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I thought MMA had killed all the traditional Martial Arts. I'm not aware of evidence that any martial art is effective outside of this list: Muay Thai, Wrestlin

I thought MMA had killed all the traditional Martial Arts. I'm not aware of evidence that any martial art is effective outside of this list: Muay Thai, Wrestling, Boxing, Jiu Jitsu, and Judo. If they are effective, why aren't there any good MMA fighters using them? The Kung Fu guy got brutally beat down at UFC 1. Now, you can argue that all the rules of MMA make some of the death-blow containing martial arts less effective. But there were few rules for the first dozen or so UFCs when Royce Gracie was choking everybody out with his Jiu Jitsu. Yes I am aware of Lyoto Machida. But one good fighter does not mean that karate is an effective style, and most people who watched it thought the Muay Thai fighter Mauricio Rua won that match. Wearing white suits, dancing around and making noises turns out not to be very good training when it comes down to the business of punching people in the face. I wouldn't be too intimidated facing some traditional "master" across the ring. And if you disagree with me, there are people who will pay you plenty of money to prove that your pet style works in front of a paying audience.

blasdel 17y ago
Not only is that completely unrelated to the article, you're also making a broad category error: karatekas ground themselves in the business of disciprine, not punching people in the face.
- jacoblyles 17y ago
  If it's not designed for punching people in the face, then it should drop the "martial" from its description and simply describe itself as an "art", like dancing.
  - elblanco 17y ago
    Learning to shoot a gun or a bow and arrow or ride a horse is also a martial art.
    - jacoblyles 17y ago
      Sure, those are martial arts. But karate pretends to be a martial art for unarmed combat. If it is not useful for unarmed combat, then it is not a martial art.
      - TeHCrAzY 17y ago
        Thats somewhat like saying that because an apple has no seeds, it is no longer an apple (as it is missing the primary purpose of an apple). An ineffective martial art is still a martial art.
        jacoblyles 17y ago
        Is a car that doesn't run an automobile, or a lawn ornament? What we call it is just syntax. The remaining usefulness will be the same.
  - coliveira 17y ago
    It is still martial, because it is related to fighting. Just because the fighting isn't accord to your rules, it doesn't make it non-martial. For example, fighting Kung-Fu style will always be martial art, even if there were "superior" forms of fighting.
plinkplonk 17y ago
Does this (the mma post) deserve so many downvotes? (-3 at the point of writing) I think it makes an interesting point. MMA fighters seem (I have limited knowledge here, I practiced Karate long ago and am seriously out of touch)) to focus on Muay Thai, some form of Wrestling and Boxing - . The "effectiveness" of various martial arts in the ring (or the street!) could be an interesting discussion (especially since we seem to be making a direct comparison to the martial arts to explain phenomena in programming). I am fairly sure such a question would be fundamentally unanswerable, but hey we discuss fundamentally unanswerable questions (like how to measure programmer productivity!) all the time here, and HN discussions are much richer than on other forums. "If they are effective, why aren't there any good MMA fighters using them? The Kung Fu guy got brutally beat down at UFC 1." This sounds like "If lisp is so cool where are all the killer programs written in it?" ;-)
- jacoblyles 17y ago
  It frustrates me that evidence is now available on the effectiveness various styles of unarmed combat but so many people seem to ignore it. There is a lot of placebo product sold in the martial arts industry that is designed to make students feel good about themselves while falsely claiming to be effective. The advent of MMA gave us hard evidence on which martial arts were real. If you can't grapple (wrestling, Jiu Jitsu, or Judo), then you have no business being in a fight with someone who can. The styles of striking that emphasized full-speed sparring and competition (western Boxing, Muay Thai) appear to be much more effective than traditional styles based on learning various forms and katas. The very rule changes that allowed MMA to stay legal in the US have corrupted its use as a pure laboratory of combat. However it is still the best legal experiment for the testing of martial arts. There is nothing stopping a Nth-degree blackbelt from stepping into the cage to prove the validity of his discipline, except for Thai boxers accustomed to kicking people in the face. So far, the challengers are few (again, except for Lyoto Machida).
