Are traditional martial arts dying?
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Most martial arts were created at a specific period in time in ancient history to protect its practitioners from a civilian, non-consensual attack. Times have changed to a point where some martial arts training is no longer practical for today’s world. There are many martial artists who are unaware of the history of their arts and the context under which they were applied.
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As an example the traditional martial arts will always be practiced and applied differently to sport fighting arts or MMA, as they are radically different in what they are trying to achieve. I’ve always found it strange how practitioners in combat sports continue deriding traditional martial arts and its practices as useless and outdated.
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There will always be people in the world who think that they can solve problems with violence or that they can intimidate other people into doing what they want.
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A traditional martial art should teach you to protect yourself and others first, and to then fight if absolutely needed. It teaches that you don’t have to use violence to resolve a situation.
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Most martial artists don’t know how violence works. Most of what they teach isn’t backed up by facts or statistics. If you look at the statistics of violent crimes, you’ll see it’s vastly different from how martial artists present it. For example, most attacks involve deadly weapons and there’s a repeated use of them in combat.
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They don’t know how stress affects the body and mind. They don’t know what the signs of a potentially violent person are. There are those who don’t know what parts of the body are vulnerable to damage.
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Most martial artists don’t test their theories and training. They typically only spar with people of the same school or style, in very controlled settings. All they know is consensual one-on-one, toe-to-toe fighting…. I could go on and on.
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To test your art’s effectiveness, you need a systematic method. You need to accurately reflect attacks in the real world. You also need measurements, good observations, trial and error experiments, and so forth. Simply putting two stylists together on the mat isn’t going to tell you which is more effective…… it’s not simply about winning.
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Whether you want to call them traditional martial arts or fighting systems, they will always have a place and always be practiced.
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Traditional martial arts were effective in the past, with the right training and the right mindset, in my view, they are just as relevant now as they were when they were first developed.
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 Photo credit: Adam Carter Shuri Karate Dojo
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