The Traditional Martial Arts Renaissance in MMA

The early days of MMA were an exciting, wild time filled with the sort of style vs style battles you normally see in anime or disco era martial arts movies.  Then, as the years went by and fighters began to find what works and what doesn't in MMA competition, certain martial arts were found to be more effective arts to train in for those looking to compete in the ring.  Some of the most proven arts in professional MMA include Boxing, Muay Thai, Kyokushin (or any other hard contact) Karate, Wrestling, Judo, Sambo, and Jiujitsu.

Over the last few years, however, moves from "traditional" martial arts have emerged in the arsenals of top MMA fighters.  Lyoto Machida, using his base as a Shotokan Karate practitioner with extensive experience in point sparring, is the fighter most often brought up as an example.  There are plenty of other examples, as well, such as Anthony Pettis throwing no-setup kicks from his Tae Kwon Do background, or Vitor Belfort (among many others) and his new found love for the spinning back kick.  Other moves like axe kicks and side kicks are now being used by so many fighters it's hard to think of just one example.  Jone Jones, Machida, Robbie Lawler, and other fighters have even began using hand-trapping fights in a way that resembles Jeet Kune Do, which gets a lot of its hand-trapping methods from Wing Chun.

Machida does with his Karate what every 8 year old training Karate at the YMCA day dreams about.

So what gives?

Before we go any further, it's important to make a note about the concept of "traditional" martial arts, as it's an ambiguous and often inaccurate concept.  Traditional martial arts theoretically describe martial arts that have been around for a long time.  However, Aikido is generally considered to be a traditional martial art while Judo isn't, despite the fact that Judo is actually a couple decades older than Aikido.  Wrestling has been around for a damn long time, and yet it isn't considered a traditional martial art by most people.

When people refer to "traditional" martial arts, most of the time what they're actually referring to are East Asian martial arts with a sense of mystique around them and an odd fetish for "tradition", even if the traditions have been fabricated.  These martial arts, such as Karate, Kenpo, Aikido, Kung Fu, Wing Chun, Tae Kwon Do, and Tang Soo Do, are what we talk about when discussing "traditional" martial arts.

So why hadn't we seen more of these styles- and moves associated with them- pop up in the ring until the last five or so years?  Was it because they were inherently inferior?  Was it because they were "too deadly" for the ring?  Was it because their qi blasts only work on the invisible ninjas that follow practitioners of these arts around on a daily basis?

Was it because Shaolin practitioners spent their time kicking ass at soccer instead?

The answer is simple: it's all in the training.

Martial arts are most effective when you pressure test what you've been learning, that way you learn to apply your techniques under fire.  It's a concept I talked about on my previous blog, but really it's something that a lot of people in the martial arts community have already been talking about for a long time.  Martial arts training without real sparring or its equivalent (randori in Judo, rolling in Jiujitsu, etc) is worthless.

In other fields, it seems like the most self-evident concept in the world.  If you said you wanted to become a professional quarterback by only playing games of catch and never actually playing a game of football, people would laugh at you.  If you were a scientist who made a bunch of claims without submitting the evidence for those claims to peer review, you'd probably start at least a dozen rap beefs with other scientists in your area of study.

The same ideas apply to martial arts.  You can't get good at something without actually doing it, and you can't say what you're doing works without actual empirical evidence (and I don't mean anecdotes about how some guy totally used Aikido to take out some nameless mugger on the street).  Yes, learning techniques by applying them against compliant partners is crucial for learning the proper way to execute any technique in martial arts.  But only applying what you learn against compliant partners means you'll never be able to apply what you learn against someone putting up some resistance, whether in the ring or on the "streets" that people love to theorize so much about.

I'm great at shooting hoops, which means I could totally become a high level shooting guard!

And that's where traditional martial arts largely fail.  An overwhelming majority of instructors in these arts avoid pressure testing what they teach.

Now, of course, people have a variety of reasons to train martial arts, and not all of them are actually trying to learn to fight.  There's nothing wrong with that.  The problem is many traditional martial art schools brand themselves as teaching "real" self-defense, and then use ridiculous excuses like "what we teach is too deadly for sparring!!!" to avoid pressure testing their techniques.

As mentioned above, when MMA became big, people from all sorts of styles came to compete.  And those who came from schools that didn't pressure test what they learned got obliterated.  One of the most enduring examples was Rhodes vs Ettish, where experienced kickboxer Johnny Rhodes took on Karate blackbelt Fred Ettish.  The results weren't pretty.

 

Though Ettish has since taken MMA seriously and won a match at 53 years old.

 Because of the horrible success rate of traditional martial arts in the early days of MMA, people largely dismissed them entirely.  As the infant years of MMA passed and people began to see which martial artists were having the most success, they worked off the assumption that those arts producing the most successful fighters were the best to train in.  And they weren't wrong, either- but it wasn't because these martial arts were inherently better.  Rather, it was because those had much more schools training with pressure testing than those of traditional martial art schools.

