War of styles: do traditional martial arts work?

This post intends to fill a gaping hole in the previous one and to take a hard look at traditional martial arts. Are they real? The basic assumption I made in the previous post is that if there is sort of competition where apart from extremely dangerous techniques everything is allowed, and it is open to any style, and it runs long enough to provide statistically significant results, then, in the long run, it will show which styles work in practice, and which don't. 

This series of repeated experiments is impartial, quantifiable, and requires no expertise, only common sense. The UFC satisfies the above criteria. There have been more than 500 fights so far inside the octagon in the span of three decades, featuring fighters from all kinds of martial arts and combat sports. Everything from Western boxing to Chinese kung-fu had the opportunity to prove itself.

And traditional martial arts didn't shine. No one who was proficient in traditional styles only - like Karate, Taekwondo, Wing Chun, Tai Chi, Kung fu, ... - ever got close to the middle tier, let alone the top. Which came as a surprise for most. Aren't arts developed for centuries, by masters honing even the smallest moves to perfection, supposed to be superior to mundane "sports", like box or wrestling? The defenders - those who at least recognize that the burden of proof is on them - offer many explanations, and I want to address the most frequent ones here before I attempt to come up with the reasons for why the result should have been predictable.

Explanations

But there are UFC champions using traditional arts

What about Lyoto Machida, George St-Pierre, or Stephen Thompson? These karatekas are among the very best fighters in UFC! Well, yes and no. First of all, they are not simply karatekas, they are also expert grapplers, who are additionally trained in wrestling, boxing, Muay Thai, etc. Second, although they have a recognizable background in Karate, it amounts to maybe 10% of what they are doing. It lends their fighting style a distinctive sheen, but 90% of their moves are indistinguishable from the other fighters'. Also, when talking about statistics, having a handful of counterexamples against hundreds doesn't make a case. A God-given talent can compensate for a lot.

In real life, there are no rules

Eastern martial arts have been developed for life and death situations, so goes one argument, not for playing by the rules. That is, their masters on the street would employ techniques that are too dangerous, therefore illegal even in the UFC. On the other hand, the effectiveness of combat sports in real life is hampered by the artificial rules and protective gear their practitioners are used to. 

This is a very weak argument. Lethal techniques by definition can not be sufficiently practiced. You can't learn how to crush someone's jugular with your fingers by practicing it in slow motion against an obliging partner any more than learning how to hit someone with a right hook by only imitating it many times over while your partner patiently plays the role of a sandbag. One can only master a technique by continuous and persistent trial and error. By trying to apply it hundreds of times against training partners who do their best to thwart it. The only proof of having learned anything practical is if you can successfully apply it frequently enough. If you not a single time did it for real, thinking that you'll be able to in a situation where you are in real danger is delusional.

Prizefighting is beneath the arts

The next explanation is that it is beneath a real master to participate in such a bloodsport entertainment. I'm sure that many masters share this view. But I'm also sure that not every one of them does. From the tens of thousands of students of martial arts, there must be a large number of them who don't feel the competition demeaning. Yet, they are nowhere to be seen. At least not among the winners. There is a craze nowadays about exposing fake masters, and youtube is overflowing with videos where some MMA fighter beats the crap about masters of exotic styles. Plus, in the martial arts lore, the stories of wandering masters who developed their style by accepting and actively seeking challenges are abundant. The founders of almost every style were famous for their supposedly numerous victories where they proved that their new school is better than the rest. The conveniently risk-averse high-mindedness is a recent phenomenon.

The aim is spiritual development

Then come the ones who claim that the purpose of martial arts is developing the character and keeping the body healthy - therefore the effectiveness of them as combat styles is of secondary importance. This is lame. If the aim is health and spiritual development, don't call your method a martial art. Either it is "martial", that is, it prepares its practitioners to defend themselves in violent situations, or it's just a cheap PR trick to claim that what you sell is more than it really is. 