  - plinkplonk 17y ago
    "The advent of MMA gave us hard evidence on which martial arts were real." I see your point, but playing the devil's advocate here, fighting in a ring under rules is still very different from a fight on a street (no "rounds", no referee, multiple opponents, no holds barred, weapons, uneven lighting and general chaos). Japanese martial arts may have been designed to deal with fighting armored swordsmen on a battlefield, for example. So the "framing" of MMA may just show the effectiveness of various styles within that frame. Still useful, but not the ultimate lab (as you point out).
btilly 17y ago
You're missing something basic. In any particular environment, some techniques will be more effective than others. Different martial arts are good for different situations. What works in MMA won't work in other environments, and vice versa. (Not to mention the martial arts that exist for other reasons like meditation and sport.) For example in the MMA environment, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is very effective with its emphasis on taking the fight to the ground, then choking people out. That works one on one. However in a bar fight with 2 guys, taking one to the ground leaves you totally vulnerable to the other. Bad idea. In that situation you'd be much better off with something like Krav Maga with its focus on quick disabling moves, defense and escape. However Krav Maga uses a lot of dangerous moves that are either not allowed in MMA, or won't work against an experienced opponent, so it will never succeed in MMA. Therefore nobody in MMA will use Krav Maga. Conversely no police department is going to be in a hurry to switch from training in Krav Maga to training in BJJ. The fights happen in different situations with different rules and different techniques are optimal.
- jacoblyles 17y ago
  No, I don't think I missed that point at all. Both the post that you are responding to and another one I wrote below indicate that the proliferation of rules in MMA designed to protect the safety of the fighters and to allow the sport to remain legal in the US have harmed its previous status as a perfect laboratory for unarmed combat, though it remains the best we have. Also, MMA is unarmed and one-on-one, which does not accurately depict all combat settings. However, old school MMA and Brazilian Vale Tudo had/have very few rules. It would be easy for a master of a useful art to make his name in such arenas. Even today, I see no obvious reason why martial arts such as Karate, Kung Fu, and Capoeira couldn't be applied under modern MMA rules except for the fact that they are not effective. It is hard for me to imagine that a truly superior unarmed martial art could exist without having some influence on MMA. No art relies so completely on groin strikes and eye gouging that its central lessons could not be adopted under the rules of the sport. Arts that claim to be too deadly or too dirty to use in competition (such as Krav Maga) may well be useful. However because they are too dangerous or dirty, they can't show us any evidence of their usefulness. The burden ought to be on the teachers who sell expensive gym memberships to make the case that their art is useful. But there appears to be an audience for martial arts that favors them in inverse proportion to the extent that they have demonstrated their usefulness in actual combat. It is as if some people value the mystique of martial arts above all and are afraid of mixing it up with a real opponent. They want the self-esteem and ceremony of wearing a colored belt and looking good in the mirror, but not the pain and sacrifice of getting actually punched in the face. Krav Maga suffers from the additional drawback of being a popular fad martial art, so the average quality of a gym varies very widely. Otherwise, I see nothing obviously wrong with the philosophy of the system. At least they put on padding and hit each other at full speed, which is essential to any martial art worth the name. There is certainly room for martial arts designed to be taught to little old ladies or used under unfair situations. However, the proof of their effectiveness will always be skanty, limited to hypothesized bar situations and anecdotes. Meanwhile, Jiu Jitsu fighters prove the effectiveness of their art by choking people unconscious in a cage fight. Muay Thai fighters prove it with the blood of their opponents. The strength of the evidence in favor of arts used in MMA is much higher than evidence for arts that claim to be useful outside of an MMA setting. On a somewhat related note - Alistair Overeem and his brother got into a scuffle with six security guards in a Dutch nightclub. They won.
