Can you learn Martial Arts from a Book? 

You can imagine how difficult it was for ninja to gather correct information from Japanese people 😂

Assuming that you have good, accuraye information, I feel like it’s possible to get a good foundation laid by learning martial arts from a book, but like with any martial arts, you need a partner of some kind to work out the kinks you don’t see/read from the texts, even if this second person isn’t necessarily a “teacher” per se. at the end you’ll come up with something close and considering that everyone has their own style and preferences they incorporate into their own fighting style, close is as good as you can get. 2 different teachers of the same style will still do things slightly differently

When you see how much Karate changed 100 years after ist was brought to japan, its no suprise that swordmanship also changed fast. Especially in times of peace. The Focus was no longer on a side weapon in war but an dueling weapon and status symbol. And today you often see Form/"Tradition" over Function and not the other way around (in many kinds of martial arts) Im looking forward to seeing your interpretation of the old ways of swordfighting.

I had no idea it changed so much

Good video 👍🏻 It really makes you think about what people learned from books but then made it their own style kind of

I think the real problem is that you need a training partner to learn to fight. With lessons from books and a training partner, you can theoretically learn as well as people in a school. Without engaging in fighting, at least in sparring, you won't actually know how to fight. See the man who tried to learn to swim on dry land. never braving the waters.

That's a good question! Regarding the rediscovery of old martial arts, I feel like the title question contains two other questions within it: 1) Can you fully recreate a historic martial art from the sources we have? I think the answer to this is "Not fully," for the exact reasons that you mentioned. The original sources can be altered over time, have content missing, or sometime they're just not a good sources to begin with. However, that leads to the second question... 2) Should you try to recreate and learn martial arts from the historical sources anyway? Absolutely. The alternative is to let information from the past slowly be forgotten and or further misunderstood. This doesn't just go for martial arts, but any way of doing things from the past. If you can't get a perfectly accurate recreation of how something was done from the sources, striving to get as close as you can by practicing and testing things out yourself is always a worthwhile endeavor.

I think a book can be a guide but I'm not sure if you can always learn it correctly. I say literature (least likely to learn), video of techniques (better) having an instructor (best) That being said, if the quality of the descriptions is great, and comprehension of the student is great, anything is possible

I bought books along time ago. A few things were understandable through practice and trial and error. Then i bought the VCR training tapes which helped.more. But, there were things i still didn't quit get the grasp of .

It's kind of like nursing/medical field It's one of those things that's better with others. Hands on. You can "learn" or get a good idea of it, as a concept; you need another person to push that discipline. That's what I think.

Thank you very much for the video, I think if you already have very good previous knowledge of another martial art, it is possible, but it is always better to have a master who will help you with small mistakes that you don't notice yourself.

Very cool subject matter, Antony. In regards to the subject, having a foundation in the arts is a key aspect. For exaple, if someone has a goal to resurrect a dead language, then they would almost certainly have to have proficiency in their own language.

Hi Antony, congrats on your research. To answer your question, I think it is possible to a degree and it is a great tool. However, I also think you need a solid foundation to be good at it. Whether you trained in other arts or similar to give you a basic understanding.

I personally think you need a "good" teacher to help you studie from a book. Contradictory, the teacher is using books as well. But he has the time and division of studying it full time. And he's devoting his whole life on this. So I trust him on helping me understand the literature better. Even though I'm super stubbornly. And sometimes he likes me for being so

The issue is how descriptive is the book vs how good the teacher. Whether it’s something like Capoeira or Tai Chi, many applications for the movements have been lost. Even karate and boxing suffer from going from technique loss and rule changes. Ramsey Dewey just did an episode of how karate blocking techniques incorporate grappling moves. To see this though you would have had to of taken other martial arts. (Also see Jesse Enkamp’s video on how karate styles were formed and judo techniques were kept separate-so I think some things can be learned but meditation and other styles would have to be known first

Hey Antony, great video as always. I think almost the same as you in this aspect. Only training with books and manual withou background knoledge of other martial arts might be a problem. I think once you learn the basics of martial arts principples, opening, ma-ai, defense, dodges, striking etc. you can study much better with books or manuals. You can always mix both things, for exeample i think you could train some bojutsu from the Stick Fight book from Hatsumi but, if you want to get better, get in touch with a kali or kobudo instructor for a seminar or something like this and improve your skills. By the way i'd love to see one day you talking about the Asayma Ichiden Ryu ha from the channel "Lets Ask Seki Sensei" done by Shogo from "lets ask Shogo." see the lineagge historical moments were it appears, famous fighters or something like this. Thank You!

