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| MMA vs TMA |
MMA vs Traditional Martial Arts: Are We Asking the Wrong Question?
Few arguments in modern martial arts are as repetitive as MMA versus traditional martial arts.
The discussion usually follows a familiar pattern.
An MMA practitioner points to unrealistic demonstrations, compliant partner drills and martial artists who have never tested their skills under pressure.
The traditional martial artist responds that MMA is merely a sport, that rules prevent dangerous techniques, and that traditional martial arts were designed for real combat rather than competition.
Then everybody argues for another twenty years.
There are legitimate criticisms on both sides.
But I think the entire debate begins with a mistake.
MMA and traditional martial arts are not necessarily trying to accomplish the same thing.
Until we decide what we are actually measuring, asking which one is "better" doesn't mean very much.
First, What Is MMA?
Modern mixed martial arts is a combat sport.
Its practitioners train to fight against resisting opponents within a defined competitive environment.
That environment has rules, weight divisions, time limits, referees and prohibited techniques.
None of this makes MMA fake.
Rules are what make full-contact competition possible.
Without them, athletes could not train and compete repeatedly while reducing some of the most obvious risks of serious injury.
Modern MMA has also produced an extraordinarily effective training methodology.
Successful fighters need striking.
They need grappling.
They need takedowns and takedown defense.
They need conditioning.
Most importantly, they must develop these abilities against opponents who are actively attempting to defeat them.
That last point is extremely important.
MMA demonstrated something that parts of the traditional martial-arts world had gradually forgotten:
techniques must eventually survive resistance.
That contribution should not be underestimated.
What Are Traditional Martial Arts?
Here things become much more complicated.
"Traditional martial arts" is an enormous category.
Chinese martial arts alone include hundreds of systems developed in different places, periods and social environments.
Some were associated with military practices.
Some with civilian self-defense.
Some with security work.
Some with villages and families.
Some with religious communities.
Some eventually became performance arts, sports, health practices or methods of personal cultivation.
And many became combinations of several of these things.
By the twentieth century, Chinese martial arts were already being deliberately reconstructed as systems of physical education, national culture, health and moral cultivation as well as combat.
So when someone asks:
"Does traditional kung fu work?"
My first question is:
Work for what?
Not Everyone Practices Martial Arts to Fight
This seems obvious, but much of the MMA-versus-TMA debate ignores it.
Imagine a seventy-year-old man practicing Taijiquan every morning in a park.
Perhaps he enjoys the movement.
Perhaps his father practiced it.
Perhaps it connects him with Chinese culture.
Perhaps his friends meet every morning and practice together.
Perhaps he simply likes it.
An MMA fighter demonstrating that he could defeat this man in a cage proves absolutely nothing of importance.
The elderly practitioner never claimed otherwise.
Traditional martial arts can function simultaneously as physical activity, cultural heritage, social practice, historical preservation and martial training.
In some communities they also participate in festivals, ritual practices and local identity.
Their value therefore cannot always be measured exclusively by competitive fighting performance.
Something can have cultural value without being the most efficient method of winning a fight.
But "Tradition" Is Not an Excuse Either
This argument can be abused in the opposite direction.
If somebody says:
"I practice this because it is part of my culture."
Fine.
Combat effectiveness is not necessarily relevant.
But if somebody says:
"My traditional martial art will teach you how to defeat an attacker."
Now combat effectiveness becomes extremely relevant.
You cannot advertise fighting ability and then retreat into cultural preservation when somebody asks whether your methods actually work.
This is where MMA's criticism of traditional martial arts becomes legitimate.
If we make a martial claim, we need a way to test it.
Forms alone cannot do that.
Cooperative applications cannot do that.
Lineage cannot do that.
The reputation of a dead master cannot do that.
At some point, another person must be allowed to resist.
What MMA Gets Right
MMA's greatest strength isn't any particular technique.
It is its training environment.
A jab has to work against someone who doesn't want to be jabbed.
A takedown has to work against someone trying not to be taken down.
A submission has to work against someone trying to escape.
A fighter must manage distance while another person is changing it.
Timing develops against unpredictable movement.
Conditioning is tested under pressure.
Mistakes have immediate consequences.
This creates an extremely powerful feedback mechanism.
Something works.
Or it doesn't.
The opponent gets a vote.
Traditional martial artists should take this very seriously.
A technique demonstrated beautifully against a cooperative student may collapse completely when attempted against resistance.
MMA exposed a lot of martial-arts fantasy.
