Is martial arts really that useful?

Tekkip20@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 124 points –

I've been thinking about martial arts and how really it is useful these days since a lot of places will have criminals hiding firearms or in the U.S. some states have conceal carry.

Whilst it contains discipline and it is enjoyable to train in a club for, say Karate, I just think it might not be that useful in places where firearms are commonly held, all it really takes is for someone to take safety off, aim, pew pew and that's it.

I suppose I probably get this thinking from kung fu where it's seen more of an art form then actually being a serious bone breaking form of combat

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The science on how humans survived through some seriously apex predators tags this as the reason. We evolved to run, the Usain Bolts of the world not being rare back in the day, which is why we are even here, and now we’ve de-volved into a sedentary society where Usain Bolt is the only one.

It was never about our speed, it was about our endurance and persistence. There's no point in history where we were the fastest creature in the local food chain, a deer or Buffalo was going to sprint faster than us, but when they had to stop to cool off or recover from the fast burn of energy, we were right there, right behind them, still coming.

It's true we're more like the T1000 from T2 than usain bolt. Iirc our endurance on land is unsurpassed by any other mammal

It was just one theory, backing his advice. We didn’t have the sharpest teeth or claws, but we could run away. And far better than our lazy asses generally can today.

Usain Bolt was faster than the hundreds of billions of people that came before him. He set a world record that still hasn't been broken.