Tichy 17y ago
What is MMA?
- plinkplonk 17y ago
  "What is MMA?" Mixed Martial Arts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_martial_arts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_martial_arts
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
elblanco 17y ago
Studying traditional Martial Arts is not only for fighting. In fact I'd go so far as to say it hasn't been for fighting since the invention of firearms - most martial arts focus on other aspects now. I think your focus is too limited. It's like saying "I thought modern hiphop had killed all traditional music styles," when encountering somebody practicing a violin. Probably in most cases, people attend their local Karate or Tae Kwon Do school as a form of exercise that's less boring than doing 30 minutes on a treadmill. In many of those cases that might be the only exercise they get. Lots of people study styles because they like how they look, or they prefer a meditative aspect of them, or they enjoy the storied history of the style or really want to learn how to handle a spear or something. Learning to beat an opponent in 1 on 1 combat is merely a single aspect of the Martial Arts. Interestingly, this is something that's even showing up in other modern non-MMA martial arts that are pretty well tested in combat. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jailhouse_rock_(fighting_style) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jailhouse_rock_(fighting_style) I actually think MMA styles would be more appealing to the public if they learned and promoted the non-combat aspects of martial training (discipline, fitness, respect your parents, etc.). Right now, outside of MMA circles, those styles are largely viewed similarly to boxing -- rough sports for rough people. Not everybody wants to be a rough person. Some people just want to escape their life for 45 minutes, put on a costume and kick their feet a bit.
- jacoblyles 17y ago
  >"Not everybody wants to be a rough person. Some people just want to escape their life for 45 minutes, put on a costume and kick their feet a bit." If that is the case, then here among bright people we can acknowledge the reality behind it and ignore the BS. There is fantasy and escapism in traditional white-pajama martial arts marketed towards people that want to look tough but don't want to risk actually getting hurt.
  - elblanco 17y ago
    I have to agree with you though, that there are far too many people that try and look tough, who walk around saying "I have a black belt in Karate" or some such, and couldn't make it through a Tuesday night bar fight. The reality behind the "other arts" is that they were, at one time, highly effective in a particular milieu for fighting and are no longer in that milieu. Nobody should go and learn Kendo or Kumdo or some other fencing thinking that they are now a badass and all they need is to find a 20-30" long stick to defend themselves. But Kendo dominated sword fighting in East Asia for hundreds of years. The same as nobody should step into a strip mall Tae Kwon Do school and expect to learn unarmed combat useful for fending off pirates and concluding dynastic wars. I've heard several times that "well this is a real hard core school, like in Korea/Japan/China/Israel/Brazil, they really hit you here!" B.S. If somebody isn't trying to kill you, you aren't in a fight. The same hold true for MMA styles, it's just that their "OMG I'm fighting for my life here" is quite a bit fresher in the stylistic memory. That's not to say that the old styles are out of date, just that they haven't seen real action in a very long time and don't do too well against newer styles in recent action. But, as the styles are catching up again, there are notable exceptions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyoto_Machida http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyoto_Machida http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshihiro_Akiyama http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshihiro_Akiyama http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Barry_(martial_artist) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Barry_(martial_artist)
rdouble 17y ago
+1 for retro usenet nostalgia. This was just like reading rec.martial-arts in 1993. Waiting in anticipation for the first kibo thread.
- jacoblyles 17y ago
  Sure. Anytime someone wants to bring up the awesomeness of his magic ninja 18th-degree blackbelt sensei who is mysteriously afraid to enter into widely available and legal real combat competitions, I'm there.
- Sukotto 17y ago
  Yeah totally. Except there's a lot less ad hominem attacks here :-) Still, I miss reading Chas and Badger and those guys. I used to (mostly) lurk there a lot in the 90's and early naughties.

