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Any list of traditional stylists in MMA is incomplete without mentioning the san shou artist Cung Le. Akiyama doesn't belong there because Judo is an ancestor o

Any list of traditional stylists in MMA is incomplete without mentioning the san shou artist Cung Le. Akiyama doesn't belong there because Judo is an ancestor of Jiu Jitsu and squarely in the MMA mainstream. Pat Barry isn't that good, although his weakness stems primarily from having the grappling game of a quadraplegic - his striking is okay. The only fighter at the top levels that uses a traditional style as his main art is, again, the ever-notable karateka Lyoto Machida. But at first his point-fighting karate style meant that he seldom ever finished his opponent, having a high rate of fights go to decision. Over the years he has managed to adapt it to a more heterodox and more dangerous style. The outcome of the immediate rematch against Mauricio "Shogun" Rua will have a lot to say about whether or not karate can hold its own in a sport dominated by Thai boxers. While Machida won a close and disputed decision in the first fight, he will likely be the odds-makers' underdog going into the second. In some sense, you are fighting for your life in MMA. The ref stops the fight and declares a TKO when one combatant is no longer intelligently defending himself, i.e. when his life is effectively in his opponent's hands. Suffering real damage and having the mercy of the referee as the only obstacle to departing for the next realm motivates fighters to stick to what is effective.

elblanco 17y ago
I'm confused as to what you consider an MMA style (honest question)? Judo, while not terribly new (turn of the 20th century), is a sportified Jiu-Jitsu and is firmly rooted in traditional Japanese styles which is about as traditional as you can get (not Brazilian). Judo was a style for a hundred years before the acronym "MMA" was a twinkle in the Gracie family's eye. I would never categorize Japanese Jiu-Jitsu variants in with modern MMA styles like (BJJ+Muay Thai (which I categorize differently than either pure style on it's own) or whatever the Lion's Den teaches or Vale Tudo). There is something intrinsically different about the modern MMA styles from the old styles (even though they have a heck in a lot in common). Good call on Cung Le. I didn't count him since I've watched him mostly in pure San Shou bouts before he went MMA. I think the salient point is that in the modern sense, people go to practice a traditional style, but it's all over-specialized and taken out of context. The context being that traditionally, something like "Karate" was practiced as part of a holistic training curriculum and not in the singular style sort of over-specialized way people do it nowadays (but much more like how modern MMA trains). A person of the warrior class in whatever society learned a very wide variety of fighting methods, from barehanded fighting, to grappling, to fighting with a pike, a bow and arrow, a sword, from a horse, from on foot, in formation, one-on-one etc. they learned tactics, strategy, command, etc. These people learned to fight from the time they could stand on two feet and that's pretty much all they did all day, every day. You find this same kind of pattern throughout history and across the planet. But doing something like learning to sword fight today is regarded with mild amusement by most people as not practical and not a serious path to self-defense, yet sword fighting is about as tested and time-honored as you can get. Fighting with swords makes the modern MMA styles look like a 4:00 school yard fight at an elementary school. Musashi for example killed a few dozen people in one-on-one duels, forget some pitiful 15-1 win-loss record in pro MMA bouts or whatever. The Spartans are the stuff of legend, they'd eat somebody like Lyoto Machida for breakfast and the entire Lion's Den for a mid-day snack before lunching on the Gracie Clan and going hungry for dinner unless they happened to march into a Vale Tudo match on their way to the bathroom. The second point is that almost no MMA stylist is a purist, hence the "mixed". A typical mix is some kind of grappling (BJJ or some such), some kind of striking (typically Muay-Thai) and a bit of a few other things as icing. The point being is that modern MMA is doing nothing new that the traditional "styles" we all denigrate as being unpractical in the modern world have been doing for a few thousand years. I'd be willing to wager that any 17th century member of Japan's warrior class could give a hell of a bare knuckle fight to Brock Lesnar. And that guy most definitely practiced something like Karate. But he also supplemented his striking with a study of some kind of grappling. Basically the same formula we see today, and have been seeing for time immemorial.
- realitygrill 17y ago
  Personally, kendo practitioners taught me how ridiculously hard fighting unarmed against a weapon is - no matter how super talented you are. The teachers that tell you to run away in a real fight have got it correct. On that note, a JHU student killed a burglar with (I believe) a katana a couple months ago: http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2009-09-16/news/0909150076_1_samurai-sword-samurai-weapon-pontolillo http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2009-09-16/news/0909150076_...

elblanco 17y ago

I'm confused as to what you consider an MMA style (honest question)? Judo, while not terribly new (turn of the 20th century), is a sportified Jiu-Jitsu and is firmly rooted in traditional Japanese styles which is about as traditional as you can get (not Brazilian). Judo was a style for a hundred years before the acronym "MMA" was a twinkle in the Gracie family's eye. I would never categorize Japanese Jiu-Jitsu variants in with modern MMA styles like (BJJ+Muay Thai (which I categorize differently than either pure style on it's own) or whatever the Lion's Den teaches or Vale Tudo). There is something intrinsically different about the modern MMA styles from the old styles (even though they have a heck in a lot in common). Good call on Cung Le. I didn't count him since I've watched him mostly in pure San Shou bouts before he went MMA. I think the salient point is that in the modern sense, people go to practice a traditional style, but it's all over-specialized and taken out of context. The context being that traditionally, something like "Karate" was practiced as part of a holistic training curriculum and not in the singular style sort of over-specialized way people do it nowadays (but much more like how modern MMA trains). A person of the warrior class in whatever society learned a very wide variety of fighting methods, from barehanded fighting, to grappling, to fighting with a pike, a bow and arrow, a sword, from a horse, from on foot, in formation, one-on-one etc. they learned tactics, strategy, command, etc. These people learned to fight from the time they could stand on two feet and that's pretty much all they did all day, every day. You find this same kind of pattern throughout history and across the planet. But doing something like learning to sword fight today is regarded with mild amusement by most people as not practical and not a serious path to self-defense, yet sword fighting is about as tested and time-honored as you can get. Fighting with swords makes the modern MMA styles look like a 4:00 school yard fight at an elementary school. Musashi for example killed a few dozen people in one-on-one duels, forget some pitiful 15-1 win-loss record in pro MMA bouts or whatever. The Spartans are the stuff of legend, they'd eat somebody like Lyoto Machida for breakfast and the entire Lion's Den for a mid-day snack before lunching on the Gracie Clan and going hungry for dinner unless they happened to march into a Vale Tudo match on their way to the bathroom. The second point is that almost no MMA stylist is a purist, hence the "mixed". A typical mix is some kind of grappling (BJJ or some such), some kind of striking (typically Muay-Thai) and a bit of a few other things as icing. The point being is that modern MMA is doing nothing new that the traditional "styles" we all denigrate as being unpractical in the modern world have been doing for a few thousand years. I'd be willing to wager that any 17th century member of Japan's warrior class could give a hell of a bare knuckle fight to Brock Lesnar. And that guy most definitely practiced something like Karate. But he also supplemented his striking with a study of some kind of grappling. Basically the same formula we see today, and have been seeing for time immemorial.

realitygrill 17y ago
Personally, kendo practitioners taught me how ridiculously hard fighting unarmed against a weapon is - no matter how super talented you are. The teachers that tell you to run away in a real fight have got it correct. On that note, a JHU student killed a burglar with (I believe) a katana a couple months ago: http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2009-09-16/news/0909150076_1_samurai-sword-samurai-weapon-pontolillo http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2009-09-16/news/0909150076_...