Furthermore, the traditional arts are suboptimal by their own standards. What instills more respect and humility and the appreciation of hard work into the students: testing their progress and facing their limitations every day on the mat or practicing forms and meditating on theory?

Self-defense is more than dueling

The last explanation is that martial arts focus on self-defense, which is more general than a one-on-one fight. Situation awareness, fighting with multiple or armed opponents, etc. This argument has some merit. But still, a more holistic approach to combat doesn't explain why the practitioners tend not to excel in one-on-one fights - which is still supposed to be the center of any martial art.


These are the common arguments for the lack of evidence that traditional styles work. I tried to explain why they are all unconvincing. The simplest explanation is often the best - and the burden of proof is on the one who argues against it. The simplest explanation for the lack of evidence supporting the effectiveness of conventional martial arts is... that they are not very effective. They are tradition-bound, overcomplicated, inward-looking, and they emphasize practicing forms over sparring exercises.

The problems

Overcomplicated

By overcomplicated I mean that the Eastern styles tend to have a huge repertoire of techniques, and most of them are not very usable. Karate (and I'm sure various kung fu styles as well) for example, has a plethora of exotic strikes, such as the one using the pressed-together fingertips in form of a bird's beak (chicken-head strike) to hit the side of the neck just behind the collarbone. For one, hitting the neck with a simply clenched fist is probably much more damaging - unless one imagines that he can tear up some artery or hit a deadly pressure-point with his beak-transformed hand (watched too many movies presumably) -, and for two, good luck with hitting a small specific area on a moving opponent. Or as another example, the world is yet to see anyone in the octagon going down from a classic, back-of-the-neck-hitting, knife-hand Karate chop. It's as if the founders of most styles had wanted to incorporate every possible move that can be useful in some imaginable situation, while not giving much thought to how frequently those situations are likely to happen in real life.

The majority of defense techniques are not that versatile maybe, but equally useless. Traditional Karate blocks are practiced with opponents who stop and freeze after a strike, so the blocking hand has enough time to meet the attacker's hand helpfully held motionless in the air. The testament of their impracticality is that these blocks go unused even in Karate-competitions, where the fighters resort to simple parries, like boxers.

The unnecessary large and mostly useless repertoire also means that even if it contains reliably effective techniques, the students have much less time for practicing them than kick-boxers or Thai-boxers. 

Tradition-bound

Due to their heavy emphasis on tradition, martial arts evolve with glacier velocity. The MMA world fully adopted BJJ in the course of a few years only. It simply worked and everyone recognized its necessity. Low-kicks from Muay-Thai got integrated as well in no time. Martial art techniques evolve beyond trivial changes only when someone founds his own school and redesigns the repertoire. If the students ask about the reasons behind a certain technique, the master doesn't point to the twenty-five times Royce Gracie submitted his opponents with that particular arm lock - instead, the explanation often boils down to that "the old masters knew what they were doing, and you should believe it works".

Navel-gazing

The inward-lookingness is the inevitable consequence of the tradition-bound mentality. Since we know that ours are the best offensive techniques, learning defense only against them is sufficient. Traditional Karate or Wing Chun with their emphasis on linear moves don't have an idiomatic way to deal with circular strikes like a boxer's hook. And repeating the Wing Chun mantra of "the shortest distance between two points is a straight line" won't deflect a body shot or an uppercut. Wing Chun in particular is a style that lives inside its own bubble. The famous sticky hands practice, in which the partners keep constant hand contact to be able to react to the opponent's move, is often a spectacle of strikes and parries exchanged with almost supernatural speed when demonstrated by advanced students. But it works only if the opponent plays the same game, as the very few Wing Chun practitioners stepping in the octagon can testify.

What about Aikido and the like?

