Whenever I watch random street videos on google, or UFC matches, I always try to invision myself as one of the victims in the video. I take Shaolin-Do Kung-Fu, and I can never picture myself as being the winner of those situations, simply because I just cannot see myself employing learned skills of kung-fu against a barrage of punchs.

Now compare this situation to a sparring match, and I can say that I would excell. Because in a sparring match, there are set rules and such. In the real world however, no rules will hold anyone back, simply because there are none.

So what do you all think?

I think that if you increase the intensity levels and reduce the number of rules in sparring, you will improve your abilities to react under "real world" pressure.

Is this another "is kung fu practical" thread?!

So basically you are worrying about something you imagined.

Such is the way of the world, almost everyone is afraid of somethinig that isn't real.

You don't train to compete in UFC, so why would you excel? UFC guys, when training for UFC, aren't training for kung fu sparring matches, so why would they excel in that area?

And as for street fighting.... To quote Marc "Animal" MacYoung, infamous streetfighter turned self-defense guru "And to tell you the truth, in order to find yourself in a 'streetfight' you have to be somewhat of an [censored]. You may want to believe otherwise, but there is a simple raw truth....there ain't no such thing as "a good guy" in a streetfight."

Ah ya gotta love Mac! don't agree with everything he says, but I did like that quote of his about the Streetfighting.

I think MattJ And Guitarninja made a good point all the same, a lot of TMA's places don't train enough. The only place I know locally where they offer training more than twice a week is the WTF TKD at the local uni. They train 5 times a week. If I didn't travel to another dojo, I'd only be able to do Judo once a week as well.

To excel as a fighter, then you would have to train as a fighter. Train and practice with the mentality that you are going to use these techniques to fight. Try and find out what your techniques are used for, how to apply them. Learning all of this, step up the intensity. Remember you're not just training for excercise, you're training to fight.

Also like mentioned before, step up the sparring.

And if you spar, maybe you should approach it as more of a streetfight, meaning have a more relaxed stance and keeping your body and techniques loose and simple. Because you probably wont be doing 540s in the air on the street and standing in a monkey stance. Though it mite scare some people, haha

Make sure to spar as much as you can in class...even if you can't do full contact face strikes, you should be able to strike towards the face, and you should get in that habit. You should also be allowed to use Chin' na and grappling moves that are in the forms, and you should practice using those as much as possible. Making it really work will also require a lot more training than can be offered in class. There is generally not nearly enough time in class for bag work. I would invest in a heavy bag of some sort and practice all your techniques full force on a regular basis. Experiment with ways to hit, hand formations, different types of kicks. Make the techniques your own, and don't depend on the exercises in class to teach you everything.

A real fight is just sparring without rules and pretty much just do more damage to your enemy in simplest ways, just watch out as some ppl will play dirty.

You should be able to use your Kung-Fu techniques in a "real world" fight, because you train using those techniques and you will end up using your Kung-Fu out of instinct pretty much.

I train TMA! So maybe if your not learning something in your TMA, you should switch to a differant TMA