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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
by 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.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- btilly 17y agoI agree that quality is an issue in martial arts, and some are undoubtably ineffective. (Aikido anyone?) Also many that are not totally ineffective were not exactly designed for maximum effectiveness. For instance Capoeira. It is designed for a combination of fighting and dancing in friendly competition to music. Is it a surprise that it isn't the most effective way of hurting people? Anyways the design goals of Krav Maga seem to me to be to make something that is easy to teach quickly to groups of people that is reasonably effective in nasty situations those groups are likely to encounter. Groups like military and police. The goal isn't to make great fighters. It is to help a police recruit with only 120 hours of training survive the guy who pulls a knife while resisting arrest. As long as it does that, it has succeeded. And right now most police departments and multiple military forces are convinced that it is good for that. In terms of teaching MMA central ideas, I'm not sure how it could possibly do so. Since Krag Maga is derivative of virtually everything else, it doesn't really have many original ideas. Its focus on dirty strikes is not allowed in MMA. And professional fighters don't particularly need their lessons carefully broken down for ease of learning. On your related note, I'm not sure why you thought it relevant. To make my point I talked about the MMA style that I thought would be least useful in the hypothetical bar fight. That doesn't mean that all MMA styles are going to be ineffective against multiple opponents. For instance kickboxing offers a lot of ways to take someone out of a fight fast without leaving a big opening for his friend to attack you. Therefore it is unsurprising that a pair of top kickboxers took out a much larger number of opponents in a fight.
- jacoblyles 17y agoFor what it's worth, I do believe that Krav Maga and similar styles are potentially the most useful of any martial arts not used in MMA, for the reason that they fulfill a different niche (fighting in non-fair situations), as you state. It is very hard to compare such styles objectively, since you aren't able to practice crippling/disabling blows or fighting with weapons at full speeds unless you are willing to rapidly lose training partners. Thus we are left with endorsements, but that is the nature of the beast. Perhaps some military or police force could teach different groups different methods and measure who performs the best, but even then there would be too many variables to isolate. However, for arts that claim to teach one-on-one unarmed combat, including all the ninja/master/sensei arts, there remains an effective proving ground and their absence from it is telling.