Apr 01, 2009 19:00
I tried to make this as realistic and true as possible, given my own knowledge of martial arts. A lot of this is all stuff I’ve been told by my teachers.
There’s a great documentary about Japanese martial arts, called Budo: The Art of Killing. I highly recommend watching it for anyone who’s interested. I actually thing this documentary itself is artistic, just the way they choose to present martial arts. It’s up on youtube, the first part of the film is at this link:
youtube (dot) com/watch?v=V-7SDVi5c4g
I don’t know as much about Korean or Chinese martial arts as I would like, nor do I know very much about Western fighting styles. They are very different from Japanese martial arts-many have described the attitude, style, and objective of the three nations to be completely different.
Just for kicks, there’s a sick round of competitive tae kwon do, the gold medal round of the men’s 80+ kg for Athens Olympics (2004). It isn’t representative at all of what applied martial arts would look like. You’ll notice that they don’t throw punches, only kicks. The commentary’s in Korean. : youtube (dot) com/watch?v=iuHDjdSzpFo
EDIT: I stand corrected. Many thanks to Serulene, who wrote that “Tae Kwon Do has some great punch/grab techniques, but kicks score a lot higher so players in competitive matches aren't likely to utilize hand techniques. There's some talk about changing the rules a bit to encourage players to use their hands, but so far, it's only been discussed. Shame, really.”
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