MMA vs Tai Chi — Myriad Misadventures

Before I start I just want to state that I won't be arguing for or against either traditional martial arts (TMA) or sport martial arts (SMA). I like and respect both. The point of the post is just to point out something I've noticed.

What Martial Artists do on the Internet

A non-scientific study with numbers I made up

Stop me if you've heard this one before. An MMA fighter and a karate master walk into a bar. You've heard it? Then you know where this is going. If you've read some of my old posts, then you know that I like martial arts. I watched Power Rangers as a kid once and that was it. Lately I've been buckling down a bit. I've been trying to get to class more and I've been reading a lot on the internet. This has made something very obvious; martial artists all seem to be at each other's throats all the time. Maybe I always knew this but recently I've been noticing it more. But maybe I should back up.

How it All Started

Last year I stumbled upon an article about a Chinese MMA fighter, Xu Xiaodong, who caused something of an uproar by defeating a tai chi master, Wei Lei, and insulting traditional Chinese martial arts. Many people in China were offended and a whole kerfuffle ensued. Last month he popped up again, when he fought and defeated a wing chun practitioner, which ignited a conversation among my classmates. Since I read about that first fight, I've seen a lot of people arguing about which martial art is best, why his or her martial art is better than another, why TMA aren't any good, or why SMA are missing some key element of martial arts, just to give you an idea. While I understand the desire to know what's best, it doesn't seem quite so cut and dry to me.

The Arguments

When people debate martial arts, a few things seem to crop up often. The main points are usually as follows.

SMA are bad because they don't incorporate the spirituality, self-betterment, self-reflection, or whatever of TMA

TMA are bad and lack any practical use because they don't actually teach you how to fight properly.

The traditional martial artists often take offense at the perceived dearth of spirituality, for lack of a better word, in sport martial arts. In their opinion martial arts are about more than self-defense. They should focus on your well being as well, bettering the practitioner as a person. They believe SMA ignore this aspect to focus exclusively on fighting. Talking about some martial artists from Thailand, Chatri Sityodtong, quoted in the New York Times, sums up their opinion when he says "Real martial arts is about respect, humility and discipline" (New York Times, March 27, 2018). Of course SMA practitioners debate this. The traditional martial artists also sometimes argue that their arts are too violent. They aren't for 'fighting' they're for 'killing.' This belief stems from that idea that TMA were, supposedly, created to fight*. Assuming this to be true, we also have to assume that, in the best interest of self-defense, they were designed to, if not actually kill, then seriously injure the opponent. Think breaking joints, maybe maiming or death. This would be necessary to protect yourself from an attacker. Contrast this to SMA, which evolved as, well, sport. They are an entertainment medium (a violent one). Most people don't want to watch people actually kill each other, plus it would be illegal. As such it focuses on pummeling your opponent until they lose consciousness or submitting them. The argument continues to say that since the techniques of TMA are too violent there is no way for TMA to be compared with SMA, because the TMA fighter can't actually do anything in the fight without hurting the SMA fighter. His or her techniques aren't allowed and the SMA fighter then gets to walk all over him or her. The truthfulness of this opinion of TMA is another discussion**. What is important is that it's the argument for why TMA seems to regularly lose competitions to SMA. The sport martial artists counter that the problem is TMA don't actually teach any practical fighting. It focuses on form competition and looking cool in place of any actual substance. It proposes to be some sort of ancient system of self-defense and fighting with its codified systems of rank and its forms, but when push comes to shove nothing they teach can really be used. Therefore in a fight between the two SMA will always win.

I think that both of these are wrong and miss the actual problem. They miss the fundamental flaw of competition between SMA and TMA. I don't think the problem is that TMA are somehow too violent. I also don't the think problem is that SMA teach actual skills while TMA teach a bunch of nonsense. The real problem is rules. Read that again. Rules. Think of it this way; if a basketball player and a soccer player play a game of soccer, the soccer player will probably win, because they are playing his game. Likewise, if they play basketball then the basketball player will win because now they're playing his game. Any martial arts competition is in essence a kind of sport, because a true no-holds-barred fight would be far too violent. Since all sports have rules and these competitions between arts are sports, we then must look to their rules, and here lies the real problem. There are many kinds of SMA (boxing, MMA) and many TMAs have a sport component (like karate). However these all operate under different sets of rules. For example when Conor McGregor fought Floyd Mayweather Jr. in a boxing match last year most people wrote it off.

