Martial Moniker

There has been a lot of talk about what the best martial art is. But what I have found since I took my first martial art lesson in 1988, is that the name of the martial art does not tell you how effective a specific martial art school is. There are certainly trends - Muay Thai schools have a tendency to teach more effective fighting skills than Shotokan Karate schools - but this isn't guaranteed. Furthermore there are usually vast differences in the quality of fighting skills taught between martial arts schools claiming to teach the same martial art.

When I trained in Choy Lay Fut in Bremerton from Vern Miller in the 1990's, Doc Fai Wong's "First Disciple" (first student approved to go off and start his own school in Doc Fai Wong's lineage,) learning to fight full contact was part of the training. Sometimes Vern would make everyone do K1-Rules Kickboxing before teaching them even the beginning katas in Choy Lay Fut. And historically, Choy Lay Fut's reputation has been all about the Lei Tai (Chinese fighting ring,) so Vern's approach was indeed very "traditional" for that style. Older videos and stories I have heard about how Doc Fai Wong's schools were sparring in the past were very similar to what is practiced by Enshin Karate now, lots of full contact strikes and take downs, not easily represented in the "American Kickboxing" rule sets of the 1960's and 70's.

Years later living in Seattle I ran into another Doc Fai Wong lineage school. I was exited to get back to training. But when I brought up sparring, the Sifu said "I don't like to spar, it makes for sloppy technique." I didn't even know where to get started with him - how did he not know that the real technique is the technique that happens in sparring? Kata hopefully informs that technique, but the technique isn't the step by step instructions in kata, technique is what you can actually do when someone's trying to do something similar to you at the same time.

So right there in schools of the same brand, geographical area and lineage, I had some of the most effective fighting skills I have ever heard of taught to me in one school, but in another school essentially no effective fighting technique taught at all.

All across the USA right now, you can find gyms that train MMA fighters. In many of those gyms, you can sign up to take kickboxing fitness classes that don't have any sparring in them. They will teach "Muay Thai" moves, but at no point in time in these classes I refer to will you do those moves on another person. You will have in actuality not ever really done the moves at all.

There are Shotokan schools that go beyond the lame Olympic-style kumite point fighting, proceeding to continuous American Kickboxing or "Full Contact Karate" sparring. I know, because my first style I learned, Tae Sho Karate Do (aka Tae Sho Arnis: a recognized kickboxing gym in the Pacific North West in the 1990's,) was one such school. Certainly there was a huge Arnis influence on that style, but the unarmed Kata was 100% Shotokan. Yes we participated in Kumite Point Fighting, but most of our sparring was continuous full contact karate. If you read my blog regularly you will know that I have a lot of contempt for American Kickboxing/Full contact karate, but it beats the hell out of Muay Thai with no sparring at all.

The bottom line is this: not everyone can relocate where they live in order to train at the perfect martial arts school for them. We have the martial arts available to us, not the martial arts we wish were available to us. But we've had the internet and YouTube for a long time now, we can look up best practices for martial arts, and elevate whatever martial arts we have available to us to the level we need in order to learn effective fighting technique.