Sports - What are they?

SO - This forum - Basic interpretations of sports - what are they? why are they designed how they are? how many people enjoy them? why should one play or watch them? It's to simply quantify anything and everything about a sport. 

May seem kind of cliche, but football, anyone wanna tackle all this for football, just to get the ball rolling?

I'm sorry.

A physical competition with a specified rule set?

Like - the motivations behind them, why? What is the essence of football? What does it do? What does it accomplish? Why and how does it work?

Well I'm a combat sports guy so that's what I'll speak to, and I can tell you that motivations are different for everyone.  Most people in a given MMA class are there for either self defense training, or to get in shape. The sport itself had motivations of creating a setting where martial arts "styles" could be putted against each other in a time where most people thought fighting was like the karate kid. I've heard that the Gracie clan set up Royce with easy fights in UFC1 to promote Gracie jiu-jitsu. And theres of course the monetary gain. 

If you're looking for "essence." The three most important aspects in fighting are : technique, athleticism, and aggression. And a surplus in one can often make up for a deficiency in another

Huh that's really interesting actually - you know - this is kinda random, but if I could ask a favor? 

I actually write quite a lot, and I'm working on several short stories, where fighting is a pretty popular thing to do within. Do you think you give me some tips on some basics off combat? Or at least some typically used techniques? I'm not terrible I would say but I feel like I could definitely do better. 

Anyways- to the topic at hand -I would figure something like that for MMA at least, it makes sense to me anyway.

Yeah that's fine, but I'm no expert.

I would say the same three fundamentals apply to football too, and maybe tennis. Although the rules of the sport tip the balance in different directions

That makes sense I suppose - certain limitations would mean certain aspects are more emphasized than others. In football, there are pretty strict rules about how you can tackle your opponent, which severely limits physical aggression. I think? 

Huh, so their raw physical attributes, their ability to react to others, strength, stamina, endurance, hand-eye coordination and so on, allows them to compete with what more technical people? Yeah, I would think so, I think its just athleticism in most cases helps most of those things.

Yeah, and going by the same "three main aspects of fighting model," a person with lower levels of technique and athleticism can win fights through sheer aggression alone.

  Also, consider the essence of stand up fighting alone. Muay thai is the most complete stand up art, and it is fundamentally a game of extremely high speed, high risk, rock-paper-scissors. Only it's knee-elbow-highkick-lowkick-stright punch-etc. And many things counter many things.

Interesting, is there a particular reason that certain techniques cancel out others? And I would presume that there are exceptions, such as the fighting equivalent of scissors being used by a very experienced fighter may beat the fighting equivalent of rock?

Oooh, I see. So it's more along the lines of how this attack does damage in this circumstance compared to another? Not in particular that this attack will always beat out that one. Okay, I think I understand it a bit better.

Yeah, fighting has an insurmountable amount of variables to be able to say that one technique will always work as a counter to another. So we have to talk in terms of percentages. Also, some people don't have the baseline athleticism to pull off certain techniques. 

One example is an escape from the thai clinch that is literally putting your hands in the opponents armpits and deadlifting them up and pushing them away. Without the certain baseline strength, it's not a technique that will work.

Ah, yeah, a vast amount of techniques are out there that I do not have the strength nor endurance to really pull off. Once I'm out of quarantine I'm actually looking forward to starting conditioning, I'm fairly out of shape.

As for the other side, yeah that also makes sense, people and techniques are very vast, so combining them would make it hard to try to quantify it beyond percentages. 

Also, some people are so strong that they can apply it less effircently than an opponent with textbook technique and still be successful.

To quite Gordon Ryan, "Lifting is the most important thing for jiu-jitsu. The second most important is being good at jiu-jitsu."

Do you have a recommended middle ground? Also what would you say the difference in conditioning may be between sports? I know in some obvious cases, like endurance and the like would be more emphasized in cross-country and track when compared to football, stuff like that, but what would be like some fundamental differences there? If you don't mind my asking

I'm not sure what you mean by middle ground, so I can't answer that exactly. 

I have played a few sports in my time, and really it boils down to practicing fundamental techniques and improving relevant athleticism for greater technical efficiency.

But there is some martial arts specific conditioning that isn't necessarily athletic. Shin conditioning by thai fighters is a good example. Kicking a hard bony part of a person like the knee hurts, so fighters will condition their bones to be harder and their nerves to be deadened so that when they throw a low kick and it gets checked, it doesn't feel like they just broke their shin bone.

