I don't disagree with that. A legit lineage is not a guarantee of combat effectiveness. But a false lineage puts everything in question. So after I had decided Sin The had no honor, I took a look at the style itself. I'm still looking for an impressive forms demo. If you have actual fight clips, even better. But I figured that was asking too much. I saw some low level sparring matches, but nothing that came anywhere close to impressive.
If you do forms and don't fight, you can't see combat in forms. If you know combat and forms, you can. Whether the man doing the form can fight or not is another question. But if they perform strong, it's one more check mark in the positive column. And one thing you can tell is whether it could be used effectively or not. Especially in an applications demo.
How bout everyone here trying to make their point put up a great example of one or more of the arts you practice. Let's compare and discuss? No arguing over character or egos, just the movements themselves. If you can post combat and performance peices, even better. I haven't gone video digging for awhile, but I'll take a look when I get a chance.
I will post high level Wrestling, Sub Grappling, Muay Thai and Bak Mei. I know, weird combo right. but I find the shorthands work really well in close while engaging and disengaging from the clinch and in the outer pocket I can use Muay Thai to pick em apart. If I get in real trouble I can fall back on my grappling or my acrobatic experience to get in real close or get right out and take off. Wrestling I will use whether I am standing or not. It's probably the most useful of what I have learned. Very rarely in real fights have people just stood and boxed with me. I am usually the smaller one, so they always try to close the gap and get hands on me. Without the wrestling background I doubt I would have done anywhere near as well as I have. I would get bearhugged, fallen on and dry humped by bigger guys who only really know how to hold on and swing.
One time a man who outweighed me by atleast 60 pounds tried to throw me down stairs, I brought him with me and used him as a sled. Without the wrestling, that would have hurt alot. Infact it hurt anyways. But not as much as it hurt him. Couple of surgical strikes and some more indiscriminate stomping and it was done. Found a dental impression in my shoe later. It was on film too, security cameras. It saved me from an internal charge. Of course they wouldn't let me have the footage as a trophy, unfortunately.
I remember my friend filmed some of our sparring sessions tho. It was full contact with sparring gloves(6's) and mouth guards. About 10 of us taking turns. Maybe I can convert those if he still has em. They are on a tape somewhere.
Too bad the digital camera age didn't start sooner. So much stuff taped on lil tapes that are so easy to just pack up and forget about or lose. Nobody can ever be bothered to convert them. I imagine this is an issue for many of you guys as well. I never had a video camera back then, but somebody always had one. I'll see what I can do. But to be honest, if I'm gonna call old friends for footage, I would rather run down some of our shows and B-Boy competitions instead. We'll see.