blasdel 17y ago

Not only is that completely unrelated to the article, you're also making a broad category error: karatekas ground themselves in the business of disciprine, not punching people in the face.

jacoblyles 17y ago
If it's not designed for punching people in the face, then it should drop the "martial" from its description and simply describe itself as an "art", like dancing.
- elblanco 17y ago
  Learning to shoot a gun or a bow and arrow or ride a horse is also a martial art.
  - jacoblyles 17y ago
    Sure, those are martial arts. But karate pretends to be a martial art for unarmed combat. If it is not useful for unarmed combat, then it is not a martial art.
    - TeHCrAzY 17y ago
      Thats somewhat like saying that because an apple has no seeds, it is no longer an apple (as it is missing the primary purpose of an apple). An ineffective martial art is still a martial art.
      - jacoblyles 17y ago
        Is a car that doesn't run an automobile, or a lawn ornament? What we call it is just syntax. The remaining usefulness will be the same.
- coliveira 17y ago
  It is still martial, because it is related to fighting. Just because the fighting isn't accord to your rules, it doesn't make it non-martial. For example, fighting Kung-Fu style will always be martial art, even if there were "superior" forms of fighting.

plinkplonk 17y ago

Does this (the mma post) deserve so many downvotes? (-3 at the point of writing) I think it makes an interesting point. MMA fighters seem (I have limited knowledge here, I practiced Karate long ago and am seriously out of touch)) to focus on Muay Thai, some form of Wrestling and Boxing - . The "effectiveness" of various martial arts in the ring (or the street!) could be an interesting discussion (especially since we seem to be making a direct comparison to the martial arts to explain phenomena in programming). I am fairly sure such a question would be fundamentally unanswerable, but hey we discuss fundamentally unanswerable questions (like how to measure programmer productivity!) all the time here, and HN discussions are much richer than on other forums. "If they are effective, why aren't there any good MMA fighters using them? The Kung Fu guy got brutally beat down at UFC 1." This sounds like "If lisp is so cool where are all the killer programs written in it?" ;-)

jacoblyles 17y ago
It frustrates me that evidence is now available on the effectiveness various styles of unarmed combat but so many people seem to ignore it. There is a lot of placebo product sold in the martial arts industry that is designed to make students feel good about themselves while falsely claiming to be effective. The advent of MMA gave us hard evidence on which martial arts were real. If you can't grapple (wrestling, Jiu Jitsu, or Judo), then you have no business being in a fight with someone who can. The styles of striking that emphasized full-speed sparring and competition (western Boxing, Muay Thai) appear to be much more effective than traditional styles based on learning various forms and katas. The very rule changes that allowed MMA to stay legal in the US have corrupted its use as a pure laboratory of combat. However it is still the best legal experiment for the testing of martial arts. There is nothing stopping a Nth-degree blackbelt from stepping into the cage to prove the validity of his discipline, except for Thai boxers accustomed to kicking people in the face. So far, the challengers are few (again, except for Lyoto Machida).
- plinkplonk 17y ago
  "The advent of MMA gave us hard evidence on which martial arts were real." I see your point, but playing the devil's advocate here, fighting in a ring under rules is still very different from a fight on a street (no "rounds", no referee, multiple opponents, no holds barred, weapons, uneven lighting and general chaos). Japanese martial arts may have been designed to deal with fighting armored swordsmen on a battlefield, for example. So the "framing" of MMA may just show the effectiveness of various styles within that frame. Still useful, but not the ultimate lab (as you point out).

btilly 17y ago

You're missing something basic. In any particular environment, some techniques will be more effective than others. Different martial arts are good for different situations. What works in MMA won't work in other environments, and vice versa. (Not to mention the martial arts that exist for other reasons like meditation and sport.) For example in the MMA environment, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is very effective with its emphasis on taking the fight to the ground, then choking people out. That works one on one. However in a bar fight with 2 guys, taking one to the ground leaves you totally vulnerable to the other. Bad idea. In that situation you'd be much better off with something like Krav Maga with its focus on quick disabling moves, defense and escape. However Krav Maga uses a lot of dangerous moves that are either not allowed in MMA, or won't work against an experienced opponent, so it will never succeed in MMA. Therefore nobody in MMA will use Krav Maga. Conversely no police department is going to be in a hurry to switch from training in Krav Maga to training in BJJ. The fights happen in different situations with different rules and different techniques are optimal.

jacoblyles 17y ago
No, I don't think I missed that point at all. Both the post that you are responding to and another one I wrote below indicate that the proliferation of rules in MMA designed to protect the safety of the fighters and to allow the sport to remain legal in the US have harmed its previous status as a perfect laboratory for unarmed combat, though it remains the best we have. Also, MMA is unarmed and one-on-one, which does not accurately depict all combat settings. However, old school MMA and Brazilian Vale Tudo had/have very few rules. It would be easy for a master of a useful art to make his name in such arenas. Even today, I see no obvious reason why martial arts such as Karate, Kung Fu, and Capoeira couldn't be applied under modern MMA rules except for the fact that they are not effective. It is hard for me to imagine that a truly superior unarmed martial art could exist without having some influence on MMA. No art relies so completely on groin strikes and eye gouging that its central lessons could not be adopted under the rules of the sport. Arts that claim to be too deadly or too dirty to use in competition (such as Krav Maga) may well be useful. However because they are too dangerous or dirty, they can't show us any evidence of their usefulness. The burden ought to be on the teachers who sell expensive gym memberships to make the case that their art is useful. But there appears to be an audience for martial arts that favors them in inverse proportion to the extent that they have demonstrated their usefulness in actual combat. It is as if some people value the mystique of martial arts above all and are afraid of mixing it up with a real opponent. They want the self-esteem and ceremony of wearing a colored belt and looking good in the mirror, but not the pain and sacrifice of getting actually punched in the face. Krav Maga suffers from the additional drawback of being a popular fad martial art, so the average quality of a gym varies very widely. Otherwise, I see nothing obviously wrong with the philosophy of the system. At least they put on padding and hit each other at full speed, which is essential to any martial art worth the name. There is certainly room for martial arts designed to be taught to little old ladies or used under unfair situations. However, the proof of their effectiveness will always be skanty, limited to hypothesized bar situations and anecdotes. Meanwhile, Jiu Jitsu fighters prove the effectiveness of their art by choking people unconscious in a cage fight. Muay Thai fighters prove it with the blood of their opponents. The strength of the evidence in favor of arts used in MMA is much higher than evidence for arts that claim to be useful outside of an MMA setting. On a somewhat related note - Alistair Overeem and his brother got into a scuffle with six security guards in a Dutch nightclub. They won.

