But are you sure what someone who never trained MA but was fighting street fights all year long will be much worse than you? Then think about someone who trained MA only 1 year but having 3 years real fighting experience vs someone ONLY training say 3 years? Think about it...
Well, that might sound over confident or arogant, but yes, i'm pretty sure i could defeat a experienced street fighter who is tough and fast, but has no MA education. After all, MA was invented to defend yourself against tough and fast attackers and there would be no point in all those centuries of people inventing and evolving MA if it wouldn't give you an advantage.
The most effective MAs are based on real science and basic principles. In the Wing Tzun system and some modernised Karate systems, you rather learn how to utilize those basic principles instead of just training ritualized movements.
One of that principles is, for example, not to block fists, but to block ellbows. When somebody tries to hit you, his ellbow moves 2.5 times slower than his fist. So if you use your full speed to intercept not his fist but his ellbow, you have a hughe speed advantage.
And if you are good enough you don't block anything, but divert the energy of your opponent's movement into a direction that suits you, without needing much energy. That way you can even defeat people who are not only stronger but even faster than you.
It's things like that you don't learn in street fights and pub brawls.
It's applied science and the experience generations of people made in fist fights before you that makes up the things you learn and train in a decent MA school.
And here we got the similarity to military training. Sure, experience is a good thing, but in the end every single soldier can only accumulate a very limited amount of experience, even if he sees many battles. Every situation is different and what one soldier learned by his own experience is different from what another has learned.
Training means to learn and to profit from the experience of many soldiers that came before you.
I think the main advantage of battle experience is less that seasoned soldiers really know so much more about what to do in a battle than a well trained but inexperienced soldier, but more that they are more used to the stress and terror of combat and keep a cool head. But i think the way very well trained soldiers tend to do the things they have learned in a state of being somehow emotional detached, compensates for that. You somehow slip into "the zone" and it's a bit as if you would step outside yourself and watch what you are doing from the outside when you apply what you have learned in a lot of training.
I guess you know how that feels too, from work or maybe from playing a computer game very often till you are able to do things without thinking about it anymore.
