Human Weapon

I was up late last night watching TV and I ran across a show called Human Weapon. I generally don't think very highly about Martial Arts television shows (the one real exception being BBC's Mind, Body and Kick Ass Moves) because they rarely showcase the real purpose and the real science behind martial arts.

In terms of MMA, this show was really interesting. The particular episode I was watching was on Judo, but the first thing I realized was that I recognized one of the hosts, Jason Chambers (15-6-1) from his loss to Michihiro Omigawa (Omigawa has sense become one of the foremost Judoka in MMA).

Both of the hosts are smart guys, both in terms of their ability to host the show and their knowledge of martial arts. That's my plug for their show, check it out.

Now, I wanted to head into the central theme of their show, which is this idea that you should look at and learn a little bit of all of the martial arts. While I think it's a good idea to learn as many aspects of the martial arts as you can in order to become a complete fighter, I don't think that the way that they did it was necessarily the best way to learn.

When a professional mixed martial arts fighter visits a camp, he doesn't do it for a week, in fact, it's rare for a guy to do it for as short as two weeks. The generally excepted time frame is 4-8 weeks, that's the time it takes (training 6-8 hours a day, 6 days a week) to learn the basics of a gyms primary fighting style or the specialty of the gym.

A common thing for fighters to do is bounce from gym to gym, and train at a gym for 6 or 8 months at a time. That gives time to take 2 or 3 fights (or perhaps 4 or 5, if it's a prolific fighter like Jeremy Horn) and figure out how they can adapt that style into the skills that they already have.

This is the difference between going to a third world country for 2 weeks on a school trip and joining the peace core and heading out for two months. When you leave for two weeks, you can quickly fall back into habits that (whether positively or negatively) the earlier training had gotten rid of. If you were there for 6 months, 8 months or a year, you are fluent in that style and as long as you excersise the practices regularly, you'll never lose it.

The problem with the TV format is that bouncing around gives you time to make an episode (maybe 2 weeks, 3 at most) and then you have to go to the next one. As intensly as you might be training, you aren't going to learn even the fundamentals in 3 weeks.

So, while I think Bill Duff and Jason Chambers are doing a great job putting together a television show, I think it's unfortunate that they aren't training at the level that they could be.