There is no real martial arts they just play games.
Muscle memory. When you take MMA classes or whatever, your coach will make you fight, and then the guy will attack you and then you will learn to push him away and fight back and then it will become a bodyreflex for you, to stand in the right position, to grab his body, use your muscles, it becomes natural, just like if you would fall down and use your hands to land safely.. Or if someone threw a knife after you, then you would in reflex move extremely fast away or put your hands for your head, thats reflexes, and the MMA will become a reflex.
Muscle memory is when you practice a technique to the point where it becomes a reflex reaction. If you have to think about a move before you apply it could cause you critical seconds in an actual fight. In a real fight the winner is often the person who makes the second to the last mistake.
Unfortunately you don't. Being in real life situation is not even close to being in a gym or dojo. People usually have a scenario in their head on how they think it's going to go down and they imagine themselves doing this technique or that technique and then they walk away the bad@ss. For instance dojo's you train to disarms knifes sometimes. You train on what to do when your attacker puts a knife on your throat. But once you are actually there, once you feel the cold steel on your throat and you look into the eyes off someone who may even kill you, do you really think you are going to try to disarm him? I very much doubt it.
My best tip is to do martial arts for fun. Do it to get into shape, do it to meet some new cool people, do it to learn something new. Hopefully if you are in a situation like that you can trust your training but don't have any delusions about taking down 10+ men at one time or dodging bullets.
Wow.
Well my ideal answer is that you train to fight and hopefully you never use it outside of competition. That's the reality for most people in the western world and in "civilized society".
With that said, if you train properly and use the many tools available you'll develop skills and confidence to be able to defend yourself. Training wrong and you'll be very surprised at how much trouble bad training can cause you in a "real fight".
One thing to keep in mind is that to really get good at a martial art it takes years of training. And the first year or so, your training can actually make you a WORSE fighter. This happens as you're learning to overcome your natural habits and replace them with ones from your martial art.
In my own case, the path was learn the basics of kata, exercises, drills, and light sparing. As these skills became easier to do more were added, but the previous ones were done over and over and over, etc.
In time, more physical sparring and conditioning were added as were prearranged sequences. Now prearranged sparking is one of the more problematic things in martial arts in my opinion. I say that because, it brings the "I do this, you do that, then I do this mentality". Then when someone does something unexpected you don't know how to respond as you're "programmed" to do one thing only. So after the basic moves are learned, I train with "screwups" tricks, and just doing something else. The idea is that most of the time you do what's expected, but you need to be ready for something else.
Now this is just a few thoughts on things and I hope my point is clear as it really takes a long time to get to be a very good martial artist and have the confidence and skills to be able to use them in the real world.
In fact, I'll even go as to say that most people never train long enough to get to that point.
So I was wondering when taught any type of Martial Arts/MMA, how do you learn how to use that in a real fight?
Is it muscle memory, is it the fact that your bodies muscles automatically remember this technique and this fighting style?
Is that how it works?
