Wushu Watch: The Dumbest Ideas in Martial Arts

Then he went on to train in submissions and build a striking game of sorts, spending his weekends driving to tournaments of no note, to wait ages to compete, and sometimes lose.  Loyalty? Well the man has been with the guys at American Top Team for the best part of a decade and earned a black belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu which, in turn, takes years.

Funnily enough, the group of traditional martial arts fanatics who believe MMA is too brutal and barbaric shares a notable overlap with the group who believe that their martial art just won’t work in MMA because of the bans on eye gouging, hair pulling and groin striking. Of course, that is what most traditional martial arts were developed for—that’s the reason for the light lead foot and the knock kneed stances, everything is about kicking the crotch and stomping a man while he’s down.

If you look at any ancient training manual, pre-dating the move towards making chuan fa and karate more spiritual, good-for-exercise systems in the twentieth century, everything is about grabbing a hold of something tender and hitting your man while you hold it aloft. Modern students of these arts getting upset about a combat sport because they forgot that blood is just one of those things that happens when two bodies collide at force is pretty darn silly.

70s Karate is the Best Karate

Over the years I have been fortunate enough to accumulate a library of books—some of which are good, some of which are bad, and more than a few of which are outright hilarious. Almost every martial art started in a good place, the purpose was to win fights or protect ones self or possessions. Forms contained techniques, these techniques were practices through pushing hands exercises or sparring. A couple of generations form the source, everything becomes a lot more basic. Suddenly instead of performing a grip strip or a release from a hold, everything is a block for the same old stepping punch. The one which no one ever, ever uses.

One need only look at Gichin Funakoshi. There’s photos of him teaching kata-guruma, double leg takedowns, and a host of other throws, but after a while in Japan, the Okinawan school teacher was suddenly all about down blocks and stepping punches.  When the martial art becomes about the form of the fundamentals rather than the function, things get very weird when you start trying to twist logic to apply said techniques. Masatoshi Nakayama wrote a series on self defence with the great American martial arts explorer, Donn Draeger, and it was straight up garbage. This tradition has continued in the works of seemingly every traditional karateka who has been moved to write about self defence since.

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