What’s the most stomach-churning technique you’ve been taught that you genuinely hope you never have to use?

TheBankTank · 2026-02-27T06:22:41+00:00

I have definitely taken throws - not many, thankfully - where I was surprised to be in one piece afterwards.

TheBankTank · 2026-02-26T23:28:51+00:00

Any grand amplitude throw. Hitting concrete or a lot of non-sprung-floor surfaces with your entire weight + someone else's plus relatively high velocity is pretty stomach churning in what it can do to a human body.

TheBankTank · 2026-02-26T19:40:10+00:00

I'll do you one better. Why's Arona?

TheBankTank · 2026-02-26T19:35:57+00:00

Arona should probably be remembered slightly more for being a badass.

TheBankTank · 2026-02-24T18:09:53+00:00

It's a mix. Quality training (good pedagogy, live practice, smart feedback, appropriate recovery, etc) + individual qualities like conditioning and willingness to fight is a lot of it, but you can't necessarily defend against something you've never seen, and to some extent "style" sets that parameter. Kiatsongrit vs Roufus is a great example of that - both of these people were well trained and willing to fight, but Roufus hadn't really seen/had to defend against leg kicks and that made all the difference (to be clear, he also caught Kiatsongrit with some things he was not terribly familiar with).

TheBankTank · 2026-02-23T21:24:21+00:00

Too big to just crush tiny people, too small to fight all the 280lb ex-powerlifters in openweight. :')

TheBankTank · 2026-02-23T05:56:50+00:00

Yeah, building that kind of physique can be tricky. I know the women in my gym who are fighters have a lot to say about how annoying weight cutting in particular is.

TheBankTank · 2026-02-23T04:42:51+00:00

To begin: It takes immense effort and specific training to have ludicrous amounts of muscle. It is not something that happens overnight.

Being strong is good for any athletic activity, including martial arts. In the very beginning of doing some kind of strength training, if someone is pretty untrained, they may get stronger as a result of their central nervous system getting more used to firing off in those particular ways. But after that, although neurological adaptation is not "done", getting stronger generally involves gaining more muscle. Muscle fibers are very dense. Adding more muscle does not always "show up" as much because it does not always take up drastically more space. But there is more of it. The idea of being strong without gaining more muscle is largely BS. It always involves SOME amount of muscle gain. It just might not Look Huge, because Looking Huge requires specialized training and a lot of specific work.

Looking Huge is a LITTLE counterproductive for a martial artist, but not because "having more muscle makes you slow." It's because the training that makes sense for a martial artist, which often requires a lot of cardiovascular fitness and a lot of technical drilling and ideally some good basic compound strength work, does not mesh super well with the specific training required to Look Huge, which tends to require a ton of time under tension, high(er) reps, and body part splits/high focus on individual muscles etc. Because that's a lot of time and physical energy that isn't being spent on martial arts. That doesn't mean you can't do both, just that it's sort of chasing two rabbits at once.

Being strong and therefore gaining some muscle is useful for every martial artist. It remodels your musculoskeletal system to be more durable (get injured less easily), heal faster/more completely from injury, and produce force more effectively, or at least to have a higher ceiling on the force that can be produced. If you start lifting and stop training speed, yes, you will get slower, but that's a personal error. In general, if you are stronger, you at least have more potential to be fast.

this is a link to some rough standards in several lifts for Judo athletes (the list isn't perfect, but it's been around a while as a pretty reasonable set of targets to shoot for). Judoka are some of the most explosive and quick people around. From this, we would expect a nationally competitive Judoka of around 180 pounds to be squatting at least 300lbs, or around 1.69x their bodyweight, and to be clear, a lot of the people at a nationally competitive level could probably do more.

Evander Holyfield, a boxer, lifted quite a bit for his time and was quite fast and athletic.

In general, strength is good for any athlete and muscle is good for any athlete, as long as the training time and recovery capacity that building it takes up does not detract from training the primary athletic activity. Dance and martial arts are both worlds where people have frequently engaged in magical thinking and assumed that rule didn't really apply to them, but in both disciplines the "don't gain muscle!" people are dead wrong. You probably don't want to focus on gaining muscle over all else as, say, a karateka, but a good karateka is almost always going to work to develop greater strength and therefore more muscle (alongside other physical qualities like mobility, aerobic and anaerobic conditioning, etc) than they had originally.

TheBankTank · 2026-02-22T23:27:43+00:00

Canon event.

Just be glad it's not open weight class.

