Traditional Martial Arts

There's a scene in the 1980s movie Uncommon Valor where Randall "Tex" Cobb is fighting somebody (i think it's Patrick Swayze) and he says something like "don't try that Oriental martial bullshit on me". Then he proceeds to beat up his opponent using a couple of kicks to the body and head (Cobb was once a professional kickboxer). Those kicks look a lot like the kicks that are taught in traditional Asian martial arts.

I think of that scene whenever i hear arguments about the value of traditional martial arts. It's fairly clear to me that the term "traditional" doesn't mean what people think it means. For some people on Internet forums, traditional is just a term used in contrast to MMA styles. So Brazilian jiu-jitsu, even though it has its origins in the warrior tradition of the samurai is part of modern martial arts, while, say, Shaolin kung fu is a traditional art because the the gymnastic movements of wu shu, which was derived from kung fu in modern China, don't figure into cage fighting. I've even seen a comment on a video of an escrima demonstration stating that it looked more like real fighting than those Asian martial arts.

Martial arts have always been used to teach people to fight other human beings. Sparring and other forms of training against live individuals are traditional aspects of martial arts. In many cases the training has been applied in real combat situations, enough so that its practitioners have learned what works and doesn't work. As others have have noted more forcefully than i could, any place that doesn't provide training against live opponents is more of a fitness club than a martial arts school.

On the other hand, arguments over the relative effectiveness of various styles are still pretty ridiculous even in the UFC era. If i were to meet Randy Couture's evil twin in a dark alley, would i rather know karate, muy thai, or jiu jitsu? No, frankly i'd rather have a gun. All styles of human combat, whether hand-to-hand or stick-fighting or sword-fighting, are essentially pre-industrial relics. You've got to appreciate them for the art, and for the discipline, and for the transformation they can effect on a human being. The term kung fu means roughly "achievement through effort". In that spirit, one can admire a great martial artist just as one can admire a virtuoso musician or a skillful artisan, but that might still leave them unequal to a thug with a gun.

Arguments about, and research into, the most practical forms of combat are a part of the martial arts. Elements of the military continue to train in techniques of hand-to-hand combat, so it's certainly regarded as valuable even in modern warfare. But that doesn't mean that I won't get irritated when some half-trained doofus without the conditioning to last a 2-minute round disrespects traditional martial arts because he or she learned how to do an arm-bar on a cooperative training partner.