MMA sucks, traditional martial arts suck more, Part Two

I hadn’t really intended to write a second part to this “MMA sucks!” post but the amount of reactions I’ve received pushed me to it; so it’s all your own fault!

Seriously, I seem to have given the impression that I dislike MMA. Despite having clearly stated otherwise, this is still the response I got the most. So I’ll repeat it: I have nothing against MMA, at all. On the contrary, if I had more time, I’d resume my shootfighting training because I enjoyed it immensely. What’s more, I have tremendous respect for everybody who steps into the ring, cage or onto a lei tai. Those who haven’t fought full contact (I don’t care which rules, it all hurts)  don’t know what they’re talking about and should at the very least respect the courage these athletes show. Which brings us to my first point:

Pressure testing

Over at Neil’s blog, somebody commented on his MMA post and said this:

I agree with what you say “What works, works.” the rub is how you KNOW it works or not. The traditional arts you espouse lack aliveness, they lack pressure testing, and their students do not KNOW if they can perform the techniques, nor do they KNOW the technique will work of they do.
The training methods are faulty. Embrace it, change the way you train, be a better Martial Artist for it.

This is a classic argument against TMAs and one that I can only half agree with. First what I disagree with:

The argument is based on a false premise: Some TMA schools lack anything resembling pressure testing. Many other schools have a variety of ways to do so. So it’s a statistical issue more than anything else: it depends on which traditional schools you see. Some of the schools I trained at had an insane amount of pressure testing with all-out sparring and no limits to the techniques you could use.  There was no protective gear either; they thought gloves and shin guards were for wussies.

In contrast, I’ve also seen watered-down MMA programs implemented in commercial dojos to increase the income stream. There was no pressure testing at all and the techniques were taught in the same robotic fashion as their traditional arts. Had these people entered a class of that traditional school, they would have been humiliated by the traditional folks, using nothing but their old-school techniques.

So let’s say it’s way too easy to look at a handful of traditional schools and MMA gyms and then make a blanket statement like that.

Context is king

Here’s the part where I agree with that statement. I mentioned this in the first part and it’s one of the traps traditional folks fall into:

You cannot take a traditional art out of it’s historical/cultural context and expect it to work in another one. Like I said, 500 years ago in China is not the same context as today in the suburbs. You can’t just switch these around and think they’ll work flawlessly.

But there’s a flip side to this: Your art was perhaps developed back then and made you devastatingly lethal. But that doesn’t mean you can get those same skills by just going through the motions today. The training methods and concepts will be closed to you until you take your training to a deeper level. What you need most of all is a deep understanding of what violence is. This isn’t out of your reach by default, it largely depends on your environment and past experience.

Basically, there are a only a couple of ways you can get this understanding, which is the common denominator of all the martial components of traditional martial arts :

• Live in a society where violence is a daily occurrence, a fact of life.
• Failing that, have experienced the physical and psychological effects of violence in your past. The more experience, the more understanding you’ll have.
• If that isn’t your case either, you’ll need to study, train hard and go through as much pressure testing and scenario training as you can.

Fortunately, most of us live in a society where violence is if not rare, at least not something you face on a day-to-day basis. Sure, you might read or hear about it, but it doesn’t happen to you every single day. As a result, most of us fall into that last category, the ones who have to train hard to get that understanding of what real-world violence is actually like.

The traditional practitioners I mentioned before are all guys who know violence intimately. Either because of where they live or because of their profession. They don’t need pressure testing because they get that enough in their daily lives. They understand the realities of violence on a gut level and play for keeps.

If there is anything missing in the way traditional martial artists view their practice, it’s often just that: a lack of comprehension of what violence entails. Because if they would know just a fraction of what happens out there, they would train a whole lot harder than they do. In contrast, most MMA gyms understand the need for the rough training to prepare a fighter for the Octagon. And that’s where the discord often starts.

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Related Posts:

• Book Review: “Fighting in the Clinch” by Loren W. Christensen and Mark Mireless
• How not to stretch, part 5
• How not to stretch, part 4
• How not to stretch, part 3
• How not to stretch, part 2