MMA: Style, or rule set?

[tallgeese]

I agree, good post and points. I always appreciated your thoughts ps1, I just disagree slightly on this.

However, I would just like to point out a couple of responses. First off, any good fighter should be varyingh is game to fit the opponat he is fighting at the time. This should be true no matter whay system you're out of. MMA simply gives you a larger set of responses than many more traditional arts. Due to the competivie nature of it, one also has the advantage of reviewing tapes and such. For systems designed for steet use, the only thing that changes is that you have to do your opponant's skill assessment on the spot and adapt as the fight progresses.

Secondly, I think that most competitors with a background in more traditional arts often tout these as a background. Not what they are actually doing in the ring. Anyone can see that these athletes are not confined to what ever their black belt is in while in the ring. BJJers are punching better and better as are wrestlers, and MTers are sprawling with the best of them. No one is operating under any "style" that they have.

I see your point with the terminology, I just respectfully disagree on it's importance. Heck, most schools with Japaneese backgrounds can't call the stuff the same thing (certainly not pronounce it right). I gave up trying to approximate another language a long time ago. Pretty much if it looks like a duck....

Really, only your more elite fighters h ave more than one or two coaches. A bulk of the guys training out there right now have a couple at most. Remember, I think that this is part of the evolutionary process. This next generation of MMA guys will come out and coach and fell less of a need to have more than one coach work with a fighter. As far as getting more people to work with your guys, who in a traditional art hasn't done this? If someone in your system is better at forms, you probily have him work with someone who needs to get better at them. It's true across the board.

As for the set curriculum, it's coming. As close as fighting to haveing anything set that is. More people are becoming more knowlegeable all the time. When I started competition, what feels like an age ago, you really had to hunt to find anyone who knew anything to teach you submission grappling. Now, alot of guys can show you a decent game. I'm not talking guys that will clean the matt with a high end grapper, but guys with decent skills that can show you the basics and then some who have probibly had a few fights and or matches.

Of course it changes from fight to fight. Good traditonal arts should too. That's not consistancy, it's winning. As to those training who didn't want to study a style, that's probibly true- in the traditional sense. No forms and such, only what works...I can't fault them for that. But it dosen't make what their doing less legitiment as a "system".

Again, I'm not saying that it's there yet. Only that I see it evolving in that direction. I don't think we'll ever see a ranking system, and that's fine, nor is that needed to be a "system". I just think that this is a new synthsis of ideas and training methodogies that are coming into their own. We also have to be careful in saying that the elite fighters we see on tv define MMA. They may be the pinnicle of the art (or sport, whatever) but they are just the very tip of hte iceberg of people studying out there.

[bushido_man96]

It appears to me that the combat sports that tend to come about in the West tend to get looked at differently by practitioners of Eastern Martial Arts; even be Western practitioners.

Boxing, Wrestling, and now MMA seem to get looked at in this light, as well. I think much of this comes from the bias that many people think Martial Arts only come from the Far East, and that something can only be a Martial Arts style if it fits into the parameters set by Eastern styles. Many parameters, I believe, that did not come into vogue until the last 100 or 200 years.

In the West, as the technology of warfare advanced, so did the training methods, and the use for hand-to-hand combat with intimate weapons and the body began to leave the battlefield. Therefore, we see our various Martial systems go from the combat usage to a competitive sport, like Boxing and Wrestling. MMA is basically the modern rendition of Pankration, except people don't die in the competition.

So, we have a mindset that a style has to have its own "language," like Japanese/Okinawan for Karate, and Korean for TKD. Now, if we take this into consideration, the MMA style is developing its own pedagogy: monikers like "ground and pound" and "sprawl and brawl" are becoming terminology used in the gym. This is the same thing, in my opinion.

Now, the other bias is that an MA, in order to be an MA, has to have some philosophy or mindset, such as "doing good for the world" or "fighting for justice" while "maintaining loyalty to the instructor" and developing things like integrity, perserverance, indomitable spirit, etc. These are all good things to develop, too. Don't get me wrong here. However, most of someone's level of acceptance to these things will be based on personal opinion and philosophies. Guys like Gichin Funakoshi and Bruce Lee had some great personal philosophies; the problem is that often times people take them as the written word, without questioning or exploring for a philosophy of their own. One of the main reasons that the philosophies of these two gentleman took off as they did is because they were in positions of importance or visibility that allowed them to do so. Even though they are good philosophies, they are not my philosophy.

I'll finish up with this: the Eastern mind and the Western mind just don't usually see things the same way. And this is ok. This is good, in fact. Variety is the spice of life. In the end, I think it is important to look at things that develop in the West with a Western eye, as opposed to trying to fit it into an Eastern mold.

[ps1]

I guess, in the end, this all comes down to how a person defines a martial art. To some, arts such as Karate, TKD, and BJJ are not martial arts either. Because they do not focus using the art in war. For others the definition is much more broad.

Bushido also makes a great point about the difference between the eastern and western mindset.

[Bushido-Ruach]

Interesting topic.......

Teaching an MMA class, and my unique background, I guess, I see MMA a little different than most it seems. To me (I teach MMA self-defense, which is vastly different from the sport), I look at MMA as being a style - not so much as a "style" as we would normally call a traditional martial arts style, but more as a style of personal choice.

In other words, MMA is my style of fighting because to me it gives a greater range of techniques from different traditional styles because all styles do not teach the same techniques. While there are numerous techniques that a lot of martial arts do have in common (perhaps because of "common ancestry" if you will), this is not true of all of them.

For example, I take techniques from combat Aikido (which are pretty much not found elsewhere) and Hapkido.....some techniques, especially the escapes, are the same or descended one from the other (variations on a theme technique). Then there are techniques unique to Eagle and Tiger styles of kung fu that you wouldn't normally find in other styles - these can be quite devastating, but can take a long time to master.

You have different techniques to learn that have evolved into what they are today because of the unique environments in which they were created, and why they were created - such as the Plains Cree Indians and their distinctive martial art utilizing the tomahawk, or the Vajra Mushti of 2000 BC in India which was the king's personal body guards, where they practiced special one hit kills.

In my opinion, taking different techniques from different systems makes one a more complete fighter.....throws from throwing arts like Judo or JuJitsu, kicks from arts that specialize in kicks, techniques that specialize in vital point strikes, joint strikes/manipulations (Chin na), techniques from styles like Aikido and Hapkido that specialize in escapes and using your opponants momentum against him....guiding him to destruction with his own power rather than trying to muscle in and destroy him in vagrant strenuous combat where both of you can get hurt.

After all, it would be equivalent of studying JuJitsu for years, then studying Aikido for years, then studying Ninjitsu for years....etc, etc and then combining them all into a system that works for you. Because not all techniques work for all people, what works for you may not work for me. In my class I have my students work on what works for them, no wasting three years of their lives trying to perfect a single technique when they can be learning 100 techniques that work for them in that same amount of time.

I vote that MMA can be a personal style, and I hope that I didn't bore anyone to death.

[Karateka_latino]

This is a very good disscusion. Lots of valid arguments from each side. I support the opinion of MMA starting as a set rule and turning into a style in its own right.

The Style of having your own style using what works for you, without having a standar system, that you can train for itself or added to other stablish styles.

While it's true that the core of MMA techniques comes from muay thai, boxing, wrestling and BJJ many fighters come from other backgrounds such as TKD, karate, capoeira, etc... and many of those fighters incorporate those techniques into his or her arsenal. So it's very difficult to create a standar system for MMA. That's why the first "M" of MMA stands for MIXED.