Post MMA Martial Arts

You first need to read my post on Martial Eras and my post on the coming Martialocalypse in order to understand what I am talking about in this post. Until you do, just understand that I think we live in a very specific time when it comes to martial arts, and I think that time is coming to an end as the public imagination turns from MMA to Karate Kumite Point Fighting.

From my POV, MMA had one job, and that was to stop the spread of Kumite Point Fighting. Look at WHY it failed to do this: there never resulted from MMA a casual tournament format. The genius of MMA is that it is still more of a testing ground for martial arts to prove themselves than it has been a martial art in and of itself. But that never really made it to the tournament scene in a big way, not like Kumite Point Fighting did. Instead with are left with the several mixed grappling/striking formats we had before MMA: Pro Hapkido, Sport Japanese Jujitsu, Pankration, etc.

There's another WHY that should be mentioned here, and that is that the UFC always was a ploy to make BJJ look good. Let this sink in: how many MMA instructors out there think that we actually don't need mixed striking/grappling tournament rules because we already have BJJ tournaments? How many BJJ coaches have said to themselves "if people really need striking tournaments, they can do that Karate Kid point fighting stuff, after all, it's probably just going to the ground anyways so it's the BJJ skills that really matter, who cares if their stand up striking is garbage?"

Kumite Point Fighting is going to get the public's imagination in a way that it never did before. It will suck finances out of the BJJ school system, and MMA will have less viewership as people believe the lies of Kumite Point Fighting. That infrastructure that has kept martial arts at a high quality in our age today will be degraded.

But as more people do point fighting, some fraction of them will become disillusioned with it, because it's still ineffective in real situations. So basically all new students of non-kumite-point-fighting schools will be disillusioned former Kumite Point Fighters themselves. They will be looking for mixed striking/grappling arts with better sparring rule sets.

The mixed striking/grappling martial arts, given very little attention in MMA, may have their day in the sun in this new age of martial arts:

• Kudo is very likely to explode in popularity. 
• The Tipon/Gathering scene is likely to become the new gritty street fighting venue. 
• The grappling arts that have significant striking elements that they sometimes compete with - such as Combat Sambo - are likely to see significant growth if not dominance. 
• BJJ, in response to selective pressure from Sambo and Kudo, will likely become mostly the Combat version with no Gi and lots of slapping each other around. 
• Muay Thai will remain very popular because of their clinch fighting, and ability to quickly teach people real striking skills to fulfill the broken promises of Kumite Point Fighting.
• Knock Down Karate (Kyokushin, Enshin, etc.) will become very popular as the "real Karate."
• Many TMA schools who are not married to any particular tournament rule set are going to have some kind of ground grappling that they never took seriously before MMA became popular.
• Combat Glima is going to become the default grappling style for any martial arts system looking for easy answers to their lack of grappling. It's going to be huge in Western/Midevil martial arts as those arts continue to move on to more realistic continuous fencing practices, shamed away from traditional fencing by stop-and-go Kumite Point Fighting dragging down the reputation of martial arts as a whole.

But here's what we are not going to have: that standardized mixed striking/grappling ruleset for casual tournament competition that martial arts has desperately needed now for over a century. MMA will be like the Shoulin Temple is now; there will be a lot of martial arts schools tracing their roots back to fighters who once participated in MMA in it's glory days. There may not be many BJJ schools left to study at, and the ones that are left may be very different than the ones we enjoy now, but MMA will have passed on the legacy of grappling to that part of the martial arts community that still cares about effectiveness.

Vertical Fist

One of the first things I noticed in Chinese Martial Arts when I was first exposed to them was be it in Yang style Tai Chi or Choy Lay Fut, the basic straight punch was thrown with a vertical fist instead of a horizontal fist.

As I got into kickboxing I used vertical fist punches mostly at close range to the body, and horizontal fists long range to the head. My aspiring kickboxing career ended after my first two fights were cancelled because of chronic wrist pain in the mid 90's, which is were a lot of my aversion to punching to the face comes from.

