On the martial arts debate

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I just wanted to bring up a few pointers on the occasional style skirmishes people get into in discussion. I was talking to my instructor tonight at the end of our belt test tonight and I think he made some great points that are much more universal than, say - old lines dividing Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Indonesian, Malaysian, etc.

He's made mention before that he's had several great instructors in the past who'd do different things while demonstrating a move, he'd get confused by that, bring it up to them, and the instructor implied "Oh, don't worry - its all the same". In a literal sense its not, in the broader application sense though yes.

It seems like all of the arts that have been out there for centuries or millennia, up until recently, were passed along family lines. In that sense they'd have some things that were effective, some things that weren't, plenty of things that may have even been there simply to distinguish or brand name their family art from the next. Even today you see that much diversity in many other parts of the world; some arts have been systematized more in the sense that those particular culture's central government got the arts involved in military training.

I guess what I'm really getting at though; the age old maxim that a good instructor is a good instructor, I think holds true. A few examples that I know to be true for stand up, are likely true in abstract on the ground although may not be identical in translation, are as follows:

- go to the blind side when possible
- control the elbow
- break the center line (unbalance your opponent)

and I know there are other core principles and likely I've seen them used albeit, even three years in, IMO, I may still be a bit new to see it all exactly that way yet.

Another sub-point which I don't know if there's as breezy a way of saying it: your entries need to be more pristine than everything else afterward. If you're going in and get hit, what you had in mind to do after that won't matter a whole lot simply because its likely not happening any way you had it envisioned. This gets even trickier with knife fighting because, when you have practice knives something can look great to someone who hasn't actually 'been there' or come to know the physics empirically but it would get them killed. In that case or any other similar weapon knowing the difference between a good or bad entry is life or death.

I suppose I just bring this up to say, for the people who are primarily looking for self-defense arts; these are some of the things you want to look for in an instructor and whether or not they have a handle on them. Seems like there is no such thing as an art out there, whether traditional or even post 90's ad hok MMA or integrated anything, that won't have a mixed bag of instructors.

I know there are people here who do have a lot more knowledge than I do on this stuff (albeit I know that I've kept to what I do know pretty well with this); I'd be curious as to what other thoughts you might have to add on to this. In a sense though I'm hoping that a thread like this can help stabilize the dialog and keep us on ground where we're talking about things that are more quantifiable/measurable.