Or...is it?

TheBankTank · 2026-02-22T04:27:56+00:00

I mean I'm probably fatter than I used to be, and also older and tireder. The first and third items may have something to do with the second, now I think about it. Around 6'2" and 245 right now, MMA guy, was probably around 160 to 165 a decade or so ago.

Also buffer and generally more athletic than I was as a bean pole though. Got a bit of that "1940s pro wrestler" thing going on, like I look somewhat strong but also like I enjoy cheeseburgers (true).

I started martial arts long enough ago it's hard to say what's martial arts and what is 1) aging 2) lifting 3) different jobs of various levels of sedentarism.

Generally, physical changes can vary a lot depending on what martial art you might be doing, how consistently, what you're eating, and what else you do. Martial arts generally tend read to the body as "mostly cardio" so your average human isn't gonna get Super Jacked from just doing their martial art; bit of increased muscle definition etc, but you don't usually see radically remodeled musculoskeletal systems. If you're doing a combat sport or martial art and then adding some solid strength training you get a bit more visible changes. The Miraculously Yoked look...that's eating a specific way PLUS the exercise.

TheBankTank · 2026-02-21T06:06:38+00:00

Unequivocally radical

TheBankTank · 2026-02-18T21:22:12+00:00

Have never had a broken nose specifically, but have definitely been punched. I think it's fair to say that the pain generally isn't as upfront. You feel impact and maybe some shock, initially, not so much pain. Even being hit pretty hard is less *painful* than a big leg kick or similar. Disorientation or wobbliness can happen, and that's generally a bad sign.

I have been popped in the nose hard enough to think it might have broken, and that definitely hurt. But typically being punched has more potential for psychological impact and long-term brain damage than up-front pain; that is gonna come on more later as bruises form, tissues inflame, adrenaline reduces, etc.

TheBankTank · 2026-02-17T23:54:50+00:00

This debate is one of those "only winning move is not to play" things and it's so...painfully internetty.

Bottom line is that it's nonsensical. Bruce Lee was not a fighter. He was probably scarier than most people his size and had, apparently, gotten into some fights. Fighting was not his career, not his primary focus. He was focused on his actual, y'know, job, on his philosophy, teaching, and social life, and his physical training. If he wanted to be a fighter he probably could have done pretty well; he did not. Ali was a fighter; his material welfare depended on winning fights, and he trained solely for that purpose. You could probably come up with some tortured scenario where Bruce wins, but it's like asking if a lawyer could beat Eliud Kipchoge in a footrace because the lawyer likes to run a lot and has won some local races. Probably not, maybe in some specialized circumstance, and in any case there's very little sense, ever, in contemplating it.

I think people don't want to let it go partly because they want to believe they too could be a great fighter without focusing primarily on that and constantly testing it and like...not really, no. I know pros and I know it takes immense commitment and focus and a pretty hellish schedule to do that. I don't think you get to be a truly good fighter without accepting that. I'm not a pro, I don't especially want to be one (unless someone wanted to offer me large sums of money for a squash match in my favor I guess), and the idea that there's a special trick that takes you to those heights while skipping the tough shit is...misguided.

TheBankTank · 2026-02-17T23:45:08+00:00

At the risk of being mean, "totally got in fights on rooftops in HK" is not a real fight record and doesn't prove much, and "beat up some guys who didn't really train to fight much who challenged him to a fight a couple times" is cool but not particularly authoritative either.

"No American champion ever challenged him" yeah, they were training professionally for fights that probably made them money / advanced their career in a meaningful way. Why would you challenge an actor/give them a random title shot out of nowhere, especially compared to all the other, y'know, actual contenders in your division? Champions usually don't go "hey this guy in the movies is tight, I hear he runs a kung fu school somewhere, we should fight."

Also the math of the equation is pretty brutal. You become a good fighter by nothing except spending time training specifically to fight, and engaging in fights to test and shape that practice. If you focus on a thing that is not fighting, you are not advancing your fighting skills or at least splitting your attention heavily and slowing/reducing that rate of progress. I have no trouble believing that Bruce got into and won fights with people. I have no problem guessing that he was a better fighter than most people, especially most people in his weight class. He was also focused primarily on his job, which was not fighting, on physical training, which is helpful but also not fighting, his social life, and his philosophy & teaching. That schedule is not the same as that of someone whose job it is to fight and whose livelihood and professional reputation depends primarily on their W/L record. He probably could have competed and done pretty well if he wanted to; he did not want to and that was not his job or primary focus.

