Is taiji a combat sport - this fighter claims it is, although it looks a lot like sanda to me https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rRGrzPU0zDY&pp=ygUQdGFpIGNoaSBzcGFy

Is taiji a combat sport - this fighter claims it is, although it looks a lot like sanda to me https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rRGrzPU0zDY&pp=ygUQdGFpIGNoaSBzcGFycmluZw%3D%3D https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rRGrzPU0zDY&pp=ygUQdGFpIGNoaSB... I think taiji gets a bad rap. Although I haven't done explicitly taiji, when I did some shaolin quan which included baduanjin I was very impressed with how holistic the training was (with the exception of combat application). I think the training was "boring" but has the necessary ingredients for preparing the body to be conditioned for very fluid movement which turns out is very good for long term health and preservation of your MSK system. I came away impressed that we've had so much of this figured out for so long well before we had the science to explain it. Baduanjin was actually designed to be accessible regardless of age or prior skill level. > The truth is that barehanded fighting has been obsolete since the invention of rocks. So with a rock or even a rock weapon like an axe or whatever you are telling me you think you could take on Khabib? That rocks have completely obsoleted physicality and skill so now you will win. > If you want to see what works, expect to see a lot of strikes that break the opponent's knee, and wrestlers putting their opponent's eyes out. This quora post captures exactly what I think is about the search for truth in martial arts - there's so much "theory" that struggles to hold up in practice where a bouncer/martial artist reflects on how knee breaks are a low percentage high risk technique when trying to execute in real life. https://www.quora.com/Are-knee-destructions-illegal-in-MMA https://www.quora.com/Are-knee-destructions-illegal-in-MMA I think non practitioners routinely underestimate the difficulty in executing these kinds of techniques under duress. I mean, a proper liver strike is a 1 hit KO and karate teaches the liver kick where you strike the liver with the ball of your foot. How often do you see that technique used? It's like the mma equivalent of the football bicycle kick. IIRC Jon Jones used knee kicks and they werent so effective that they were banned or changed the face of the sport. Eye gouging is weird, I'm unsure how it would change MMA and we'll never find out. If they're good as a strike people will stop engaging and resort to kick range but kicks can make you more liable to take downs which then brings you into gouging range in wrestling. If anything UFC rules has shown that physicality kind of trumps skill unless the skill gap is very large. Which is a frustrating outcome but a truth nonetheless - martial arts is only useful if you're also strong