Human Weapon #1

The History Channel has a new show on Friday nights called the Human Weapon. The gist of the show is that these two MMA guys go around the world and train in various styles of martial arts and the challenge of the people of that art to a fight. At first I thought that these two guys would try to make everyone else look bad and show how great MMA fighters are. Well I was wrong, so far in the past episodes they have lost and for the most of the time they were pretty humble. They have had three episodes thus far and I will cover them one at a time.

The first episode was on Muay Tai and I liked the history of the art and they trained with the sporting element of the art, a well as a more defensive aspect in the jungles. The fight pretty much stunk but the American lost.

The second episode was on Eskrima(Arnis/kali), for which I had high expectations. They visited the group of Doce Pares Eskrima, which primarily focuses on stick fighting. They trained with various people including Tuhon Gaje and the Filipino army studying PTK. The show never did associate PTK with Tuhon Gaje though and this was quite odd. The fight once again was pretty weak and the guy with hair lost again and the Doce Pares guy seemed to be pretty easy on him.

The third episode was on Okinawan Karate. I forget which style they visited first but its major focus was, once again, on sport. They did visit some wondeful grand masters who trained "old school" which I found refreshing. They also visited a GoJu Ryu sensei which was the real deal with "real world" applications. The fight sucked ass because hits were not allowed to the head , so they were training themselves not to worry about blocking that part of the body. This time the bald guy fought and he moves like old people fuck (very slowly). I am not sure what system he studies (or studied) but they never taught him how to move. The guy he fought was being very nice to him, even though he stated that the punches were full speed (it didn't look like it to me)

Anyways, these are just some of my thoughts on the show. I don't like that they keep coming back to some sort of competition of sport at the end.Many of these arts are blade arts and sports aren't much of an element of that art. The next episode will be on a street version of French Savat and they will cover Krav Maga and Silat later on down the road. I am interested in knowing what you think. On a side note, these two guys contacted Sean stark about if he knew any Silat masters in Indonesia. He stated no he didn't but if he did they wouldn't talk to you because they are true blade arts and that doesn't seem to be what you are all about.

more blogs to come as the show continues.....