Over the last few years I have gotten into cross training with MMA and Muay Thai fighters. My wrists are so sensitive that I can't hit focus mitts for more than a few rounds without the pain coming back. But I recently discovered that if I strike with a vertical fist I don't get that wrist pain:

I figured old people teach kung fu forms, so as they get older, of course they teach old people ergonomic moves like vertical punches. Imagine my surprise when Fight Perfect recently produced a video advocating this style of closed fist strikes (Update 3/14/2020, Fight Perfect has been censored on YouTube, but the following video covered more ore less the same material as the now missing Fight Perfect video):

It is interesting to note that the vertical fist straight punch has been around a long time in western boxing as well:

In today's world there is a lot to learn about martial arts in general and striking specifically. Where I personally lost power on my straight punches wasn't on under rotation of the punch, but on my elbow coming up. The easiest way to keep my elbow down has always been vertical punches, and now that I see they are also more ergonomic, it seems to me that this is the fastest way to teach people to throw an effective straight punch.

Viking Wrestling: Combat Glima

As a Tai Chi practitioner, I have become very interested in Combat Glima (aka "Viking Wrestling") over the years, and I have noticed its popularity growing among historical western martial arts groups. WHY I am interested in it is this: in many indigenous grappling arts the goal is to put your opponent on the ground while you remain standing. But very often in the grappling styles that emphasize this, both opponents go to the ground. Stopping sparring to reset frequently is a poor sparring practice, and if your sparring goes there all the time you should probably just include it in your sparring. The logical implication would be that if your main goal was staying on your feet in the first place, getting back to your feet should your main goal on the ground. That is Combat Glima in a nut shell:

This has a few ergonomic advantages over MMA grappling styles, which make it less injury prone and less expensive in terms of infrastructure (notice Glima mostly training on grass instead of mat$.) First instead of trying to drive the opponent into the ground or otherwise submit them, on the ground they are grappling to get up:

Second they are not trying to slam their body weight down on top of their opponent when they throw (because they are trying to stay on their feet when they throw like in Sumo, Muay Thai or Tai Chi):

Even in Tres Espadas there are critics of Combat Glima, "I have done grappling before, and I think that Combat Glima has poor technique." But all the above advantages still stand - so if the technique could be better, lets improve it!

Martialocalypse

A DARK PROPHECY OF DOOM

In the 80's Kumite Point Fighting almost destroyed the martial arts scene in the USA, and this destruction was only prevented by the emergence of real competition between martial arts in the form of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA, at first K-1 Rules Kickboxing but later mixed striking and grappling competition like the Ultimate Fighting Championship or "UFC".) The MMA movement has matured and is now extraordinarily influential, making the better martial arts like Muay Thai and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu more popular than the Kumite Point Fighting that once gave martial arts a bad name.

However, Kumite Point Fighting has now been officially approved as an Olympic sport. Where MMA was once a savior to the martial arts community, it will now be used to promote Kumite Point Fighting. A small minority of fighters like Anderson Silva and Connor McGregor have managed to have success even with dropping their hands or using long stances in MMA. Even though this is rare among all MMA fighters, champions or otherwise, their style of fighting will be used to justify the Kumite Point Fighting style of martial arts.

It won't matter that most of their technique is Muay Thai. Kumite Point Fighting instructors will be able to say "look they are the best in MMA. They fight like we do, in our stance, using the body's longest weapon, the kick" just like they used to say before MMA. And they'll have plenty of boards for people to break to show how "powerful" those Kumite Point Fighting kicks are, just like before.

"But BJJ is so popular right now, it won't fall from grace as the most popular martial art..." People are going to watch one season of Cobra Kai and become interested in the of the "Olympic sport" of Kumite Point Fighting. The instructors perpetuating this abomination are going to reference MMA as a justification for why those students don't need to bother with Muay Thai or BJJ.

