Ten truths about the martial arts

1. The harder you train, the better you perform “for real”. This means as close to full contact as you can get and against resisting people. It is even better resisting people NOT from your own school/organization

2. You can talk about “reality” as much as you want, but if you are only training in your own school, you are very far away from it

3. Wrestling, grappling and/or “rolling” can be pretty much done full speed, full resistance and full on which is precisely why people who do these things are usually pretty good fighters.

4. A wrestler is a fighter, 9 out of 10 times pick the highs chool wrestler over the guy taking traditional martial arts classes in a fight

5. The only way you can train hard with striking is with padding. If you tell me you spar full contact without any pads/safety equipment, I will tell you flat out “no, you aren’t”. In fact, what you’ve just informed me is that you have NO IDEA what full contact is really about

6. Traditional Chinese martial arts has throws, trips, tie ups, sweeps and clinching. If you were told otherwise, you were lied to. If you aren’t learning and practicing these things, either your instructor is f-in with you or simply never learned things correctly

7. If you want to see real “internal”, look at a high performance athlete. 99% of the time they have never even heard of so-called “internal training”

8. The guys criticizing the performance of a fighter are always sitting in the cheap seats, have never fought and don’t train in gyms where there is any contact

9. People who constantly talk about “superior” traditional technique, “superior” internal techniques, make excuses about “rules”, or like to say “it’s just a sport” are also the people who seldom (if ever) play with contact, never venture outside their school to work with outsiders and certainly never will test their “theories” in a real combat sport

10. If you are not good at something, practicing it makes you uncomfortable, and if you prefer to never be doing it, it is likely EXACTLY what you should be training