Rating Martial Arts

My careful study of why I despise TKD so much led me to one conclusion: it's all about sparring practices. I don't care if you trained at Miletich if you were doing their non-sparring aerobic kickboxing class. Even worse is if you are a master of kickboxing because you trained under someone who trained at Miletich's non-sparring kickboxing class.

All light contact and no contact martial arts run the risk of being worse than no self defense training at all, since they could create bad habits that a completely untrained person may not have while giving no real actionable skill in return.

The name of a Martial Art is too broad, we need to look at individual schools. I trained at a Choy Lay Fut & Tai Chi school that eventually dabbled in MMA and boxing, while consistently training kickboxers, but your average Choy Lay Fut or Tai Chi school is not on that level. Likewise I have seen an Aikido school where students do Judo at the same school, but not all Aikido is on that level either.

My rating of martial arts is dependent on sparring quality and range of sparing. There are four ranges relevant to martial arts classes:

1. Grappling on the ground.
2. Grappling while standing up, including close range strikes like knees and elbows.
3. Striking standing up with punches, kicks, and weapons with very little reach like box cutters and brass knuckles.
4. Weapons with significant reach such as billy clubs and baseball bats.

When I say "full contact sparring," I don't mean contests where there is a permanent record and the object is to prove who has superior skill and strength, and participants do anything they can within the rules to win, that is "fighting." Full contact sparring means the participants are really trying to execute techniques against each other while fully resisting each other, and there is continuous action throughout the round, while the action is never broken up for more than a few seconds by the participants or onlookers. Many consider Kendo and Fencing to be full contact, I don't.

These days I put martial arts schools into 1 to 4 star categories:

1. One star includes no contact/light contact* instead of real sparring is worse than nothing at all.
2. Two stars includes full contact* with extremely limited techniques: Olympic TKD, Boxing
3. Three stars includes full contact with a reasonable amount of techniques to master a general range of fighting: BJJ, Kickboxing, schools that compete in San Shou, Knock-Down Karate, etc.
4. Four stars includes full contact with a enough techniques to cover multiple ranges: schools competing in MMA, Sport Jujitsu, Pankration, etc.

To be "four stars," you really need sparring with three of the four above ranges. Two stars refers to schools that focus on only one range, or have extraordinarily restrictive rules in two ranges (such as wrestling having no submissions what so ever, Boxing no kicks, TKD no leg kicks or face punches.) It does not matter what range of techniques is covered by one-star schools because the sparring isn't serious enough to deliver skill superior to whatever bad habits they might be teaching.