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.