"No-contact fighting": what is REALLY going on?

[Katriona1992]

Straight-out charlatanism isn't all that interesting to me; more intriguing are those cases where the participants genuinely believe that a supernatural power is at work.

I remember an episode of "That's Incredible" back in the '80s in which a Hwarangdo practitioner demonstrated his "light body" powers by standing on a box of eggs without breaking the eggs (hint - it's the eggshells, not the martial artist, that have extraordinary attributes). As a gag, one of the show's hosts then also stood on the eggs, obviously expecting to crush them, but in fact he succeeded just as well as the "light body" master. Hard to tell who was more surprised ...

lol....must be pretty embarrassing for the martial artists. Anyways, I reckon that non/light contact sparring was originally created for safety measures (e.g. back in the day when mats don't protect the uke that much from throws and are way more expensive, proportionately speaking, than now) but should be stopped now (lest, of course the teacher does not actually have the skills) due to the improve in technolgy.

[DdlR]

http://www.bartitsu.org/index.php/20...net-1895-1899/

Further on this theme, here's an account of what happened when Bartitsu founder E.W. Barton-Wright tested the supposedly supernatural powers of a vaudeville performer back in 1899.