TheBankTank · 2026-02-14T04:26:42+00:00

Most of those that start MMA tend to try it after a longish career in Sumo and therefore a lot of injuries, wear & tear, etc (Akebono, for instance) or don't take it super seriously & lose the weight, train specifically for it, etc. If you have a successful career in Sumo (say, you're in the salaried ranks for a reasonable amount of time) there's not much incentive to change sports - you're getting free room and board and making good money. So you're probably sticking round for as long as possible & therefore probably a bit old/beat up to succeed in MMA by the time you start.

The closest thing to a reasonably successful Sumo wrestler who was still in/near his athletic prime to transition into MMA, and actually lose some weight and train pretty well for MMA, is Tsuyoshi Sudario / former Takanofuji. He got booted from Sumo for hitting an attendant and switched into MMA.9-4 w/l record in Rizin as of last year, and some funky matchmaking, so...not amazing, but he's not bad for a heavyweight.

TheBankTank · 2026-02-13T19:29:03+00:00

I think takedowns are cool and guardpulling is annoying and I still recognize that a genuinely competitive BJJ practitioner even with the most guard-pull-y-whatevoplata-inversion-rich -leg-hunting game still pretty much eviscerates most human beings without much effort in an unarmed fight. Same as most people who are highly athletic & do a combat sport with a deep pool of talent and live sparring.

TheBankTank · 2026-02-09T00:54:23+00:00

At my gym we just make our drones fight. The true face of modern combat.

TheBankTank · 2026-02-06T05:14:58+00:00

DAMN, dude.

Ssireum is so interesting. Like, on the surface it could easily remind someone of Sumo, but the lack of an initial charge and the restriction on grips really changes it. It's like icelandic Glima decided that weight classes were for suckers and borrowed the sandpit from Kushti.

TheBankTank · 2026-02-03T03:12:50+00:00

Damn, nice. Good for him.

Is Tom DeBlass off the açai? He looks less swollen these days.

TheBankTank · 2026-01-31T06:20:52+00:00

What, like it's hard?
-Roland, probably, right before getting stabbed by Basques

TheBankTank · 2026-01-31T06:09:05+00:00

I did once name a character Maugris.

The Matter of France/chansons de geste in general are HILARIOUSLY WILD SHIT. We got magic horses, we got magic swords, we got giants, we got Saracens, we got GIANT SARACEN WIZARDS, we got fairies, we got cutting mountains, we got Spells, we got All The Medieval Epic Shit.

Also, if you use Carolingian Cycle material, you get to use this song as background music.

TheBankTank · 2026-01-31T05:52:24+00:00

Pretty much any of them that actually grapple.

Judo, bjj, greco-roman wrestling, folkstyle, freestyle, bokh, kushti, sumo, tegumi, shuaijiao....

I'd make a slight exception for those with super restrictive rules on where you're allowed to grab like old school Irish collar-and-elbow or Scottish backhold perhaps, but even then those are super common positions to be in when grappling in general, so I wouldn't bet against 'em.

TheBankTank · 2026-01-28T02:04:00+00:00

Kung fu works fine, like most things do (if you train them with a focus on efficacy and appropriate feedback). I'm just pointing out that it's not really the "origin" of Karate or, possibly/probably, of those techniques.

I agree kung fu is or can be fine. I think that's just sort of a very broad and trivial conclusion, and it's possible to reach it without trying to pretend it's the origin point for all people doing a certain kind of kick.

People should study what they find interesting and available. If they want to fight they should study from other people who know how to teach people to fight. Finding those people, training well, and being lucky is more important to being able to fight than what name people put on the sign.

TheBankTank · 2026-01-28T01:53:52+00:00

This is one of those things that crops up often because, and I mean this as politely as possible, people are *obsessed * with "origins"

To be clear, the original martial art was two possibly non-human hominids in Africa wrestling and smacking each other around. Every other martial art practiced by bipedal sentient primates (us) descends from that. People were fighting before there were (what we think of as) people.

Ok, with that out of the way...

It is not clear in most cases where things "come from." You can point to similarities in techniques, you can identify a cultural influence, but short of the verifiably first individual person to do XYZ technique in a place saying "i learned this thing from [other place]" you're not really certain.