So far, I have only mentioned martial arts focusing on strikes and kicks. What about the ones using wrist locks, throws, arm-twists, like Aikido or Japanese Jiu-Jitsu? There is even less evidence in their favor, and every problem above applies to them. The simple fact is that just can't catch a wrist in the air. Sure, some can if his opponent tells him exactly what technique he will use. When the attacker can choose randomly between two pre-agreed techniques, it is much harder. When it's a choice of five, I think it's almost impossible. So what about a real fight with two dozen possibilities? What if he can also fake? Or do combinations? Boxers who practice nothing else than evading punches can only block or duck one - and often not even that. Catching one in mid-air and improvise something...good luck with that.

What about the famous "using the opponent's weight and strength against him" principle? This is even more ridiculous than the aforementioned Wing Chun aphorism. Does anyone really think that the weight categories in Judo competitions are there to protect the heavy and strong from the smaller people?
It is not to say that Aikido or Jiu-Jitsu is completely useless. They probably come in handy in self-defense situations when someone is trying to shove you around or grab your jacket, and thus expose himself to a counter-attack. But the assumption that the opponent is always less competent or can be taken by surprise is not something to reliably count on.

Emphasizing forms over sparring

The little emphasis on sparring in the training sessions is the ultimate problem with traditional martial arts and the one from which the others follow. And also a probable reason for their existence. Sparring is a force for convergence. Whatever background one has and whatever forms he practices seem to have little effect on the techniques he will use in a full-contact sparring match or in a real fight. Look at occasional videos on Youtube where kung fu masters are challenged and you'll see none of the moves you expect from movies or staged demonstrations. But it doesn't exclusively apply to people who volunteer to get disabused of their delusions in front of the whole world. To a lesser extent maybe, but it's true for professionals as well. The differences between the moves of a, let's say, Thai-boxer and a Kyokushin karateka in a full-contact match are far outweighed by the similarities. Martial arts even at their bests are guilty of the narcissism of small differences.

Infatuation with the number of techniques and the importance of perfecting every little detail  crowds out the development of the most important skills in a fight: the sense of distance and timing, the ability to read the opponent, keeping your composure after eating a heavy blow, the ability to cope with the messiness of a fight where nothing ever goes exactly how one plans it.


Caveats

Of course, my arguments above are sweeping generalizations, bound to be false here and there. There must be very combat-centric styles that, nevertheless, are not interested in competitions, or not in UFC, at least. Not every style is equally bad either, and there can be huge differences between dojos of the same style. Some dojos are competition-oriented and pay lip service only to the rest. Some traditional Karate styles, most prominently Kyokushin, are very much combat-focused - and produced great UFC champions, like Georges St-Pierre. The most decisive factor that reliably predicts a style's effectiveness is not whether the traditional label applies or not. It is how much emphasis it places on sparring.  For example, there are great Judokas in UFC, but I also know about black-belts who didn't even need to spar on their exam.


Old myths in the new world

Will traditional martial arts disappear eventually if enough people watch combat sports and read this post? I don't think so. They appeal to the human psyche in ways that down-to-the-earth sports like wrestling or box don't. Their techniques can look amazing. Demonstrations, like shows of acrobatics, are often a joy to watch. They provide not only physical education but lifestyle guidance, social structure, a feeling of belonging, and mystery. The promise of secret knowledge - who knows, some old masters perhaps really can control hidden energies or you can be lethal even in your eighties - always lingers in the back of the mind even for skeptical and reasonable students.

The myths surrounding martial arts are not in any way less fascinating and enjoyable than other kinds of fiction. Today's UFC champions are 30-some guys who mostly have bodies of Greek gods and are experts in multiple fighting styles on Olympic levels. The idea that there still are some old masters in the mountains of China that could beat them easily if they deigned to do so is a hilarious and amusing testament of human gullibility. And yet it's something that life would be poorer without. Suspending our disbelief is necessary to enjoy works of fiction. Movies of Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, Jackie Chan, Van Damme, Seagal have been formative experiences of many kids, me among them. If some have problems with re-adjusting to reality when the film is over, it's not the end of the world. And it's not incurable either. A punch in the nose with a boxing glove usually helps.