So, during the '00s, we mostly saw fighters with a background in better-proven martial arts fighting.  Then Machida came and changed the game with his background in Shotokan Karate.

Recently, Jack Slack- one of the best martial arts writers around right now, if not the best- wrote an article about Machida's background in point fighting.  The gist: it's great for getting in and out, but the scoring system means it often turns into a game of tag that doesn't prepare you for an actual fight (hell, considering point sparring teaches you to reset after landing a single hit, it could be argued that it actually makes you worse at fighting than you were before).  But what Machida did was combine his point sparring Shotokan background with the full contact, pressure tested methods and arts that fighters use.

Now, Machida wasn't the first big MMA fighter with a background in a traditional martial art (Chuck Liddell had a background in Kenpo, for example).  But Machida was the first fighter where his traditional martial arts background was both an integral part of his fighting style and how he was marketed to fight fans.  When Machida became the UFC's light heavyweight champion, it was declared to be a success for Shotokan Karate, as well as other point sparring martial arts in general.

The amount of people signing up for Tag-Ryu Karate skyrocketed.

Then, in February of 2011, Machida's training partner and professional Matrix ninja Anderson Silva knocked out Vitor Belfort with a front kick.  Two months later, in April, Machida knocked out Randy Couture with a crane kick.  All of a sudden, not only did point sparring have some credibility as a training tool, but so did flashy kicks that had mostly been disregarded by the MMA world for the previous decade.  These weren't the first flashy kick knockouts to happen in MMA, of course, but they were the first ones that happened on a big enough stage for everyone to take notice and start paying attention.

So now, almost half a decade later, MMA fighters have started experimenting and finding success with techniques from traditional martial arts in substantial numbers.  The spinning back kick and side kick in particular have become popular over the last few years.  And, as I mentioned above, hand trapping has began to emerge for fighters who are in a nebulous area between boxing and clinch range.

I love watching MMA, as well as other martial arts, because I love watching the art and breaking down the science behind everything that is happening.  And it makes me excited that both the art and the science behind MMA keep evolving as this young sport continues to develop.  As fighters and coaches continue to expand their repertoire, everyone in the martial arts community wins.  Except for those "too deadly to spar" dorks.

The Millennial Generation: Entitlement and Cynicism?

I was born in January of 1990, one month after the Cold War was officially declared over by George Bush Sr and Mikhail Gorbachev at a summit held in Malta.  I am, basically, right in the middle of what US society collectively refers to as the "millennial" generation.  As with defining most generations, there's no solid agreement as to when the exact dates are, but the general consensus is that the millennial generation began somewhere in the early or mid-80s and ended in the early 00's.

As millennials, we occupy a unique time in history.  We were around before computers and cellphones were commonplace, coming of age just as they started to take off; we grew up in a world where there was only one global hegemonic power, the United States, unlike most of the rest of human history that had multiple world powers vying for control; we experienced both Anchorman and Mean Girls.

And, just like figuring out the exact period of time that encompasses a certain generation, trying to figure out how to collectively define our generation has generated a lot of different ideas as to how we can do so.  Some of the proposed ideas come from our shared experiences: the internet, globalization, 9/11, the Great Recession.  Others come from traits that we supposedly have: entitlement, idealism, cynicism, sarcasm.

My persistent efforts to get social scientists to collectively refer to us as

"Generation Pokemon Stadium" have, alas, yielded no results so far.

Amidst all the thoughtful analyses about our generation, however, is also a metric shit ton of content by people that were somehow paid to write articles that basically amount to "get off my lawn and stop it with your dag-gum hippity hop music, you hooligans!"  There is no shortage of articles talking about how terrible we are as a generation, saying that we don't have any work ethic and our economic woes are the result of that (rather than, say, that whole Great Recession thing).

It'd be easy to just respond "nuh uh!" and call these people unkind names.  Or even point out that, hey, if you're the generation that raised us, you're actually insulting your own parenting skills each time you talk about how spoiled we are.  But, as usual, a more nuanced and thoughtful response is probably the more productive route.  Why are so many older people so likely to believe we are spoiled and entitled?  And might there, perhaps, be a kernel of truth to that notion?

First off, it's important to get something out of the way: we're inheriting a global economy that is pretty fucked.  There's a reason we're so cynical, and there's not really much room for debate here.  Income inequality is the worst it's been since right before the Great Depression, and on a world wide scale, the 85 richest people in the world have more wealth than the poorest half of the world's population.  Unemployment in the United States is still severe, even for people with a degree, and it will remain so because there are a lot of jobs that are simply never coming back.  It's not just one cause, either, but a number of them: shipping jobs overseas, automating jobs so that people no longer have to do them, less public sector jobs due to lower tax revenues to fund them, and many other reasons, there are a lot of jobs that are now gone forever.

And yet jobs like "millennium falcon pilot" haven't even popped up in their place

And there's something kind of cool about some of those.  Some blue collar jobs are very dangerous, for instance, and making them more efficient or even automated is great.  What isn't great, though, is that all of these factors together get rid of so many jobs and create such an overcrowded job market that many people simply give up, which has also made a lot of unemployment statistics look less severe than they actually are.

