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.

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War of styles: BJJ vs Wrestling

After I finished putting my affection for BJJ into a love letter, my mind was still occupied with the topic for a couple of days. I realized that I had touched on a couple of things without fully exploring them, and they merit a short sequel or two.  About how grapplers fare against stand-up fighters and vice-versa has been said enough in the previous post. Now I want to focus on the question: what is the best form of grappling? 

There are several contenders here, among which I only pick BJJ and the western (freestyle or Greco-Roman) style of wrestling, these being the two most prominent forms of grappling in the world of mixed-martial-arts, and probably the most extreme examples of their own wider groups (let's call those groups submission-focused group and take-down-focused group).

A good approach for answering complex questions is to start with an extreme example and draw general conclusions from it. What happens if a "pure" wrestler" (who knows no submission technique at all) faces with a pure BJJ practitioner (who only knows ground-fighting), all other things equal? The answer from the statistics (thanks to UFC and the like) is that the BJJ guy wins almost all the time. The reason is very simple. Wrestlers don't have the expertise in finishing moves. No chokes, no locks. A wrestling match ends when an average BJJ one starts - one fighter on his back on the floor. Additionally, wrestlers have to work against their natural instincts to turn their back on their opponent. In wrestling, it's a way to make it harder for your opponent to throw you. In BJJ, it's the best way to get yourself finished with a rear-naked choke.

However, when good wrestlers start learning submission techniques, they can catch up with BJJ'ers rather quickly. The reason for this is also the reason why moving from BJJ to wrestling is not that typical, and it's not easy, either. There is an asymmetry here. Wrestling filters for athleticism. Wrestlers are quick, agile, and have probably the best strength and body weight ratio among combat sports practitioners. They are unsurpassable in the foundations of grappling: the sense of balance, explosiveness, dominating the opponent, the use of body weight, ... From this base, learning BJJ requires learning how to move on the ground - which is truly a new skill -, and learning the techniques, which is simply a matter of practice. BJJers, on the other hand, can be experts - even if not world-class - of submission without being particularly athletic - it is actually one of the huge sources of BJJ's popularity. Improving your strength and agility is much, much harder, than improving on your technique. Someone can be a world champion in BJJ if he starts training at 18. No one will be a world champion wrestler starting at 18. Some very heavy work in your teenage years just can't be made up for once you passed the age. 

There is also the cost/benefit ratio. BJJers don't put much emphasis on what is at the center of wrestling: take-downs. The reason is that in a competition, a take-down is not particularly valuable. It scores 2 points, less than getting in a dominant position on the ground. If a wrestler tries to perform a take-down on a BJJer, the latter usually doesn't put much effort in fending it off. The attitude is: "You want to get me to the ground? I'm ok with that. Let's see what you do once I dragged you down with myself". On the other hand, learning to be very good at take-downs requires a lot of effort, and most BJJers think it's just not worth it.

To reiterate, in a match between pure wrestling, and pure BJJ - where the point is to incapacitate your opponent - BJJ wins, almost all the time. But take a seasoned wrestler and train him in BJJ, and he'll be a very, very hard opponent.

However, most of this above are true for wrestling as it is practiced today. In older times, before it has become a sport known today, catch-wrestling, or submission wrestling was very popular and it contained many submission techniques. One of its most famous practitioners, Ad Santel, has beaten the best students of the Kodokan school, the home of modern Judo. Which, by the way, spurred an immense interest in catch-wrestling among Judokas in Japan, many of whom traveled to Europe and America to learn wrestling.

But for now, I deliberately concentrated on the extremes. The wider world of grappling can be explored some other time.

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