If you had to do it all over again would you?
An honest question for all you guys (and girls) who have put a lot of time and effort into the TCMA world, if you had known then what you know now, (by this I mean had the same access to the internet as you do now and the ability to really research styles and teaches then as you do now, not to mention the ability to judge what works via the MMA and vale tudo route then as we can now) would you have changed anything?
I don’t mean drop it all in favour of BJJ lol (although if that’s your answer it is at least honest) but are their things you wish you could have changed or done differently or not done at all?
For example when I first started out there was little one could do to actually research a style or an instructors claim, you had to take it on face value for the most part, this let to me training in at least 1 style that have since been shown to be highly questionable in as far as its stated history, if I had known that then I probably wouldn’t have actually trained those styles.
When I couldn’t make something work in sparring I trusted my sifu (because that’s what we did) when he said it takes more dedication to make these things work, since then I have come to realise it wasn’t just me but everyone who had trouble making those things work and personally rather than the years I spent working on those techniques I would rather have spent the time working the pads, sparring and wrestling
I firmly believed in the importance of sets in aiding ones training, I learned them as best I could, spent years perfecting them and helping teach and break them down, now looking back I would give my right arm to have that time back to actually put it towards something else.
I regret agreeing with the other senior students I trained with who said the early UFC’s were barbaric and didn’t represent how fighting should look, it took me years to realise that pretty or not, that’s how fighting looks and that grappling is a big part of fighting
So if I had to d it all again would I, probably not I don’t regret all my time in TCMA (I still practise and use some of what I was taught) but I don’t miss a lot of it and I think students coming through now have a head start in terms of finding good styles and avoiding a lot of the pitfalls that were around when I started