That is what this bottle cap challenge is about, popularizing the idea that Kumite Point Fighting style kicks should be praised for their accuracy instead of their power. It is the worst omen in the world for the future of martial arts. "But UFC 1 proved BJJ was the best!" Self-serving platitudes won't save us, because there was a lot more to the UFC than just UFC 1:

When it is suggested that any other martial art besides BJJ has any value, some BJJ practitioners have resorted to chanting "UFC 1 proved BJJ is the best." Most commonly if someone points out that Muay Thai might be better than BJJ for the specific task of fighting multiple opponents, some BJJ people cry:

• "If you can't beat one person, you can't beat multiple people." (Since there is some small chance that you could be attacked by a BJJ practitioner, it is impossible to adequately prepare to fight multiple attackers without first being the best BJJ fighter on earth, because otherwise, you could be potentially attacked by someone who is better at BJJ than you.) 
• "Your only chance is to run anyways" (as if you could count on being faster than every other person in the group attacking you, and as if no bouncer has ever dealt with two drunk jerks at once.) 
• "You are unlikely to be attacked by more than one person anyways" (as if people planning to attack you planned to fight fair.) 

This same BJJ blind rage is aimed at every martial art that is not BJJ. BJJ has become dependent on a lot of martial arts infrastructure: high tuition, a robust system of tournaments, a community of professional full time instructors, well maintained dojos with expansive mats, armies of Gi distributors selling uniforms on Amazon, etc. At least in the Seattle Area, over time BJJ has become less likely to share infrastructure with other martial arts, some schools ending Muay Thai programs or insisting instructors only teach BJJ. This not-playing-well-with-other-martial-arts is not financially sustainable if BJJ starts to get less income from fewer new students and needs to share infrastructure with other martial arts in order to survive.

The real legacy of UFC 1 was it restored public confidence in people wearing martial arts uniforms in the face of tough guys with muscles - and BJJ does indeed deserve all of the credit for that. BJJ may lose most of their new incoming students to Kumite Point Fighting, thanks to their self-congratulatory hubris, Cobra Kai, the Olympics and all the MMA fighters who thought it was cute to use their Karate-for-kids in the cage. The dark ages we haven't seen since the 80's are about to return, and this time it is not clear to me that martial arts as we know it today will ever be this good again.

Update: this post has a sequel - Signs of the Martialocalypse.

Martial Blind Spots

The gold standard by which all other martial arts are judged is Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) popularized by UFC 1. But even BJJ has significant blind spots. When it comes to evaluating martial arts, blind spots are actually a good sign, because the effective martial arts focus on a specific goal. For example:

1. In wrestling, the ultimate goal is to control your opponent, and to keep them from controlling you, proving your dominance with a pin.
2. In boxing, the ultimate goal is to out punch your opponent, knocking them unconscious or landing a lot more hits than they can land on you.

Wrestling and boxing are extremely effective because of their intense focus and sparring oriented practices around mastering techniques relevant to that focus. The best take down artists out there are wrestlers, and the most skilled punchers out there are boxers. However:

1. Wrestling has huge blind spots when it comes to submission holds, defending against strikes and weapon attacks.
2. Boxing has huge blind spots for defending against leg kicks, take downs and submission holds.

And that's good, because it focuses the art so that practitioners efficiently master a specific group of skills. ALL martial arts have blind spots, because of constraints on training time. Even all-encompassing arts like Choy Lay Fut (where you have to study it like a part time job for multiple decades before reaching an instructor level because it covers almost every technique in existence outside of submission grappling) have blind spots:

1. No martial art will cover everything. The more they focus on basic frequently used moves, the more they will miss the tricky stunts that they aren't prepared for.
2. Having too much in a martial art keeps you from focusing on what you need. The more you learn every tricky stunt in the book, the less time you have for mastering the basics that you will have the most opportunity to actually use.

When people plan to attack you, they do one or more of the following:

1. Assume they are bigger or stronger than you.
2. Bring a weapon.
3. Bring friends.

This is when blind spots in martial arts become a problem. In a chaotic situation like that you need a variety of options, more than what any one good martial art usually specializes in. There is a simple solution, presented to us by MMA. In MMA it pays to have a background in multiple martial arts. An MMA fighter will be more successful if he has trained two of the following martial arts instead of having spent the same amount of time training in only one:

• Thai Kickboxing
• BJJ
• Wrestling

We can apply this to the problem of people planning to attack you as well. Consider how better prepared a martial artist would be for fighting multiple opponents they had trained any two of the following martial arts instead of focusing on only one:

• Boxing
• Kali (stick fighting)
• Judo

Ideally you would want to have a background in both striking and grappling. There are dozens of great martial arts out there. Training in two complimentary martial arts will cover most of these blind spots.