MMA in Martial Arts

Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) is "God's gift" to Traditional Martial Arts (TMA.) At least in the USA it has saved the martial arts community from kumite point fighting, and it has has given a training opportunity for all martial artists to make sure they have all their bases covered for real fighting. Some have accused me of trying to save all of martial arts through full contact free sparring...

I started doing martial arts in the late 80's, purely for self defense reasons. I joined a school that was part American full contact karate and part Filipino Martial Arts (the master of that style had some sort of WEKAF background.) Our first few months of practice was getting used to full contact beat-em-up sparring, where we really got our hands dirty learning to throw down.

Then the tournament was announced. A point fighting kumite tournament. We needed to do things a little different, and do a different kind of sparring. I didn't realize it at the time, but our stances became very long, our sparring became no contact, and worst of all we learned to freeze up whenever we thought we scored a point or someone else was scoring a point on us. It was the opposite of self defense training.

Then we actually fought in the 1989 Lakeside Invitational tournament in WA. I remember the master's last words of advice to me: "it isn't very effective for self defense, but if you throw a back fist instead of a straight punch it will be easier for the judges to see." I got 2nd place in my division.

Within an hour that same master packed up his bags and walked out of the tournament, never to return to a kumite tournament again, almost immediately seeking out the kickboxing community and training his students in leg kicks. (The reason he walked out was he was kicking his opponents in the head so quickly the judges weren't calling his kicks as points... until he finally kicked his opponent in the head so hard that he fell down... and then the judges still didn't see it, even though his opponent was complaining about contact.) This was just as kick boxing was starting to pick up in the USA:

What happened in the 80's was that most martial arts schools became kumite point fighting schools. If you were doing Kung Fu, you were just doing Chinese-flavored kumite point fighting, Tae Kwon Do was reduced to Korean flavored kumite point fighting. At that Lakeside Invitational tournament, there was even a "Judo Boxing" club there doing point fighting, pulling other fighters to the ground and then scoring with a light jab towards their opponent's head... even grappling was turning into grappling flavored kumite point fighting.  One guy I know tried to go into a point fighting tournament with his style listed as "Muay Thai."

Movements like the UFC no holds barred and K-1 striking professional tournament pulled Martial Arts in the USA out of its death spiral, and got a real conversation about effective self defense started again. Suddenly few could ignore the importance of ground fighting, and even less could ignore the importance of clinch grappling. And everyone could see one thing brighter above all others: no matter what your martial art was, your most important training activity you did was full contact free sparring. Where before everything was just a different flavor of kumite point fighting, now everything was becoming another flavor of MMA, a very significant improvement, and for most martial arts a badly needed return to ancient tradition!

Don't get me wrong, MMA has its blind spots just like all other martial arts.  But what I want to point out here is how it can help you with your study of martial arts today. MMA covers all the athletic bases of fighting: conditioning, clinching, ground fighting for submission, stand up striking and plenty of sparring. No matter what your martial art is, MMA can help you make sure you have all your bases covered.

In summary, two points here:

1. MMA saved martial arts in the USA from turning most martial arts schools from being different flavors of kumite point fighting to being different flavors of MMA, returning to the ancient ways of full contact free sparring.
2. MMA can save YOUR martial arts skills by making sure you have all the basic conditioning, ground fighting, clinch grappling, stand up striking and sparring you need to realistically prepare for an unarmed combat situation. 

I do mediocre full contact weapon sparring and Tai Chi. Do I also go work out at the MMA gym and try to get beat up a few times a week? Absolutely. Why? Because training the way I do, I want to make sure my critical blind spots are covered:

Internal Skill

There is a fantasy martial art skill where a short Asian man is able to toss around larger opponents like a rag doll. This is shown in martial arts demos (like most Aikido randori,) but usually does not show up in sparring. The consensus on Bullshido.net is that the following video is not fake:

IF that larger guy really is a wrestler, he's definitely out of practice, because wrestlers train really hard and have great conditioning, and would not be out of breath that quickly. But the fantasy isn't throwing around other skilled grapplers, the fantasy is throwing around larger opponents, and that is clearly happening there.

THAT is the skill people doing internal martial arts such as Aikido, Pa Kua and Tai Chi are trying to develop, and it is no coincidence that the master in the video above practices Tai Chi. But he got that skill by training to fight in these kind of tournaments:

But are these two videos really connected, are they really the same thing? Here's what happens in one of those tournaments when the opponents are not evenly matched in terms of size, conditioning and skill:

There's that Aikido skill again, tossing people like rag dolls, this time in an open tournament.

