Why Do Traditionalist Despise MMA?

Why do traditional martial artists continue to despise the lessons of mixed martial arts? I am amazed that twenty years after Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) 1, some traditional martial arts still feel that they have nothing to learn from MMA.

One of the Taekwondo tournaments, where I used to referee, has a submission grappling division.  When I had a break, I would try to watch the matches.  Invariably, a few of the Karate or TKD black belts would come over and ask if I was interested in the grappling.  When I said, “Yes.”  I would hear “That’s all garbage.  We didn’t fight in cages in Washington, D.C.  Those guys are just thugs and tough man rejects.”

First, although a few of the competitors may have done MMA, it was a grappling tournament not an MMA fight.  Second, most martial artists have never been in a fight, so their belief in what works and what doesn’t is purely theoretical.  It is like so many of the business experts that write books about management but have never even managed a Kinko’s.

I am not advocating that all martial arts schools develop a mixed martial arts curriculum.  Mixed martial arts is a competition and success is dependent on employing the proper strategy within the context of the competition.  I am advocating that traditional martial artists can learn from mixed martial arts .

We have seen time and again that having your hands at your waist will end up getting you knocked out, whether it is in competition or on the street.  Yet, in almost all Karate and Taekwondo schools today, we perform walking or line drills with the hand at the level of the belt.  Why?

UFC 1 also showed that you could be extremely well trained in one art but if you were put in a position, where you could not use those skills successfully, you would lose.  If you are teaching a “one strike, one kill” art and the practitioner is taken to the ground before they can land that strike, they are in deep trouble.  Royce Gracie beat everyone because he could fight on the ground and they either couldn’t or weren’t on his level.  The competitors that lost to him had no problem adopting ground fighting into their curriculum.

If you think this post is hyperbole, I encourage you to go into a forum, where martial artists normally comment.  You can find them on YouTube, LinkedIn, web forums.  Check out the comments. After reading them, you will be reminded of the 1908 convention of buggy whip manufacturers, where the speaker went to the platform and said, “This whole automobile thing.  It isn’t going to last.”

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