Tichy 17y ago

What is MMA?

plinkplonk 17y ago
"What is MMA?" Mixed Martial Arts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_martial_arts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_martial_arts
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

elblanco 17y ago

Studying traditional Martial Arts is not only for fighting. In fact I'd go so far as to say it hasn't been for fighting since the invention of firearms - most martial arts focus on other aspects now. I think your focus is too limited. It's like saying "I thought modern hiphop had killed all traditional music styles," when encountering somebody practicing a violin. Probably in most cases, people attend their local Karate or Tae Kwon Do school as a form of exercise that's less boring than doing 30 minutes on a treadmill. In many of those cases that might be the only exercise they get. Lots of people study styles because they like how they look, or they prefer a meditative aspect of them, or they enjoy the storied history of the style or really want to learn how to handle a spear or something. Learning to beat an opponent in 1 on 1 combat is merely a single aspect of the Martial Arts. Interestingly, this is something that's even showing up in other modern non-MMA martial arts that are pretty well tested in combat. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jailhouse_rock_(fighting_style) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jailhouse_rock_(fighting_style) I actually think MMA styles would be more appealing to the public if they learned and promoted the non-combat aspects of martial training (discipline, fitness, respect your parents, etc.). Right now, outside of MMA circles, those styles are largely viewed similarly to boxing -- rough sports for rough people. Not everybody wants to be a rough person. Some people just want to escape their life for 45 minutes, put on a costume and kick their feet a bit.

jacoblyles 17y ago
>"Not everybody wants to be a rough person. Some people just want to escape their life for 45 minutes, put on a costume and kick their feet a bit." If that is the case, then here among bright people we can acknowledge the reality behind it and ignore the BS. There is fantasy and escapism in traditional white-pajama martial arts marketed towards people that want to look tough but don't want to risk actually getting hurt.
- elblanco 17y ago
  I have to agree with you though, that there are far too many people that try and look tough, who walk around saying "I have a black belt in Karate" or some such, and couldn't make it through a Tuesday night bar fight. The reality behind the "other arts" is that they were, at one time, highly effective in a particular milieu for fighting and are no longer in that milieu. Nobody should go and learn Kendo or Kumdo or some other fencing thinking that they are now a badass and all they need is to find a 20-30" long stick to defend themselves. But Kendo dominated sword fighting in East Asia for hundreds of years. The same as nobody should step into a strip mall Tae Kwon Do school and expect to learn unarmed combat useful for fending off pirates and concluding dynastic wars. I've heard several times that "well this is a real hard core school, like in Korea/Japan/China/Israel/Brazil, they really hit you here!" B.S. If somebody isn't trying to kill you, you aren't in a fight. The same hold true for MMA styles, it's just that their "OMG I'm fighting for my life here" is quite a bit fresher in the stylistic memory. That's not to say that the old styles are out of date, just that they haven't seen real action in a very long time and don't do too well against newer styles in recent action. But, as the styles are catching up again, there are notable exceptions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyoto_Machida http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyoto_Machida http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshihiro_Akiyama http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshihiro_Akiyama http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Barry_(martial_artist) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Barry_(martial_artist)

rdouble 17y ago

+1 for retro usenet nostalgia. This was just like reading rec.martial-arts in 1993. Waiting in anticipation for the first kibo thread.

jacoblyles 17y ago
Sure. Anytime someone wants to bring up the awesomeness of his magic ninja 18th-degree blackbelt sensei who is mysteriously afraid to enter into widely available and legal real combat competitions, I'm there.
Sukotto 17y ago
Yeah totally. Except there's a lot less ad hominem attacks here :-) Still, I miss reading Chas and Badger and those guys. I used to (mostly) lurk there a lot in the 90's and early naughties.