But the above video before that, the 2nd video with the evenly matched opponents reminded you of something, didn't it... Sumo: the ring size and format, objectives and techniques are similar. Though I didn't quite grasp the significance of this at the time, in the early 90's I had a short, stocky friend from Japan who had used his sport Sumo training effectively in self defense, at least once against multiple opponents:

The fact is the Mongolians spread this kind of grappling all over Asia and Eastern Europe if they didn't have it before. This kind of grappling's application on battle field is obvious: it is better for you to be on your feet and worse for your enemy to be prone. Time and again this type of stand-up grappling to throw the opponent on the ground is found in culture after culture, all over the world.

THAT is the skill that made Aikido famous. So how come most Aikidoka can't do it? Because they don't do that type of grappling. How come the early Aikido masters could do it? First, the Aikido founder probably did Chinese internal martial arts and probably had significant tai chi type sparring skills, BUT even if he did not, his involvement in Sumo is well documented. Other early Aikido masters also had Sumo backgrounds! Aikido is supposed to be like Tai Chi in that it is supposed to grant Sumo power to people not large enough to be Sumo wrestlers. But that skill can only be achieved by training in that skill directly, as shown in the above videos: Kata and forms may or may not be appropriate conditioning for that kind of sparring, but they are no substitute for that kind of sparring!

As a martial arts critic, I would ask "why don't we see this in MMA?" First of all we have, just for example in UFC 1 a kickboxer* used exactly that sort of technique to take out a Sumo practitioner:

Second of all, MMA by way of BJJ and Sambo is highly influenced by Judo. Kano added a rare school of techniques to his Judo when he created the sport of Judo, which were the ground fighting techniques that are now ubiquitous in MMA. With added techniques for ground fighting, it made the most sense to try to fall on your opponents when you throw them, keep them pinned, and from there try to submit them. They teach the most deadly and effective unarmed self defense skills known to mankind: chokes, limb destruction and slamming heads on the ground. Yet ALL training has blind spots. Throwing the opponent on the ground with you still standing is a blind spot for this kind of training.

*But notice that this is the objective for most combat sports: in boxing and kickboxing, knocking the guy off of his feet is plan A. This is the only way to score in Knock Down Karate. Though it has very limited amounts of clinch time allowed, Chinese kickboxing actually allows numerous throws to this same end. Numerous indigenous grappling arts have the same objective. But as I have mentioned before, the combat sport where I see the most internal martial arts skill is in Thai Kickboxing:

No wonder Muay Thai has a great reputation for handling larger opponents or multiple opponents, with their footwork, practical striking, and throw-the-opponent-down style of grappling. Here's an example of Muay Thai technique being used to train people to take on multiple opponents:

So in many ways, Muay Thai IS the REAL Aikido. But how could Aikido, Tai Chi and Muay Thai be almost exactly the same thing? Listen carefully to how this kickboxing & MMA coach explains his encounter with a Tai Chi master starting at 8 minutes, 45 seconds:

Muay T(h)ai Chi

When people are trying to figure out the application of various techniques from Chinese Martial Arts forms (katas), my most common piece of advice is "what would that move be for if a Thai Boxer was doing it in a kick boxing match?" This is most particularly true of one of the most esoteric martial arts, Tai Chi. In fact, the person who originally taught me both kickboxing and Tai Chi marveled how similar Tai Chi was to Muay Thai in contrast to other kickboxing and martial arts, and wondered how closely related the two arts might be in actual lineage.

(He wasn't the only Kung Fu teacher out there teaching both Kicboxing and Tai Chi side by side, just for example:

Chinese kickboxing in general scores high for landing Tai Chi style takedowns.)

The most obvious example of how Tai Chi moves resemble Muay Thai techniques is blocking leg kicks:

Compare that Muay Thai block for leg kicks to the basic Tai Chi technique called "Golden Rooster":

But as I have gone on to explore other schools of Tai Chi, I have come the conclusion that real Tai Chi (as with other Martial Arts,) is found in the sparring more so than the forms. Let's take for example the most laughably obscure move in Tai Chi forms, called "Wave Hands Like Clouds":

There are so many conflicting ideas out there about how Wave Hands Like Clouds it would be used in self defense - head locks, blocks, wrist strikes, groin strikes, elbow strikes, joint locks, breaking wrist grips - with almost no consensus on what this infamous technique could possibly be for. But it wasn't until later in life when I was taking classes from MMA coaches and fighters that it started to dawn on me what this was actually most likely for... going for what is sometimes called in Muay Thai a "steering wheel grip":

But in Chinese kickboxing the clinch time is far more limited than in Muay Thai, so we don't see this as extensively. So let's look at one of the greatest Tai Chi masters of our time sparring, Chen ZiQiang:

And there you have it, the power of steering wheel grips demonstrated in sparring by a Tai Chi master, used in an almost identical way as it is used by Muay Thai champs. And just in case you think that is too-good-to-be-true or that somehow Chen ZiQiang has unique skills, here are other Tai Chi practitioners sparring using the same sort of techniques (especially before arm drag throws and in the case of the guy in the yellow shirt):

Muay Thai is called "the art of 8 limbs," and Tai Chi is considered to have "8 Gates" or types of attacks, one of which is "elbow":

What is full contact elbow fighting called in today's world? Muay Thai.

