Originally posted by: Racso
maybe it's just me but i think that the tread went to the trash!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! =P
Yeah, but only as of this page. The karate/martial arts discussion in general is quite a valid tangent, and ... to be honest, exactly where you'd have to expect that video and its audio commentary to take things.

Speaking of which ... back on track:

Originally posted by: Chaoskiddo
i understand, but you cant understand if you havent ever been in a tournment, in tournments sometimes the point IS to look flashy for the sake of winning, if you were acctually on the street fighting some1 of course those flipping crazy jumping moves would be a waste of time.
Depends on the situation. If you're being jumped by 5 or 6 thugs in an alley, and you take down the first one in a painful way doing some extremely flashy move that makes them think you're more skilled than you necessarily might think of yourself as, they might get intimidated and either hesitate or back down. Or they might decide to pull knives or guns, and completely change the face of the situation.

Of course, in like a pit fight or something, the intimidation factor is only really useful for psychological warfare, and I'd imagine most experienced pit fighters would see through that sort of game (and psych themselves up quite a bit beforehand)-- but it would make the audience happy to see that sort of showboating wasteful stuff.

In the case of this video, the guy used very basic stuff (a basic stance, a basic hit), properly executed with black-belt power... it wouldn't really look impressive at all if you don't know anything at all about how impressively sharp, accurate and powerful that hit had to be to take that dude down like that.

Makes me think of this: http://tang.keenspace.com/d/19980222.html