We should acknowledge that rather than make excuses for it.
What Traditional Martial Arts Can Offer
But MMA's success does not make every other martial practice obsolete.
Traditional martial arts preserve things MMA has no reason to preserve.
Historical weapons.
Regional training methods.
Forms.
Traditional terminology.
Lineage histories.
Local customs.
Specialized conditioning exercises.
Older tactical concepts.
Traditional body-development methods.
Cultural practices surrounding the martial art.
Some of this material may have little relevance to modern competitive fighting.
That's perfectly acceptable.
A traditional art does not have to justify its existence by producing UFC champions.
I practice traditional martial arts partly because I believe this material deserves to survive.
But preservation and effectiveness are different questions.
Something can be historically valuable without being competitively effective.
And something can be competitively effective without possessing much historical depth.
What About Health?
Another common comparison is that traditional martial arts are healthy while MMA destroys the body.
Again, reality is more complicated.
Different forms of martial-arts practice have different risk profiles.
A person practicing slow Taijiquan forms has obviously chosen a different physical activity from a professional fighter receiving repeated strikes to the head.
Research on martial arts and combat sports suggests possible benefits involving physical fitness and psychological well-being, while the evidence varies according to population, training method and study quality.
MMA, meanwhile, carries a substantial injury burden. Systematic reviews have found that head injuries, lacerations, fractures and other injuries occur in competition, with the head frequently reported as an injured region.
But we should not turn that into:
Traditional martial arts = healthy. MMA = unhealthy.
Traditional martial arts can injure people too.
Bad joint manipulation, excessive conditioning, inappropriate training volume, hard contact and incompetent instruction can damage practitioners.
Likewise, recreational MMA training does not necessarily mean someone is receiving professional-fight levels of head trauma every week.
Intensity matters.
Training method matters.
Age matters.
Competition frequency matters.
So does the individual.
Does MMA Cause Violence?
Here I would completely reverse one argument from my original version of this article.
Years ago, I argued that MMA attracted violent and antisocial people and encouraged aggression.
I no longer think the evidence justifies making such a sweeping claim.
Martial-arts psychology is much more complicated.
Studies of martial arts and combat sports have produced different results depending on the population, type of training, coaching environment, experience and the psychological variable being measured.
More importantly, millions of people train in combat sports without becoming violent criminals.
We should distinguish between:
being good at violence in a controlled environment
and
being a violent person.
They are not the same thing.
If I criticize traditional martial artists for making claims without sufficient evidence, I have to apply the same standard to my own arguments.
So this is one claim from the original article that I withdraw.
But MMA Is Still a Sport
This statement sometimes infuriates MMA practitioners, although I don't understand why.
Calling MMA a sport is not an insult.
Boxing is a sport.
Wrestling is a sport.
Judo is a sport.
MMA is a sport.
And an extremely demanding one.
But sport necessarily creates a specific environment.
There are weight divisions.
There is one opponent.
There is a defined fighting area.
There is a referee.
Weapons are prohibited.
Certain techniques are prohibited.
The contest begins at a known moment.
Medical assistance is nearby.
None of those conditions makes MMA ineffective.
They simply tell us what MMA is designed to test.
MMA Is Not "The Street"
This is where some MMA enthusiasts make exactly the same mistake they accuse traditional martial artists of making.
Success in MMA demonstrates an extremely high level of ability in unarmed fighting.
It does not demonstrate invulnerability in criminal violence.
A criminal assault can involve weapons.
Multiple attackers.
Surprise.
Hard surfaces.
Vehicles.
Alcohol.
Friends joining the fight.
An attacker may not square up and announce his intentions.
Someone may simply stab you.
Or hit you from behind.
Or pull a gun.
No unarmed martial art solves these problems reliably.
That includes Wing Chun.
It includes White Crane.
And it includes MMA.
The statement:
"An MMA fighter would probably beat most traditional martial artists in an MMA fight"
is quite reasonable.
The statement:
"Therefore MMA prepares someone for every form of real-world violence"
is not.
Those are completely different propositions.
But an MMA Fighter Has Important Advantages
Traditional martial artists shouldn't hide behind knives, multiple attackers and surprise attacks either.
Take two people of similar age and physical condition.
One has spent five years regularly sparring, wrestling, striking and grappling against resisting opponents.
The other has spent five years exclusively practicing forms and cooperative applications.
If an unavoidable unarmed fight occurs, I know which person I would rather be.