Why? McGregor is an MMA fighter, which operates under one set of rules. Mayweather is a boxer, which has another, distinct, set of rules. They were boxing. Like the soccer/basketball example earlier, Mayweather would probably win because he's a boxer. And he did. If they fought under MMA rules McGregor would almost certainly win because they would be playing his game. This creates an obvious problem. If you have a muay thai fighter and a karateka, how do you compare them? If they fight under karate rules the karateka will have an advantage and vice versa if they fight under muay thai rules. This gets even murkier if you're looking at a martial art without a strong sport component or a practitioner that hasn't focused on it. For example, how do you go about pitting an MMA fighter and a tai chi fighter against each other? Will you do some kind of pushing hands drill or ground fighting? Or something else altogether? The MMA/tai chi fight I mentioned earlier supposedly had fewer rules than a traditional MMA fight, but if the tai chi practitioner is used to pushing hands in competition how does that translate to this fight? Or if the fight does not allow ground fighting and the MMA fighter is principally a grappler, where does that leave him? Some rules must be set and they are likely to favor one competitor or the other. Of course this all assumes that the tai chi fighter in the example above, or the TMA fighter in a theoretical example, can actually fight. This is another topic I will talk more about in a future post**, so for now let's assume he or she can indeed fight. It would be easy to dismiss the pushing hands of the tai chi fighter as impractical but we have to remember that it is one of the ways tai chi fighters compete. A self defense is not a competition so if the TMA fighter has not learned his self-defenses in the context of a competition (because of violence or something else) he or she is put at an immediate disadvantage because the rules don't favor him. On the flip side of the coin we can see that SMA can also be disadvantaged. If a tae kwon do (TKD) fighter and a boxer fight, either the fight allows punches but not kicks, giving the boxer the advantage; kicks but not punches, giving the TKD fighter the advantage or it allows both, which, depending on the other rules, could disadvantage either person. This disadvantage is not born from one being better than the other, but from training a specific thing for competition.

My Take

The main problem with comparing martial arts in the context of competition is that these martial arts, like all sports (remember, competition), operate under a set of rules and the sets of rules for each are different. If you try to make the rules as broad as possible, then someone who practices something like MMA will have an advantage because they practice under a similar set of rules. If you try to make the rules narrower, than the person who practices a sport whose competition adheres to that rule set may then get an advantage. The only way to truly see which martial art is 'best' would be to completely remove the sport aspect and allow the fighters to maim or kill each other, which simply isn't feasible. First, it would be a waste of talent, to have people dying or suffering injuries that ended their martial arts career. Second, it would probably be illegal. The early days of the UFC may have been closest to this, but it has since changed and implemented more rules. Even accounting for both of these though, this kind of fight would be open to the criticism that one martial art is not better than the other, but one martial artist is better than the other. It's not that BJJ is better than karate, but that Royce Gracie was better than Gerard Gordeau. This criticism could certainly be valid; it's impossible to tell which is true. It's possible that SMA teach you how to actually fight while TMA teach nonsense and it's also possible that TMA don't translate to competition because they are as violent as they sometimes claim to be. But how can we find out? Comparisons between the martial arts will always fail to hold weight because there is really no good way to compare them. I believe that all martial artists should consider this. If we spent our time improving ourselves, and giving each other advice on how to cover our weaknesses and get better, we would all be much better off.

*This is the obvious myth of martial arts and I can't confirm how true it may be. I have read and heard, though not from any scholarly source, that many old martial arts were designed to be weapon based though, because why would you fight without a weapon, and the open hand aspect was strictly for training.

**All this being said I do believe that there are some valid criticisms of traditional martial arts. I will talk about whether or not I believe TMA to be useless of still beneficial in a later post.

I've been thinking over this post for a while and I'd love to know what you think. Please leave some opinions and constructive comments but please don't bash any martial arts or martial artists.

Thanks for reading and I'll see you on my next trip. Don't forget to click the links below and follow to stay up to date on what I'm doing and where I am and to see all the pictures and videos from the trips.