It's definitely not ideal, but in absence on anything better, it will do. Though I would recommend a basis in some sort of weapon-based martial arts for anyone who would attempt this. Now, I have zero experience in HEMA, so if I'm wrong, someone please correct me, but I think they were experienced in martial arts too, usually Olympic fencing and Kendo, before they recreated their manuals. On the topic of if it's possible to be as skilled without a teacher as someone with a teacher, well, obviously it is. Part of the reason is what you mentioned, some people are just naturally better fighters, but also in my 15 or so years in martial arts, I've come to realise that some (read many) people who do have a teacher don't really try very hard. So if you have one person without a teacher who is a proper hard lad, very dilligent in his studies, versus another who does have a teacher but misses like a half of the scheduled practise days, doesn't train at home, and even when he does show up, he acta like a muppet and on top of that, he has no innate knack for fighting, of course, the former will obliterate the latter. Everyone who says otherwise hasn't spent a lot of time in a dojo. That being said, as someone who did both self-study and study under a teacher (both gendai budo and koryu) I have no doubts whatsoever that studying under a qualified teacher is better.

I've learned a lot from Martial arts book

you'd need a master from medieval times to come back from the past and confirm everything.

Actually it depends on several factors, first if someone has a good understanding of body mechanics its gonna be easier to learn from a book without a teacher, or if a group that has a backround in martial arts its gonna be easier to reconstruct from a book,like what hapoened in the early days of hema, but a person who doesn't have an athletic foudation and a poor understanding of martial arts and body mechanis and dynamiscs uts gonna be harder maybe not impossible but deffenitky harder ti accomplish

Manuel: "You see, I speak English well. I learn it from a book. Hello, I am English....Hello." No way of learning is perfect. Manuel will get as good as his effort, predisposition, teacher and sparring allows. I've been to Britain twice, spoken to natives perhaps 50 times. I learned English from school, tv and books. So is it perfect? No. Can I use it in a "real" situation? Yes. Will I get as good as you? No? Is it worth it? Ja, jag tycker det är djävligt givande ja, så va resten har att säga skiter jag i.

What do you imply with knowing martial art? Of course you can learn the foundation, the stances, etc from a book, but you need a opponent to see how its implemented. And you need several opponents to understand when its best to implement what fundamental.

To the question posed by this video, if the purpose of the book/scroll was to be readily accessible to anyone with step by step breakdowns of how stuff goes, maybe. If the scroll is deliberately vague, written for members of the system with each description ending with "this is an oral transmission." No. Ye might get a general sense of how things might have been done, but when ye have something that was meant to be a reminder for people already in the system I wouldn't call whatever ye glean from it anything approaching an accurate transmission of the system. Hell, this is also assuming Matsudaira was good at articulating things even if he was trying to be specific and not as general as possible. Remember he was writing descriptions for non-kenshi about what was going in the kata drawn. My own sensei has notes he wrote in Japan that he'll break out to go over something and he'll be like "what the hell was I talking about here?" I suck at verbalizing things so I draw the techniques which will have arrows and elaborations saying what's going on with the hands or feet and I'll look back at them years later wondering what in Odin's Many Names I thought I was communicating to myself. If anyone was picking up my notebook later on without any frame of reference, chances are whatever they came up with from it would spark only vague familiarity and baffled eyebrow raising from anyone in actively involved in the system. Shinkage Ryu especially is a difficult one to try to reconstruct in this way since the technical specifics of the kata take a back seat to the principle it's trying to teach.

yes u can learn martial arts from a book but it's hard

Really depends on the person and their perception on the subject. Some people just have a natural ability to pick things up while others are stuck at step one. Obviously if you have trained for a certain amount of time, read and study when you decide to learn a new ability from a book out of not being able to train under a decent instructor you should be able to obtain the skill but with your own flavour...I think 🤔

I believe that you can't FULLY learn martial arts OR HEMA from a book. As an example I would give the example of a bo kata I was once taught, at one point you strike at the solar plexus, it wasn't until I was very comfortable with it my teacher explained that a strike to the hip turns the leg making the Uke off balance for the next part. I have been taught loads of these little "alternatives" from teachers, stuff that isn't written down but is passed from teacher to pupil. You are never sure that you have anything but the most basic parts written down because some people are STILL bloody secretive.

Scrolls are a beautiful thing to learn, from what, examining the old scrolls and techniques you do have to have some personal instruction. Otherwise, there is no learning. The wisdom that can be gleaned from like the art of war, or the bansenshukai can be learned, but when it comes to the explosives and other things in the codes is very dangerous or lost to the Sands of Time. Books are a tremendous source of wisdom..

I think if you have a foundation in the martial arts, you can learn from old books and scrolls, and work out the issues. If you have zero prior knowledge and instruction, that would be exceedingly difficult without many other people and a great deal of trial and error. Years of it. I've trained in (gendai) Japanese Jujitsu for over 15 years. Myself and fellow instructors have gone through old writings and were able to make these techniques work with a little playing around. I think if I gave the same book to a layperson, it would likely take them years, if ever, to figure out how to properly execute these techniques. You don't know what you don't know, as the saying goes. How can one troubleshoot something, if they don't know that what they are doing is troublesome? Seems like a massive undertaking. Not to mention that most of these old writings have limited (or even no) illustrations, so recreating it from words alone would be very much dependant on the level of detail in the writings. Even thise with illustrations typically only show the beginning and the end of the technique. It's the bit in-between that tends to be the hard part, imo.

