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Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

A leg has rigidity due to its endoskeleton, as well as strong muscles with good leverage, which when conditions are right gives it insane strength as it can act as a mechanical lever.

Since a tail does not have a rigid endoskeleton, it can not act well as a lever. It's functionally a rope attached to your butt. Like even if you go full kangaroo mode and make the tail more muscular than the legs, making the tail rigid by flexing really hard, it basically turns into an inefficient leg with enormous mechanical disadvantages.

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But the lack of ridigity also means that it's actually quite hard to control someone through it.

If you grab someone's leg, especially near the foot/ankle, you are relying on the rigidity of the joints to be able to control their torso (and therefore their ability to fight back). The most disadvantageous position to be in is to have someone behind you, while they fully control your ankle/foot. Now you can't fully turn your body to face your opponent.

For a sufficiently flexible tail, that would not be the case. Some could be behind you and control your tail near the tip, and you could still fully turn into your attacker with your torso.

This isn't to say that a tail can't become a liability.

We have two legs, so grabbing one is a good way to get kicked in the face (or elsewhere).

A flexible tail doesn’t have that disadvantage to the grabber, especially if longer than a leg.

You can’t land a kick when someone has your foot. Gravity exists, you will immediately fall onto your butt as soon as you lift the other leg.

On the ground is perfect for kicking them in the nuts, leg/torso strikes, sweeping their legs, or various control locks. It's a near ideal place to be to also get your opponent on the ground. You can also get a solid kick or sweep in, or throw them off balance on the way down too, if you're ready for it.

You might find BJJ pretty interesting. [https://renzogracieacademy.com/about/what-is-brazilian-jiu-j...], [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0edxg2fFmw]

Judo teaches how to deal with it quite well too.

The legs are the strongest part of a human, the arms don't compare at all. And fighting from the ground can be VERY effective if you know what you're doing. Or don't just curl up and wait to die.

Ideally you'd be on your feet and able to move faster of course, and I wouldn't recommend against an opponent with a spear or other ranged weapon - but then they wouldn't be trying to grab my foot or leg anyway eh?

Although when striking is involved, leg locks loose much of their effectiveness.

It's always a race to get the critical hit or lock in.

But unless the 'grabee' doesn't do anything, someone grabbing one foot from someone is likely using both hands (and most of their upper body) to attempt to control it - and there is a second foot/leg out there free to cause a lot of damage if they're willing.

It's not a 'one and done'/'game over' scenario by any stretch of the imagination if the party is even a little motivated.

Though I suspect most folks in this thread have no exposure to an actual fight beyond watching a video somewhere, so....

For me the main example of leg locks failing in MMA is Ilia Toporia's knockout of Ryan Hall in the UFC.

Also, many powerful leg locks entries fail to succeed in MMA, due to overcommitment of limbs.

There are also a large number of banned moves in MMA. Nothing is perfect. Grabbing someones foot/leg isn't a one and done deal, either way, because we do actually have two and they're pretty powerful.

Coming from a stand-up striking Muay Thai perspective the only low risk way to grab a leg is intercepting a kick. You are then out of range of their upper body attacks and have total leverage physically and tactically. At that point unless the fighter whose leg is grabbed is extremely experienced in keeping a one foot balance by avoiding sweeps (ignoring the fact that one can bring the fight to the ground in MMA or BJJ etc - which imo is not preferable in a street fight) they're in a supremely disadvantaged position and at the will of the grabber. In a tournament, though, these situations usually resolve very quickly one way way or the other.

With your background. Can you extrapolate on how a tail would impact you? Would it be a big negative to have something that can be grabbed.

Also. Chimps/Primates. Don't they fight more in packs.

So if the competition was 5 on 1, would the tail become an even greater disadvantage. It would be even harder to maneuver or run, become someone could grab the tail.

I have two separate thoughts on the matter. One is whether a tail would provide me with additional balance and/or striking power. Potentially as a counterweight during round housed kicks or spinning back kicks. The second is that a tail by itself would be an inferior weapon to punches, elbows, knees, and kicks due to its relative fragility and potentially high nerve density.

So this leads to a utilitarian equation - is the additional counterbalance going to provide a sufficient edge to override the risk it adds of a relatively weak limb that can be grabbed?

As long as we're inventing limbs, why not put spikes at the end of the tail, like a stegosaurus' thagomizer. I bet that would be pretty fun to fight with.

Having done muay thai for several years - this is why muay thai doesn’t do well in less regulated environments, like MMA or actual street fights.

Because muay thai has a very structured set of rules and an environment which constrains it so that is the case. much less so than western boxing obviously, but the issue is even more obvious there.

generally still way better than no training of course.

BJJ folks consistently beat Muay Thai competitors in MMA for this reason.

being able to do both, plus some krav maga strikes? even better! though most krav maga if done with full earnestness would get you thrown in jail outside of a legit self defense scenario.

I agree with the octagon scenario, but not with a streetfight. If you're outnumbered, it is not advisable to go to ground. That is when rapid high damage strikes and the ability to dodge, block, or soak hits make you not just a physical weapon but psychological.

By the way, in full traditional muay thai, both quick and prolonged stand-up grappling is trained for.

I never said it was a good idea to go to ground in a street fight - but if you end up there (very possible!), Muay Thai isn’t going to help you technique wise. Conditioning would of course.

BJJ is as often about transitioning to and from, and controlling on the ground fighting - so having both would be pretty solid ‘academically’ probably.

It’s not like if you get jumped in a dark alley by someone they’ll just back off and let you get up if you fall down. Unless they were really stupid anyway.

Same with broken bottles, random street junk used as weapons, knives, multiple opponents, etc.

Which neither are going to teach you much about practically in real life, but better than nothing.

I think I forgot to mention how the best way to win a fight is to not get in one? Haha.

Right, but if we're seriously talking about the liabilities that having a tail has in a fight, then presumably most of the scenarios would involve attacking from behind. Remember also that this would be mostly quadraped animals too. Legs would have been strong, but likely still arboreally adapted, so a relatively strong upper body as well.

In such a scenario, you'd probably attack from behind from a bit of an angle to force strikes from the other leg to be severely cross body.

My original point was not that attacking the leg was easy, my point is that a flexible tail doesn't give you much leverage and control and may not be as much of a liability as you think, since if you could access the tail anyways, you probably also had their back.

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