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.