By middle ground, I meant between my state of not conditioning and not over conditioning, as in overworking myself. 

So the conditioning is just dependent on the sport, and the physical improvement is more of a side effect of developing technical skills?

People play sports because it's fun.

The first rule of sport is that it be a game. This could also include fighting, which would be sport at its most extreme. 

Sport should be won by the participant that has displayed the most skill and physical ability, and this is ultimately true with fighting were you would expect the person with the most skill and physical ability to win the fight.

Sport should also be entertaining to spectators, and from the school playground to Roman amphitheatres nothing has thrilled crowds more than the spectacle of sport at its most ultimate. The most ultimate being a good old fashioned fight.

Sport can be participated in at an individual level, or as part of a team. Team sport at its most ultimate would be mob fighting, which if legal would draw in far bigger crowds than two individuals fighting. Possibly the closest thing we currently have to mob fighting might be tag team wrestling.

Sport usually has more than one participant and is usually part of a tournament set up such as a league or knock out competition. The objective is to win the tournament and be announced champion in that field. Taken to the ultimate, the objective would be to be named hardest person in the world.

In order to excel at sport you usually require key attributes such as athleticism and dexterity, and also intelligence. It is inconclusive which attributes outweigh the other. Sometimes a person with lots of experience and intelligence may defeat a person with lots of physical ability and athleticism. on other occasions a person with lots of physical ability and athleticism may be too much for a person with lots of experience and intelligence to handle. Taken to the ultimate there is only one way to resolve this dispute and that is to get in the ring.

However, usually what seperates sports from illegal fighting is the adherence to rules and customs. Real fighting has no rules and no customs and the winner can only be decided when one surrenders, is incapable of continuing or people from the crowd have intervened.

The downside of rules and customs is that we are not always getting a true reflection of what would actually happen without the intervention of a referee. 

Sport should also usually come with a reward for the winner. With rules and customs that reward is usually a trophy for the winner and medals for the runners up. Taken to the most ultimate sport would be a gamble between two participants betting on themselves with the winner taking everything and loser losing his/her money. Though under current rules and regulations this would be considered illegal unless the bet is placed in a licensed premises. Two individuals putting money in to a pot with a winner takes all agreement is the equivalent of pool sharking. Something which goes on regularly in most pubs with a pool table.

Football has likely became the most popular sport as it contains elements of every single attribute you could think of which are required to participate in sport.

Male competition for the most part. Boys need to have a way to deal with their hormones, when they can't go to war or hunt.

You do realize that females also have testosterone, right?

Sure. But you get the general idea.

Actually the Muay Thai fighter tends to 'knee the shin' as opposed to the way around you are describing. The part of the knee at the very top of the shin, just below the knee-cap is where they toughen their muscle so their 'funny bone' doesn't react as strong. 

The 'knee-kick' is much more of a Krav Maga move.

Tae Kwon Do, Karate and Kung Fu aim to avoid leg-to-leg kicking as they want to use the legs to kick the upper body at crucial points, in general.

I'm not sure about Jiu Jitsu or other variations of martial arts.

While there's a bunch of ways to check leg kicks, it  is more technically sound to check leg kicks with the bonier part of the shin towards the bottom. Less soft, and hurts the opponent more. Shin conditioning isn't about toughening muscle, but instead toughening the bone itself through the process of microfractures and the subsequent repair, the bone heals back stronger until Muay thai fighters have weapons for shins.

 

  The technique you're referring to, where the kick is met higher on the shin, towards the knee, is a way of checking body kicks. It's an innate problem with how high up the leg has to go in order to check a body kick with the shin.

Not sure if you're referring to the "high check",  kicking the actual knee, or striking with the knee. 

  As a green belt in TKD, I can confirm that leg kicks are not allowed in sparring, which was always a hindrance imo. However, they teach you to kick with the foot, which I can say from experience, and from watching many fights, is a bad idea. In TKD sparring I used to hurt my foot on the opponent's elbow when throwing body kicks; and in actual fighting, I bruised and swelled my foot badly from accidentally striking the opponent's knee with a round kick that I landed with the top of my foot.

Sports are competition and ability,

Though there's a heavy cultural focus on the physical aspect.

Football, golf, Video Games, Chess.