It is awesome when martial arts gets on national television, especially on a compelling Top 10 or Top 20 List. Sometimes though, we get on the wrong list.

On Season 2, Episode 10, Taekwondo made TruTV’s Top 20 Most Shocking Short Clips.

The American reality show Top 20 Countdown: Most Shocking is a series during which video clips are counted down from 20 to reveal the most outrageous one of all. The series began October 3, 2009 and ran until December 16, 2012.

There are so many martial arts Fail Videos, that they became a thing. We once posted on, but learned a lot when the central figure in the video of a brick breaking attempt corrected us. So when looking at demo fails, tread cautiously – there but for the absence of a rolling video camera could be any of us at some point in our lives.

Although TruTV had to dig deep into the muck of martial arts to find this one, it not nearly the worst martial arts demo of all time. It is not even the worst Taekwondo demo of all time.

This is the worst demonstration of Taekwondo of all time. Warning: No child was seriously hurt during the filming.

However, the not so great Scot was not the worst martial arts demo of all time. In fact, he was far from it.

This demo is not the worst of all time. But it is the silliest. And the saddest.

Here is a worse demo by far – the instructor cuts his students throat with a samurai sword.

This is the worst martial arts demo of all time (on tape). Watch and you will see why.

Turning serious for a moment, if you want to convey to the public that your approach to unarmed combat is effective, you can do something simple. Don’t rub boiling oil on your body, or be hit with a sword, or smash rocks on your body with a hammer, or lay on a bed of nails. Those are demonstrations of physics. If you want to show that people who study your martial art can fight, then fight.

And that truth is, none of these are the worst martial arts demo of all time. That dishonor would go to the martial arts instructors during The Boxer Rebellion in China in the late 1890s. The adepts were taught that with the right breath-control exercises and martial arts patterns, they would be immune to bullets. And so they died.