The MMA practitioner has experienced pressure.
He knows what it feels like to be hit.
He has attempted techniques against people actively trying to stop him.
He has developed physical conditioning relevant to fighting.
He has repeatedly made decisions under physical stress.
Those are significant advantages.
Claiming otherwise because "there are no rules on the street" is another traditional martial-arts fantasy.
The Missing Question: What Kind of Violence?
"Real fighting" is itself an almost meaningless expression.
A drunken argument outside a bar is different from domestic violence.
A robbery is different from a school fight.
A challenge fight is different from an ambush.
A military engagement is different from all of them.
A knife assault is different from two unarmed men agreeing to fight.
Training optimized for one environment cannot automatically solve every other environment.
This is something I have come to consider increasingly important:
There is no universal martial-arts training environment that reproduces reality.
There are only different training methods preparing us for different problems.
"You Fight How You Train"
There is considerable truth in this familiar statement.
Training creates habits.
MMA practitioners become extremely good at solving the problems repeatedly presented by MMA training.
Boxers become extraordinarily good at boxing problems.
Wrestlers become extraordinarily good at wrestling problems.
Traditional martial artists likewise become good at whatever their training repeatedly requires them to do.
And that is exactly the problem.
If your training repeatedly requires you to perform beautiful movements against cooperative partners, you may become extremely good at performing beautiful movements against cooperative partners.
That does not automatically transfer to fighting.
If self-defense is the objective, training must somehow include the problems self-defense requires us to solve.
Can Traditional Martial Arts Learn From MMA?
Absolutely.
They already have.
Traditional practitioners can adopt progressive resistance.
Protective equipment.
Sparring.
Pad work.
Modern strength and conditioning.
Pressure testing.
Better understanding of sports science.
None of this requires abandoning traditional martial arts.
I don't have to transform Wing Chun into MMA to learn something from MMA training.
Likewise, a traditional system can preserve forms, historical weapons and cultural practices while modernizing how fighting ability is trained.
Preservation does not require stagnation.
Can MMA Learn Anything From Traditional Martial Arts?
This is a different question.
Technically, MMA already absorbs anything that repeatedly proves useful within its competitive environment.
That is one of its strengths.
If a technique works within MMA rules and someone can apply it consistently, eventually somebody will probably use it.
But traditional martial arts offer something outside that competitive objective.
They preserve cultural memory.
They connect practitioners with historical communities.
They provide activities that can change as practitioners age.
They offer subjects for historical investigation.
And for some people, they provide a lifelong practice whose value is not dependent upon whether they could win a professional fight.
MMA does not need to become traditional kung fu.
Traditional kung fu does not need to become MMA.
So Which Is Better?
Now we can finally answer the question.
If you want to become good at modern competitive unarmed fighting, MMA is clearly one of the most effective training environments ever developed.
If you want to preserve and study a particular Chinese martial tradition, MMA cannot replace that tradition.
If you want gentle recreational movement at seventy-five years old, professional MMA training would be a rather strange recommendation.
If you want to understand Fujian martial culture, White Crane gives you something MMA cannot.
If you want to learn how to function against a resisting unarmed opponent, an art that never trains against resistance has a serious problem.
And if you want guaranteed protection from weapons, multiple attackers and unpredictable criminal violence:
neither MMA nor traditional martial arts can give you that guarantee.
Different tools solve different problems.
The Real Problem With the MMA vs TMA Debate
I practice traditional martial arts.
I also believe that much of the criticism MMA practitioners have directed at traditional martial arts is justified.
Too many traditional schools stopped testing themselves.
Too many teachers substituted stories for experience.
Too many practitioners believed lineage guaranteed fighting ability.
Too many ineffective techniques survived because nobody was allowed to resist.
MMA forced the martial-arts world to confront those problems.
That was valuable.
But the opposite mistake is reducing the entire meaning of martial arts to:
Who wins a fight?
If that were the only question, enormous parts of human martial culture would have no reason to survive.
Historical swordsmanship would be useless because we carry guns.
Traditional weapons would be useless because nobody walks to work carrying a spear.
Forms would be useless because nobody performs a form during a fight.
Martial rituals would be useless.
Lineage research would be useless.
Martial history would be useless.
Except they aren't useless.
They simply have different value.
The mistake is not choosing MMA.
The mistake is not choosing traditional martial arts.
The mistake is using one measurement to judge everything.
Ask what you want from your training.
Then ask whether the training you are doing actually produces it.
That is a much more useful question than: