I think I agree. Although one caveat is that it's not appropriate for everyone, or that some kids need to be much older than others. So maybe it has to do with the parents and facilities not denying those kids based on their ability to control themselves.
On a side note, if a kid uses martial arts skills in real life, it could result in increased liability. That's something people don't think about.
The Society for Creative Anachronism is one option, but you'd have to find someone willing to teach youngsters about heavy weapons combat.
There are other heavy weapons martial artist organizations out there. Jill Bearup (on YouTube) is a stage combat person, but she's also had contact with people who do martial arts in the space.
Of course, if you want to learn Japanese style sword combat, go down to your local Kendo Dojo.
For people wanting to have a bit of fun and handle things that feel like weapons, I'd highly recommend searching out a contemporary Wushu (Kung Fu) school. It's the modern sport martial art of China, is sort of a combination of traditional Chinese Martial Arts, Kickboxing, and Gymnastics and weapons are a very big component. It's very close to becoming an Olympic sport even though it's not incredibly well known.
For reference, it's what movie actor Jet Li was trained in and performed when he came to the White House in the 70s as part of the U.S.-China opening up.
I can't disagree, but I offer I hope an amusing counterpoint I heard from my uncle. It was Korean war or earlier and during basic training they were learning bayonet fighting. One soldier protested and said he did not need to learn bayonet fighting as a knife wound to the ass is not fatal.
My counterpoint being, it's good to know the skills but avoidance when possible is best.
It is really hard to safely create space in a fight if your opponent is right on you and there's any kind of obstacle around. Or, if they have a hold on you.
At least, I assume so given how much time is dedicated to creating space and moving away in my boxing and krav maga training.
not sure how anyone can recommend boxing now ; all those interactions require the right social environment, things can go wrong quickly. I reflect on learning about places in the USA where they take wrestling seriously, which at the time seemed like low-income, blue collar sort of places.. but now I realize that the social interaction between men there was rugged, but they had norms and ways to regain equilibrium. Meanwhile multi-cultural urban school, really a bad idea to have regular and repeated situations where students strike others, IMHO.
This is not written from a place of experience, i think.
Boxing is a perfectly fine sport, with reputable, kid-friendly gyms all over. My favorite gym, where I trained for years, had an after-school program for kids, in fact.
And I always take the opportunity to dispel a common misconception: You can study boxing your whole life and never have anyone throw a real punch at you, or strike you violently. Just like you can study karate your whole life, and never have to kick anyone in the head. You should look up videos of boxing training techniques (not sparring) and see what it's all about.
Technique, conditioning, mental preparation, combos, footwork are what you learn. Sparring is for those who want to compete.
Honestly, why do people still believe this? Movies?
> Meanwhile multi-cultural urban school, really a bad idea to have regular and repeated situations where students strike others, IMHO.
I see it as a chicken and egg problem.
It can be hard to manage situations where people from different background and culture have to intensely interact with each other, especially as they are pushed to their limits. But it is also by having multi-cultural people regularly interact with each others that you help improve their relations and make these situations better.
If it seems hard to enter the cycle, a smaller first step to have the kids get used to be around each other could help.
I am a firm believer in everyone studying _some_ martial art (player's choice).
For the following reasons:
- It teaches an insane amount of respect when two people have to hold themselves back to practice
- It teaches self-discipline, mostly in the long-forgotten art of keeping yourself from becoming so angry you cannot function with form.
- It gives a crazy amount of confidence to know you are at least a little bit prepared for bad situations
- It removes a lot of the panic instinct in all kinds of intimidating situations, from actual fights, to presenting to a review board.
- You quickly learn to operate through pain and discomfort and intimidation, even if you are not being actually injured (e.g., not actually sparring).
- Everyone should feel that they are legitimately their own first line of defense. Even if that defense is to create space and get away.
My sport was boxing. I'm a knowledge worker, still.