I’ve blogged about Xu Xiaodong before – he’s the infamous MMA coach from China who rose to fame by taking on self-styled ‘masters’ of the traditional martial arts and challenging them to actually fight in a ring. The results are as expected – he wipes the floor with all of them.

Chinese martial arts contains many practitioners who have legitimate fighting skills, but the number of imposters is, sadly, huge, so generally, I’m quite in favour of what he’s doing. It’s surprisingly easy to set yourself up as a master of the traditional arts and start teaching people any old thing without ever having tested your moves in a fighting situation. These people need to be called out and I’m glad he’s doing it, but he gets a lot of criticism for only taking on people who are clearly deluded about their own martial ability, and also because these guys are not really ‘masters’ of anything. The government got involved and at one point and I feared we might never see Xu again, but as the most recent video from China shows, it seems like he’s still going, this time up against a man whose only redeeming feature as a fighter is his ability to take a beating.

It’s not clear what style the man is supposed to be represented, but his actions are clearly being hampered by the bandage they apply to his face in the first round, which results in him pretty much fighting blind for the rest of it. Talk about a Bird Box challenge!

Xu spends most of the match looking board and letting the other guy hit him without it having any effect at all while destroying his opponent’s left leg with low kicks (the guy has some very nasty bruises on his leg visible at the end). Once Xu has had enough of destroying the leg he ends the whole thing with one well-placed knee strike, and that was all she wrote.

And before Xu gets accused of beating up on an older guy, I believe this challenge was instigated by the traditional martial artist. Xu is also not a young guy.