I have noticed so many similarities between Muay Thai and Tai Chi over the years that it seems to me that if you spar full contact using the 8 gates and techniques found in the forms with a modest amount of safety gear, you will get something nearly identical to Muay Thai. When free sparring is pursued seriously, the differences between various martial arts become much smaller:

Encapsulation and Infrastructure

I have gotten into some arguments on the internet with some people who know a lot more about martial arts than me, some of them BJJ blackbelts. It has been educational. But there is a concept that I have discovered, a sort of yin-yang of how martial arts propagate:

1. Martial arts have infrastructure: what does it take to keep the community of that martial art going? What does it cost in terms of time, money, space, specialized training equipment, etc? How big of a population do you have to have in order to have enough practitioners to keep the art going?
2. All martial arts have a degree of encapsulation (in other words what their scope is, how many techniques they teach, and how big of a range of techniques.) An example of a very encapsulated martial art is Boxing: It's punches, and defense against punches. 

An example of a martial art with low encapsulation is Choy Lay Fut kung fu - it has a certain style of ergonomic "soft" movement, and any technique they can adapt to that form of movement gets grafted into that system. Choy Lay Fut has multiple bare knuckle versions of every boxing punch. Most Choy Lay Fut schools have absorbed Yang style Tai Chi, largely because of its compatible principles. With 30+ weapons (including spade and bench), you probably haven't heard of a kung fu weapon that isn't covered in that style:

So what is more practical for self defense, boxing which covers only punches, or Choy Lay Fut which covers every martial art technique I have ever heard of including numerous concealed weapons (like double daggers and chain whips,) with the exception of some BJJ escapes and passes, a few obscure Mantis sweeps, and head buts?  Boxing is FAR more practical, because in boxing you spend much more time sparring in your first year of training than a Choy Lay Fut person will (and the Choy Lay Fut student will spend most of their training time practicing forms some of which are hundreds of moves long.) Encapsulation, and encapsulation alone makes boxing more effective. There is a wider range of techniques commonly sparred with in Choy Lay Fut than in boxing, including most Muay Thai techniques. But boxing's focus allows the student to get to a self-defense ready level of competence much faster, and allows more time for the most important martial art exercise of all, sparring!

Encapsulation also reduces need for infrastructure. For example, to do wrestling, you only need 3 things: people, mats and space. Wrestling is extremely common in the USA. Boxing needs more infrastructure, with rings, multiple types of bags and protective gear. But add the 30+ weapons of Choy Lay Fut to all that, and that art needs drastically more infrastructure still.

Low infrastructure has helped propagate martial arts with low infrastructure: BJJ is one of the most common martial arts in the USA now, even though it is one of the newest martial arts in the USA. Low infrastructure martial arts allow the customer to pick exactly what they want to learn. For example I once had a Japanese Jujitsu black belt friend who wanted to learn 3-sectional Staff. I talked to my Choy Lay Fut instructor, and determined it would take this black belt at least a year of training in Kung Fu before he would know the prerequisite essentials before he could learn that weapon.

This is part of why FMA (Arnis, Kali, Esgrima) is so popular, is its forms are simple and 2 person, sparring is somewhat common, and it tries to teach the techniques that apply to a variety of weapons in a brief amount of time. It also focuses on the weapons the participant is most likely to have available.

Combat sports in general have an advantage here. Even though it seems like MMA is not well encapsulated, it is somewhat focused: it doesn't worry about obscure self-defense scenarios, weapons, uniforms, etc. It also shares infrastructure with other combat sports, so that an MMA gym can share space with boxing, kickboxing, wrestling and BJJ.

The most important infrastructure for any martial art is participation. Each individual participant has limited time they can spend training. The more time a martial art practices techniques participants are not interested in, the more those arts are wasting the resource of participation. Encapsulation keeps a martial art focused, preserving participation infrastructure.

Some arts will grow, some will shrink into obscurity. I believe encapsulation and infrastructure will be major influences on this evolutionary process.