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War of styles: which is the best martial art style?

Which is the most effective martial art style? Every combat sports enthusiast wondered the question at one point (or rather too long), and many have thought to have found the answer. "Ninjutsu is the most lethal". "A Sumo-wrestler would simply steamroll over anyone". "Shaolin-monks are invincible". "An Aikido master would just use his opponent's energy against him". "Muay Thai is the toughest". "A real boxer would just knock the lights out of them". "A wrestler would just break those jokers in half".  "No martial art tricks would help against a body-builder". And so on. Martial arts are more than sport. They often are a part of the identity of their students, and few people are willing to say something like "yeah, I've been doing xyz for ten years, but to be frank, uvw is much better." 

The question and the answers are purely speculative unless there was a controlled experiment where fighters from any style could enter the ring to duke it out between each other - under a minimal set of rules. The rules should allow for kicks, hand strikes, throws, grappling techniques - basically everything short of eye-gauging - to give every style the opportunity to prove itself, and the winner should be the one who manages to incapacitate his opponent or force him to submit. There has to be a high number of matches to produce reliable results. One wrestler winning against a boxer doesn't mean a lot on its own. But having a hundred matches resulting in a 70-30 win-loss ratio for wrestling is a statistically significant result. If the result were an unsurprising 100-0 between Muay Thai and Tai Chi, that would really say something of the latter.

Luckily for everyone interested (and open-minded), such an experiment has been going on for almost 30 years. When the Gracie family launched the Ultimate Fighting Championship in 1993, few people noticed. Today, it's a major source of entertainment worldwide and has produced probably the best hand-to-hand prizefighters in human history.

So, what does the UFC tell us about the effectiveness of martial art styles? Or in other words, which style(s) should one learn if he or she wants to be able to handle him- or herself? The short answer is that there is no such style. Every single champion or high-level athlete in UFC is proficient in multiple ones. But there may be a priority order, and I'll try to establish a possible one below.

Submission grappling

The biggest impact on the world of martial arts in modern times was when in 1993, Royce Gracie won the first UFC with a previously almost unknown fighting style. Brazilian Jiu-jitsu, the style his family developed from Judo, concentrated solely on the ground fight. Gracie was not only the most unassuming fighter in the ring - an average built and average height guy, nothing like the default lean-body-builder-like competitors of today - but he was evidently untrained in any art of punching and kicking. Every fight of his went down the same way. He ate some punches while getting close enough to his opponent to grab him, dragged him to the ground, and finished him quickly with some choke or armbar.

Brazilian Jiu-jitsu became a phenomenon overnight, and by now it has become the fundamental building block of every fighter's skillset. Today, you can rarely win a match with BJJ only - since everyone is an expert - but you will never win many without it. BJJ is, of course, only one of several submission grappling styles, although the most famous, and it can be substituted by Sambo, Judo, and various forms of catch-wrestling.

So if there is only one martial art you want to learn, go for BJJ (or something alike). I wrote a lot about why a fight between a grappler and a striker favors the grappler in a previous post, here I just point to the historical records. If your opponent doesn't know grappling, you have a very good chance to win - as Royce Gracie demonstrated. And if he knows, by managing to get to the ground with him, you can at least neutralize his other skills.

Takedowns

Submission grappling skills can sometimes be substituted by good takedown skills combined with some striking ability. Lots of UFC matches end with one fighter taking his opponent down and pounding him into submission. The so-called "ground and pound" is not as elegant as a nice choke or a lock, but it works. The most common takedowns seen in UFC come from wrestling. Judo sweeps, trips, and throws are less frequent - maybe because they were developed against gi-wearing opponents -, but there are some very good fighters with Judo backgrounds, as well.

