In my opinion the term 'traditional martial arts' refers as much to the way of teaching, ie forms, 1 step sparring, kata drill etc, as the style itself.
For effective self defence or mma, this way of training is not adequate and some 'modern' martial arts provide better preparation for a real encounter. They usually have greater emhasis on full contact sparring and conditioning.(However most of the modern styles are not in fact new art, and are infact going back to the ways the traditional arts use to be trained in).
Most traditional arts today are not taught in the same way as how they were taught in the 70-80s. In those days you would only find tough guys in gyms who would knock each others heads off in training. Black belts ment something.
Then came the leisure centre training hall, instructors wanting to create their own little empires, grading a student who doesnot like rough training, teaching kids who's mothers didnot want beaten up in training and S***t instructor who had never been in a real fight, but had their own fighting theories anyway.
But don't be fooled that all modern arts will beat traditional Styles automatically. There are schools out there how teach how martial arts should be taught. There are also alot of poor modern style instructors popping up everywhere stating they are experts in the most popular style of the day, with years of experience!. Before you know it you will all be saying the modern styles are S***t compared to traditional style, as the same rot will happen again.
The only way to keep a style focussed is by competition. The more realistic the competition rules the better and purer the style will remain.
Martial arts is about fighting after all. |