My favorite two things to watch on TV are Human Weapon, staring Bill Duff and Jason Chambers, and Ultimate Fighting Championship. Human Weapon is a show where Jason and Bill travel around the world studying all of the various martial arts for a week at a time, and then create a one hour documentary covering the history, techniques and science behind the various styles.
Bill is a former pro football player and wrestler, and Jason is a former Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighter. They each have their own strengths and weaknesses. Bill for example is huge. At 6’4″ and 280 lbs when he travels around he’s normally the biggest human in the building. It’s especially challenging for the Asian countries to match his size. However, he’s not as quick as a smaller fighter. Jason is very fast, and technically more proficient. At 170lbs and 5’11″ he’s very close to my size. (After the Marines I weighted in at 176 and 6′.)
Jason and Bill have traveled all over the world and studied everything from Muay Thai to Pankration, to Silat – plus about 13 other styles that you may or may not have ever heard of. The show is just plain bad ass, and luckily you can watch a lot of the clips over on the History Channel site.
Here is an overview video of the show:
Here is a little clip from the Ninja episode:
Here are a few minutes from the Muay Thai episode:
Other links:
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
nice, we don’t get that channel but it looks cool
Nice! The writer’s strike has left me with little to TiVo.. I’ve been burning through my Netflix cue and could use a new show :)
I definitely like to watch the UFC every now and again. For some reason, I just think that it’s so interesting to see essentially the modern day equivalent of gladiators fighting it out. Hopefully it’s not some bloodlust, but rather it’s some appreciation for the sport of it all!
Have you trained in any of these martial arts? Personally I only did a little bit of karate as a senior project in high school.
I’d only seen short clips of MMA before but I watched a bit more after seeing this post. The clips I had seen looked like guys who didn’t know how to wrestle that were boxing and kicking while doing some gym class style wrestling. I watched a little of Chuck Liddell and he at least looked like he had the technique of an average high school varsity wrestler as well as some boxing and karate skills. Still not the sport for me.
Once upon a time, there seemed to be Karate anf Ju jitsu (Judo), now there are are a million permutations, never heard of the three mentioned in the article hehe. Shows how much I know. Ultimate fighting? maybe…
I like to watch UFC, as there are and were quite some characters active from street-fighters like “Tank Abott (right spelling ??) to Achuck Liddell. but nothing amuses me more than the stupid (?) people can be found online doing “Backyard-MMA”
I just saw recently a great Nat-Geo episode comparing different MMA styles, very interesting
cheers
Rhoody
I agree John, Human Weapon is a great show especially after watching this week show about shaolin in China.
ZoomZoom
Jack
Seriously…. for two guys who have apparently trained so much in various styles, they have the technique of a water buffalo.