Western boxing

The second skillset (for the sake of simplicity, I just lumped takedowns to submission grappling) no serious UFC fighter can afford to lack is good old western-style boxing. Boxing is a marvelous and deceptively simple form of pugilism. Contrasted by e.g. the dozens of different Karate strikes (moving the hand up, or down, or sideways; hitting with the knuckles, the palm, the fingertip, the blade of the hand, backhand, elbow, ...), its whole offensive repertoire is built up from six types of punches. Jab, cross, left hook, right hook, left uppercut, right uppercut. (The dynamics of performing the same strike with the leading or the rear hand are so different that it justifies talking about two different punches). But boxing completely lacks the rigidity of traditional martial arts, and these basic punches are endlessly variable by playing with angles and distances. Additionally, the Pareto rule applies to fighting as well. An overwhelming majority of fights are won by a very small set of techniques. Boxers have taken the lesson to the heart and spent their time honing the handful of punches that always work. The only type of strikes missing from boxing, that have demonstrated utility, is elbow strikes.

Box's defensive repertoire is also simple and sophisticated at the same time. Body shots are simply blocked by the elbows and forearms kept tightly to the upper body. Instead of relying only on parries and other defense moves common in Eastern martial arts, vulnerable parts like the solar plexus, chin, or ribs are constantly covered by the arms and shoulders, to provide only small and moving targets to the opponent. Attacks to the head are bobbed, ducked, or deflected by shoulder rolls. Boxing is unique among martial arts in how it uses head and shoulder moves to evade punches, which makes defense experts almost impossible to hit. Mike Tyson was a master of this in his prime, and James Tooney was an artist. Rolling with a punch - which means absorbing the energy of the punch by simply moving with it - is another very effective technique mostly missing from other martial arts. Ultimately, the superiority of boxing over other forms of striking arts stems from two sources. One is that box has evolved as a sport unburdened by philosophy and tradition. Prizefighting hasn't left much room for theories, and what didn't work, didn't get adopted. Secondly, whereas Eastern martial arts aimed to develop techniques that work equally against armed and unarmed attacks, boxing never tried to be generalistic. Blocks and rolls would be of little use against, let's say, knife attacks.

Despite being such an effective combat style, on its own, it's clearly insufficient. Pure boxers never fared well neither in MMA, where they could be taken down and finished on the ground nor under K1 or a similar set of rules, where their superior striking skills couldn't compensate for the lack of ...

Kicks

Which is the last indispensable set of techniques. The most used kicks, like in the case of hand strikes, are the simplest ones. Front kicks, roundhouse kicks, knees. Every now and then some very good kicker finishes his opponent with a more spectacular turning back kick, hook kick, or side kick, but these are rare. These listed above are basically part of almost every martial art's repertoire, so there is no style to single out as "the ultimate kicking art". There is only one type of widely-used kick that's not ubiquitous in traditional martial arts, and that is the low-kick known from Muay Thai. Again, what is true for punches, is true for kicks as well. Taekwondo and various kungfu styles developed a huge variety of kicks, and only a fraction of them is used regularly. Eight out ten kick-KOs are the good old round kick to the head.


And from the bird's eye view, that seems to be it. If the original question is formulated as "which are the most important martial art skillsets to learn?", then the answer is that one should be competent in three distinct groups: grappling, boxing, and kicking. Of course, during this super-condensed attempt for a neat categorization, lots of things fell between the cracks. Among many things unmentioned, neither takedowns, elbow strikes, nor Muay Thai clinches fit very well in these categories, and each category encompasses many very different schools.

If the question is posed as "which styles should I learn", then the answer is: learn BJJ or some other form of submission grappling and then learn a stand-up style that emphasizes a small set of simple techniques of strikes and kicks and a sparring-oriented approach. Muay Thai, for example, ticks almost all the boxes.

Observant readers probably have noticed that apart from being brought up occasionally as references to the negative,  traditional martial arts have gone unmentioned. How come, one might wonder. Are they just not good enough? My short and unkind answer is that it is exactly the case: they are just not good enough. But the topic deserves a post of its own.