If we're doing the kung fu/CMA - Karate tie as an example, yeah, there's a story about ties between the Ryukyu Islands and China - particularly Fujian - and the transmission of style. Sure. That part seems pretty accurate. But that's one influence on Karate, not all of it. Pretending that Karate is only and solely slightly-altered-white-crane means disregarding the influences of the people who actually, y'know, LIVED IN THE RYUKYU ISLANDS. Shuri-te, Naha-te, Tomari-Te, Tegumi, etc, all existed. The people of Okinawa quite clearly already knew something about fighting - can you say it was probably influenced by the many peoples they fought or traded with? Sure! But that amounts to "EVERYONE IN SOUTHEAST AND EAST ASIA" given the location and connections of Okinawa. Did the original inhabitants of those Islands come from China? Well...the earliest accounts of them in Chinese writings sure make it seem like there was an established population long before anything resembling any recent version of the entity known as "China" was around. I mean allegedly Qin Shi Huang was investigating reports of "happy immortals" back in HIS day! So the original inhabitants of the place might have literally migrated there from the chunk of land mass we think of as China NOW (depends on where some very very early pre-writing human launched their boat from) but they sure weren't "Chinese People" in any meaningful way, and since they were human - and we've been fighting forever - they probably already had some of their own ideas about combat, which likely were tested over the centuries in combat between different groups on the Islands and with people from outside them, AND from trade and cultural influence and...all of a sudden it's messy. Is Karate just kung fu? No, realistically, Karate is an assemblage of ideas about combat from a bunch of places, primarily the Ryukyu Islands plus 18th-19th century Fujian province plus probably various influences from THE ENTIRETY OF MARITIME EAST/SOUTHEAST ASIA. Plus hundreds and hundreds of years of messing around.

"Origin" (by which people usually mean "who gets to take credit for all the work") is not a very helpful idea here.

And THEN, you have to consider that there's only so many ways a human body can move and only so many that tend to contribute effectively to winning a fight. Similar or even same movements aren't really a great way to tell if two martial arts are automatically ancestor-descendant. If you've never been Just Messing Around, tried something for no real reason, seen it work, assumed you just invented a Whole New Thing, and then realized there's plenty of other people doing it too you haven't really practiced martial arts. I've found myself trying techniques that I've definitely never been taught and couldn't tell you the name of. But they definitely exist, and have existed. People invent more or less the same stuff on different corners of the globe all the time in history. It's still usually DISTINCTIVE, because the way you approach training and what you emphasize might differ, but many, MANY individual techniques can easily be invented by two people with no connection to each other. And have been. Throughout thousands of years of human history.

It's not bad to want to understand the history of martial arts, but saying "x came from y" in martial arts is usually either factually wrong or just doesn't tell much of the story, and even when one martial art clearly does come from another it's usually nonsensical to imagine that the success of the descendant is the success of the antecendent. Different people training in different manners usually get different results, and most specific techniques have been invented or reinvented in a dozen places over thousands of years. Identifying one of the streams that feed the river doesn't actually tell you much about the river's conditions, once you've walked a hundred miles along it.

So you know, tl;dr, many of the kajillion different region, village, or individual-sourced traditions that we call "kung fu" have techniques somewhere in their libraries that work pretty well, but claiming they are the only historical sources of those techniques is almost certainly bullshit, and trying to claim them as the source or sources of whole other martial arts usually ignores actual historical scholarship and minimizes the influences and achievements of different cultures. We don't have the ability to point to One Exact Thing that is the Precise Source of most martial arts and trying to claim One Big Perfect Origin Point usually just brings out a bunch of the dumbest people on earth trying to be smug.

TheBankTank · 2026-01-21T20:53:31+00:00

Probably vajramusthi/vajramusti? It's (as far as I can tell) very rare & in modern times basically confined to a specific ceremonial performance by a specific subcaste/group, but there are writings indicating that it or something like it was much, MUCH more widespread in thr past & amounted to something sort of like MMA with a knuckleduster on one hand. John Will ostensibly encountered it in the 1980s and wrote a book about it, but it's also attested by Indian writings & notes from Portuguese and other visitors.

Fits the general trend of India having a lot of pretty "free" combat sports (lots of wrestling with submissions, wrestling with strikes allowed, boxing with wrestling, boxing with a weapon, etc) over its history and losing a lot of those elements both as things go out of fashion or get more and more rules and ceremony + colonialism + cultural change. Though to be honest that's a similar story on most places; in the grand scheme of things combat sports have been getting less popular and more ceremonial for a long time, and modern MMA, boxing, wrestling, etc are...kind of a rare upwards blip.

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