You need to spar you can't do it by yourself. Half way through the book of Bushido

No you can't- good discussion. Go learn boxing from a book and see how far it takes you in a ring. Go learn medicine from a book with no training whatsoever and then do surgery on someone and see how far that takes you. Go learn marine mechanical engineering from a book with no training or instruction whatsoever, and you might build something like the Titan submersible.

Antony, I saw in the bansenshukai that it detailed “hayanawa” techniques for capturing people, have you thought about detailing that topic in a video before?

Really hard Early HEMA as an example A lot of people A lot of time and effort A lot of money Jurassic Park Other subjects Same thing with MMA (must be many millions of dollars) to get where they are now.

Can you learn from a book? Depends on the Source Material and Depends on how much experience, skill, and wisdom a person has, lets say you started from the basic's in one school something happened you have to leave the school and you want to finish learning. I believe Karateka's call it Kata's for the next belt level. I can see that happening. But with out a partner to practice the techniques with you wouldn't too much know how to apply Offense/Defense. A person can learn from a video too, same applies. Nothing beats a Brick and Mortar School. I personally practice in a Kung Fu, kind of a long distance learning, but I do have access to others I can practice with. When I started Martial Arts I did learn a little Shotokan, I could probably go and learn the rest from a book or video if I wanted to. I have respect of all arts. Books usually are mostly for an Enthusiast.

Toyama ryu battojutsu as established by Toshiro Obarta said system was brought to the world as scrolls he brought back via previous experience and read interpretation of written text

Books are nice but a teacher is essential. If we could learn it all from a book then why didn't they do that 400+ years ago ?

As you said yourself, HEMA exists! Yes it is possible but it will take way longer to get it correct or as close as it gets, without a master. You will go through many adaptations to combat while sparring. And there is another thing: Was your book/scrolls made during the time of peace or war?

you can learn from a book but the moves need to be tested with other people. Not necessarily an instructor there is a lot of snobbery in martial arts

When it comes to a lot of Japanese martial arts they have evolved and changed over time, for the audience of the time, or just have evolved from real life use, throwing out what doesn't work anymore. If you have studied Bujinkan and Genbukan, you should know why you CANNOT learn from the books. As for things like HEMA, I would say yes you can reconstruct the martial arts from old texts.

Take the okinawan nobles. They would travel to China learn various new thing's laws and governments social network etc and of course martial arts basic instruction given and they were sent home with scrolls a few month later they would learn more again they return with more scrolls. This would continue until they learn the basics.

You can obviously learn from a book. Books are there to transfer knowledge. Its up to people to diligently and intelligently practice the skills. I think the idea you can't come from books comes from greedy and vain martial arts masters. I do think it's easier to learn from a person.

I'd say yes and no. It requires a great deal of discipline and intelligence, but it's possible. However the caveat is it won't be the same style. I can't say I've mastered my art. Hell I'm still trying to figure out how to organize it. What doesn't help is I have adhd. Organizing is not my strength. But I can safely say I've gotten to the point I can at least hold my own against most people. Don't get me wrong, I'd lose in the ufc. But I understand if you're in a conflict that you need to be violent, there's no such thing as a fair fight and it's akin to hunting prey, not fighting an opponent. Why I'd rather talk my way out. Basically, if I came across someone on the level of a ufc fighter, I'm employing hojutsu, not jujitsu

I think not having an instructor will take a lot more time since we are talking about way of Shinobi and samurai this is a life long path any way I will have to learn and unlearn properly mix and match search all while walking the ten thousand mile road but not having an instructor will encourage exploration and a greater sense reality ware as having a schools property takes less time it's stiff and rigged not really mixing has it's troubles" thank you for practicing with me" carries more weight and a greater respect for other walks of life as well as not having that othentic training is in my opinion does more for the human spirit "I'm not a pretty ninja,I'm a dirty budo kid" not to say they one out weighs the other but one in my opinion builds more humility one example of this would be samurai champlue its a good piece of art but there is no right way. Or maybe shin ran Kagera one of the cherictors is alone in a cave she threw everything but the truth she is alone there is no name no team no help even the fact she is Shinobi means nothing training under hatory Hanzo would be cool but it really doesn't help u once again another piece of art anime art driving home the mental aspect of things I watch alot of foreign film but Rather samurai jack trained with everyone learning from everyone well something like that or maybe the turtles of ole

Pardon me, damn auto correct

Side note do u think the TMNT are a way of bringing kappa demon to life I reab the loved to play with lonely children as part of their loar

Yes i think so, but i do believe a little time under a instructer to learn. I mean If you think about BJJ its more about how you practice and train.... if your testing stuff via books with other with the same goal then sure...

😂... i think its very simple.. Humans are very simple.. monkey see, monkey do, it is in our nature to copy and mimic. I know its possible to teach yourself... e.g. Miyamoto Musashi.