Originally Posted by gregimotis

I guess I tweak them all into myself eventually, but I like to feel like I 'know' an art. By that I mean, I want to understand why it's done this way and what sort of philosophy goes into it.

Aikido is a good example of a style with a philosophy and a character. Western boxing also has a character and Muay Thai's personality is different than boxing. It's hard for me to define these personalities in words, I suppose it's a combination of history and culture and technique and application.

As I've gained this insight over the years, I've started training whatever style I'm training now as a pure style. I try not to blend it in my mind with other things until after I think I'm seeing the 'mind' of the style if you will. I'm sure this is not a unique approach, but I came up with it myself and I find it more satisfiying than the 'MMA' approach. I'd decribe that as studing everything as a hybrid and immediatly discarding what won't work outside the original styles ruleset



Do others who have studied a variety of arts relate to this at all?