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PHOTO BY RICK HUSTEAD |
By today's definition, the mixed martial arts combine sport versions of American boxing and kickboxing, Muay Thai, jujutsu and wrestling into a pseudosystem that's commonly known as MMA. To many people these days, MMA is martial arts. I teach seminars around the world, and I can tell you that it's popular everywhere. In fact, you'd be hardpressed to find someone who doesn't know what it is. Not everyone likes to watch it, but an amazing number of people have seen it. Its growth from industry anomaly to mainstream entertainment in a few years has been phenomenal.
Contrary to popular belief, mixing martial arts is nothing new. What we call MMA is just the most recent and most publicized version of what the arts have been about since human beings first organized their survival skills. Granted, ancient fighting methods weren't as systematized as they are today; I doubt there was ever a formal "cave man do. "Anything resembling what we now call the martial arts were probably collections of practical knowledge and skills geared for surviving conflict with bipeds instead of quadrupeds.
As disorganized as they may have been, such skills were by their very nature real ityoriented, hybridized and constantly evolving to fit the user's needs and surroundings. If your hunting skills didn't work, you starved to death. If you lost a fight, you probably also lost your life. That meant that any ancient war arts that weren't practical were useless.
What would the competitive martial arts be like today if fighters knew that only one person could exit the ring alive? How would that change their preparations for battle? Would they be more concerned with function or form? The answer seems obvious: The threat of pain, suffering and even death is a great motivator. As long as something worked, it wouldn't matter who taught it to you or where it originated.
In truth, the martial arts have always been mixed in the sense that people tend to change things to make them better, more practical or more suitable to their beliefs. If that wasn't true, there wouldn't be so many styles and systems. People see the martial arts differentlythat's human nature. The founders had plenty of outside influences, which means they "borrowed" ideas, concepts and techniques from other sources.
The real differences between styles and systems lie in the three Ts: time, technology and training. The time in which something is developed has a lot to do with how it turns out. Social influences and beliefs play a big part, as does the level of technology available. It's never been easier to gather information on any subject. In the past, people were much more spread out, and knowledge was static and hard to access. But in today's information age, the media allow us to learn more in a day than our grandparents could have learned in a month.
The final T is training. Training implies three things: knowledge, repetition and experience. The greater your knowledge on a given subject, the more likely you are to consolidate that toward advancement or improvement. The same is true of practice and experience. But training doesn't guarantee diversity. The great American folklorist Will Rogers once said, "Everyone is ignorant, only on different subjects."
Diversity of knowledge leads to greater levels of practical understanding and is the birthplace of innovation. This is something we have in abundance today that the ancient martial arts masters did not. As I developed Dynamic Combat, I discovered that the more diverse knowledge, repetition and experience I acquired, the more I could see connections between things that I might never have noticed.
If you accept the premise that all martial arts have always been "mixed," it should hold true for what you're studying now. Even if you're a traditionalist, your art had to be created by someone who had countless influencesand there's nothing wrong with that.
OK, with everyone practicing his own form of mixed martial arts, several questions arise: What type of MMA are you studying? Is it traditional? Is it a sport? Is it reality-based? Although we're all studying the mixed martial arts in some way, we're doing it for different reasons.
To some people, MMA is exactly how the mainstream perceives ita combination of popular fighting arts adapted and designed for sport. To others, MMA is a system that's adopted a series of "traditional" techniques, philosophies and doctrines that generally resist alterationat least until someone has a good reason to change them. To people like me, Walt Lysak Jr., Kelly Worden and Lamar Davis, MMA is geared toward applications outside the ring where the prize is your life or the life of another person. Regardless, we all practice MMA, so welcome to the club.
About the author. Richard Ryan is the founder of
the Dynamic Combat Method and co-founder of Integrated Combative
Arts Training. For more information, visit http://www.blackbeltmag.com and click on Community, then Black Belt Authors.
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