Put into the context of recent history, wages have stagnated over the last few decades for the middle class and actually declined for low income people.  Minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, certainly isn't what it used to be.  Meanwhile, healthcare costs, college tuition costs, and other vital living expenses have increased exponentially even when wages haven't.

Basically, we're inheriting a job market and economy in a condition much worse than our parents did.  There's even a pretty great (yet infuriating) meme about this whole shindig.

To any older adults reading this: yes, this is actually a completely foreign concept to us.

So when you read an article about us "choosing" to put off buying houses, or have children, or get married, know that it's not actually a "choice" on our end.  Yes, as a generation, a lot of us question the values of previous generations, and there are plenty of us who actually would choose to put off these things as individuals.  But it's not rebelliousness or laziness or anything like that which explains this incident on the larger level- it's our economic condition.

But, surely, with our Sony Gamestations and Nintendo Playcubes, we're still spoiled, right?  We grew up pampered, even if we inherited a tough economy.  Surely we can find a way to both blame millennials while admitting that they don't have the same labor benefits or opportunities our parents did?

Actually, in a way, yes.  Because prices for consumer electronics, such as computers, have plummeted over the last few decades.  Likewise, 51% of US households own gaming consoles, with the average number per household being not one system, but two.  So all of us as a society, especially us younger folks, do enjoy easier access to electronic entertainment and media.

But here's the thing that often gets missed in these conversations about all the material benefits we enjoy: it connects to our economic situation, because these low prices are the result of lower labor costs.  We enjoy cheaper products, but at the expense of meager wages.  So a 20-something (or someone of any age, really, since the average age of someone who works for minimum wage is 35) working a part time job while also on food stamps or a healthcare assistance program like Medi-Cal isn't a moocher if they happen to own an iPone.  Rather, our current societal reality is that a cellphone is actually way, way easier to afford than medical care and many other costs of living (also, while we still think of cellphones as a luxury good, they have actually become more of a necessity now that everyone [including potential employers] assume you have one).

Feel free to keep posting those shitty, judgmental memes instead of thinking critically, though.

And I think our different economic realities help explain why a lot of older adults think millennials are so spoiled.  Because I don't think most adults who say we have it easy are Disney movie villains who secretly know the truth and are saying we have it easy as some sort of conspiracy to undermine us.

When I was a preteen, a cellphone was something only a few people had.  And now, about a decade and a half later, they're a necessity, along with computers.  That's a weird concept for me to grasp, and I'm someone who came of age during that shift.  For someone who was middle aged (or even elderly) when this shift started, people who grew up in an era without widespread cellphone and computer use, and only a fraction of the entertainment media we have available to us today?  The idea that we have it rough when we have so many conveniences available to us must be hard to swallow.  And they're not completely wrong, either; all of these things are pretty fucking sweet.

And beyond that, the challenges we face are a lot less romantic on paper than those faced by previous generations.  A large chunk of the 20th Century was defined by the Cold War, when almost every country in the world- even the neutral ones- genuinely feared they could get wiped off the map.  There was an immediate, tangible threat.  Before that, it was the Great Depression, where people were starving in ridiculous numbers, and the World Wars, where millions upon millions of people died.

Today, the United States is the world's biggest superpower, and other emerging superpowers like China and India are far too economically intertwined with us for there to be a war any time soon.  There are a lot of problems that stem from this situation (again, especially economic), but all out warfare or famine that threatens humanity as a whole isn't one of them.  And, while my generation was around for the worst attack on US soil that we have ever suffered, none of us actually think that we are in any danger of being invaded and destroyed as a country because of how ridiculously high our military budget is.

Which is outrageous, considering all we needed to end the Cold War was a boxing match

Instead of a big war*, today our biggest problem is trying to navigate a post-employment economy.  It's a big deal, but it doesn't have the same ring to it, especially when as a culture we are taught to look up to the hyper-wealthy elite who have exacerbated these conditions we face.  We have reached a point where, as a species, we aren't really struggling for survival against the elements or each other anymore.  We still suffer from both of those, but we probably won't be wiped out by them.  We're past the point of worrying about warfare or famine sealing humanity's collective fate.

So here we are as millennials, individually struggling for economic survival in a post-physical survival world.  We have a lot available to us that previous generations didn't, but we also face difficulties that our parents didn't.  The conditions we live in and the problems lying ahead of us are unique to our generation, and a lot of older people don't understand that.  So they look down on us- not because there is something inherently wrong with Baby Boomers in particular, but because human beings in general are terrible at putting themselves in other peoples' shoes.

Hopefully, we don't repeat these same mistake and start talking shit about the generation after us.

*It should be noted that while the so-called War on Terror in the Middle East hasn't been a huge war for us in terms of lost lives and perceived threat while compared to other wars, (1)we have still lost soldiers and (2)people in the Middle East have lost many, many lives, including thousands upon thousands of innocent civilian lives, because of the pointless and costly violence we initiated