Dan Richards

Where'd you get this "alive" business? Watching Matt Thompson videos. He's the one who started that nonsense, and too much of the MMA crowd has bought into it. And, actually, even according to the definition of "aliveness" — "spontaneous, non-scripted, and dynamic" — we did exactly that.

The video was totally unrehearsed. We hadn't even made a video before. I'd just gotten the camera. We weren't even 100% sure it was actually in record mode.

The other guy in the video and I don't even train the same arts. We're not doing any collusive aikido arrangement. He's all CMA and FMA, and I'm all JMA with a bit of RMA. But we find lots of common ground. And I hope what we're doing - in a more informal, style-independent exploration - can be an aid to people regardless of what they train.

And the guy in the video with me is a pretty serious WC, JKD, and Kali guy. He might not look like much, but he can be up on your ass like a psycho cat in heat after you tried to steal her babies. If you notice in the video, he even has some pretty serious claws.

And we did use resistance. And there are many examples in the video of me working with resistance from him and what I was doing not working.

But for really dynamic crazy stuff where we're really going at it. Yeh, we do that, and we'll make some videos of it. But first things first.

Actually, what prompted me to even make a video was a reply on reddit to a video that was posted in which Sean Ching demonstrates a lack of knowledge about what he's talking about. And said, "In WC and JKD we're always worried about the other hand, and that's why we don't like to use the wrist locks, per se."

And that's where I even got the title of the video, and for a whole series I'm going to do — sans gum and maybe beefing up the costumes and production a bit. I want to clearly show WHY wristlocks don't work, instead of just showing, oh here's how's it done. Because it's more about really understanding why something does and doesn't work. I see too many videos that just get into "here's the right way." I think it's even more important to show the wrong way.

There's way too much show and tell in videos on martial arts. And not too much on real investigation, pros and cons, and really showing what doesn't work and why it doesn't work. Because all too often people get crap instruction or play around with someone who's not that experienced, and then discount the effectiveness of these various tools and methods of understanding how to use them.