Want reality?..

This post will be all over the place probably as I am just going to type.. anyway..

The more experience I get the more I realize "how the fuck can traditional martial artists believe that their stuff will work in the street".. now I have trained traditionally in the past and beleived in it until I found out the hard way it was useless..

And now after several altercations I realize that obviously my instructor had zero experience because if he had even had a few fights he would have realized the reality is ALOT different..

Lets compare here.. how do these 2 things go together???

1. In a dojo, dressed in white pajamas, doing 3 step self defense, where the opponent shapes up and throws 3 punches and on the last punch they hold it there so you can do your perfect preprogrammed response and feel really good and confident that you can defend yourself.. and look pretty while doing it.. there is zero distractions and if you fuck it up you can start again

2. Your in a bar, some guy gets in your face yelling at the top of his voice, with a level of aggression you have never experienced, you feel fear, your heart is pumping, you don't know who his friends are.. all of a sudden he starts throwing punches from every direction, fuck you can't predict where its coming from.. you just have to block them as best as you can and clinch.. but his friend comes and jumps you and is trying to choke you as the first guy is still attacking.. you are feeling the pain, the constriction on your neck and throat, none of your perfect techniques work.. you just have to struggle out of it and throw some unperfect unpretty strikes somehow.. but you are off balance because there is 2 people hanging off you.. you realise if you go down, your fucked.. if you fuck it up theres no starting again.. you are getting through on sheer aggression and willpower.. on one hand.. this struggle is invigorating, like your really living.. your inner nature comes out and you just have to survive.. on the other hand you just want it to be over.. so you can relax and go back to the simpleness and the comfort of the dojo..

But you cant..

You wonder how this fear can be dealt with in the dojo.. can it be recreated.. you realise that this one situation shows you more than years in the dojo.. and you start to wonder if the training is worth it.. you are starting to get some good ideas of what to add to your training.. nobody will listen, you quit the dojo and train in your shed.. but all the training partners you find are put off by it.. because it is uncomfortable, because there is aggression built into it, because it is violent, because being phsyically dominated even in training is uncomfortable.. and they simply don't show up again.. they would rather be in some taekwondo class feeling comfortable and looking good..

But hopefully they will not find out the hard way like this, you would not recommend it to anybody.. atleast you were open minded enough to accept it, even though it was hard, but some of these people will not accept it and will have a meltdown..

Most of this is from my own mind.. based loosely on some of my experiences.. but altered to communicate something.. it is basically a work of fiction.. but stems from truth and experience..

Just my little bit of experience and I have these realizations.. I can't even imagine how somebody really experienced sees it.. i've only been in about 6 substantial experiences in this area, with some small things and dealing with alot of aggression that didn't go physical.. and I already can see that alot of stuff that is taught is bullshit, and wonder how different some of my old traditional instructors would think had they even had a little bit of experience..

~

Hello
as a "martial arts person" of course i have to answer.
I think what you forgot is to think about is why people practice martial arts and thats a main point if you wanna define if its the right thing for them or not. And another point is that there are very different dojos and instructors.
About the motivations...i started practicing traditional kung fu to get healthy again, get back some general fitness, train my ability to concentrate, coordination and so on. I didnt think about fighting or self defence at all the first years. Then after feeling i was ready i tried out the sparring hours and enjoy them a lot since then.
And i do think sparring is at least to a certain point a useful training for fighting or would you disagree? Apart from that at least in the style i practice there are a lot of things that i suppose i will find on the "from cage to street" dvd that i hopefully get tomorrow. It seems the old chinese guys that invented it really been pretty vicious.
There are a few dojos that belong together here and teach the same style and each of them has instructors that have been successfull full contact fighters on international level.
So all together i suppose it mainly depends on what you want, where you go and who teaches you and not if its called traditional martial arts or modern close combat or whatever.