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I think as MMA evolves it will actually grow closer to traditional martial arts in some aspects. You can see this in the past couple of years with fighters with predominantly traditional martial arts backgrounds starting to emerge as top contenders and champions.
What happened when mma fighting took hold was people saw how aggression and intent often beat technical ability. For a period watching the ufc meant watching polished brawling and then it came around as well with the majority of fighters studying the core disciplines for the past 15 years...Wrestling, Boxing, Muy Tai and BJJ but to a much more technically proficient degree. Then you have the Machida's and Anderson Silvas blurring the line even more.
I think the answer lies most in the people providing the training. The more dogmatic and arrogant the heads of the schools the less they will progress weather traditional MA or MMA.
There really are three categories though, it's not just mma vs tma. It's Traditional Martial Arts, Mixed Martial Arts and survival based combative where the goal is eliminating dangerous threats not wining. Mixed martial arts may have elements of survival fighting but you have to look at how it actually functions. At the end of the day if it is training to step into a cage or ring at your peak physical condition with an equally sized and similarly skilled opponent following a set of rules then they really are not necessarily getting any closer than TMA's to becoming the best combat art; someone who trains striking, clench and grappling as a means to get to cranking a neck or marring genitals or enough distance to draw their gun and shoot to stop is going to be a lot more likely to fulfill this goal.
At the end of the day all three will probably still exist in thirty years. People have different intentions for training and none of these specific niches is going to fulfill the other as good as the correct one will.
I personally think that a lot of people mis the boat entirely when discussing system vs system in the context of superior combative ability. At the end of the day if it's karate vs krav maga in a no rules fight, the guy who is able to deliver his intent first wins. It doesn't make sense to leave the person out of the equation in favor of the style or system. Like Bruce Lee repeated over and over....fighting is a form of self expression. whatever training methods leaves you best able to express yourself to deliver your intent is the superior one.
The system isn't the art, the person is the art.
What happened when mma fighting took hold was people saw how aggression and intent often beat technical ability. For a period watching the ufc meant watching polished brawling and then it came around as well with the majority of fighters studying the core disciplines for the past 15 years...Wrestling, Boxing, Muy Tai and BJJ but to a much more technically proficient degree. Then you have the Machida's and Anderson Silvas blurring the line even more.
I think the answer lies most in the people providing the training. The more dogmatic and arrogant the heads of the schools the less they will progress weather traditional MA or MMA.
There really are three categories though, it's not just mma vs tma. It's Traditional Martial Arts, Mixed Martial Arts and survival based combative where the goal is eliminating dangerous threats not wining. Mixed martial arts may have elements of survival fighting but you have to look at how it actually functions. At the end of the day if it is training to step into a cage or ring at your peak physical condition with an equally sized and similarly skilled opponent following a set of rules then they really are not necessarily getting any closer than TMA's to becoming the best combat art; someone who trains striking, clench and grappling as a means to get to cranking a neck or marring genitals or enough distance to draw their gun and shoot to stop is going to be a lot more likely to fulfill this goal.
At the end of the day all three will probably still exist in thirty years. People have different intentions for training and none of these specific niches is going to fulfill the other as good as the correct one will.
I personally think that a lot of people mis the boat entirely when discussing system vs system in the context of superior combative ability. At the end of the day if it's karate vs krav maga in a no rules fight, the guy who is able to deliver his intent first wins. It doesn't make sense to leave the person out of the equation in favor of the style or system. Like Bruce Lee repeated over and over....fighting is a form of self expression. whatever training methods leaves you best able to express yourself to deliver your intent is the superior one.
The system isn't the art, the person is the art.
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