I started martial arts in a very cliché way. In junior high, I was hit by a perfect storm. In about a month’s time, I watched Ong Bak, The Chinese Connection, Liddell vs Sobral, and a K-1 Grand Prix rerun on T.V. I was hooked. I watched everything I could get my hands on and studied Bruce Lee’s and Tony Jaa’s fight scenes endlessly. I made my own punching bag in my parent’s basement, got a second-hand weight set, and began to beg my parents to let me join a club. I knew before I had even started training that I would be a professional martial artist.
My hometown was small, so the only options were Tae Kwon Do or Karate and my Dad registered me in Karate. The classes were very “traditional”, the typical techniques thrown in the air and kata, with almost no sparring. I was obsessed, but even when I was just starting, I questioned some of the approaches. The blocking techniques seemed convoluted and the punches (like the step-through punch) with the hand loaded on the hip seemed counterintuitive. I would spar with my friends outside of class and always fail to do anything that looked like what I had spent hours training. Besides my own experience, the fighting that I watched in the UFC and K-1 looked nothing like the training I was doing. For a long time, I chalked this up to either me not having good enough technique or the people I watched having bad technique. I was hypnotized by “traditional” martial arts.
After four years of training, two very important things happened to me. My instructor attended a basic Brazilian Jiu Jitsu seminar with Rener Gracie and brought those lessons back to us. We only practiced BJJ once a week and the techniques were very limited since the seminar had only been a weekend. Just like in Karate, we also never sparred. The second thing that happened was I got in my first street fight. Did I use a front snap kick to the face? Or a sidekick to the stomach? Or the infamous step-through punch? No, I hit him with a right-handed haymaker, tackled him, got mount, put my hooks in, and finished from there. After four years of Karate training, when faced with my first real altercation I threw an overhand right and used the little BJJ knowledge I had acquired over the past four months.
This confirmed in my head that the skepticism I had held wasn’t misplaced but appropriate. After moving to attend university, I became fully disillusioned with my past training and Karate. I took up Muay Thai, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and collegiate wrestling in the city. I sparred every chance I could and competed in each of the sports. During this time, I suffered a series of concussions in training that ended my very short competitive career, something that for the time was very common and very overlooked in MMA gyms. With some encouragement from my family, I turned my attention towards coaching. For my Phys. Ed degree practicum, I coached and managed the gym I was training at and after university stayed on as part of the team. I met my now business partner at the gym and cornered him in his professional MMA fights. We ended up breaking away from that gym and opened our own. I had done it, I was a professional martial artist but, just like I questioned Karate’s methods, my concussions made me questions MMA’s.
Through all of this I never truly quit thinking about Karate and traditional martial arts. How had styles that were seemingly so ineffective stuck around so long? I couldn’t believe that the people back then were so incapable that these styles worked. After all, they engaged in hand-to-hand combat much more often than we do today. I also couldn’t believe that the ineffectiveness came from a lack of dedication since anything that took that long to be effective wouldn’t serve most people any purpose. The more I delved into this question the less disillusioned I became with the actual traditional styles and the more I resented the term “traditional martial arts”. That term, as most people use it, refers to styles that became realized in only the 20th century. Karate, before the Japanese built the rigid systems we now know, was an all-encompassing art. They sparred, they grappled, and they fought. Judo, until Kano wanted it to be in the Olympics, looked almost exactly like modern-day BJJ. Muay Thai, often not listed as a traditional art, has been practiced for centuries so why is it not included?
Boxing and wrestling are older than most other arts and yet never are included either. Eventually, I found research on Pankration, the ancient Olympic sport dating to 648 BC, and everything I found on it painted a picture that looked just like modern MMA minus the cage. So why the changes? Why did we move from modern-looking combat sports to the idea that rigid structure, form, and kata were the most important things? Some changes were made by governments to stifle populations, some were made to create a product that was more marketable, and some just happened through a loss in translation through time. Despite this deviation, traditional martial arts had some things that old-school MMA lacked. They were easily accessible to all people, and they promoted a virtuous lifestyle outside of the gym. Both traditional martial arts and MMA, as the public viewed them, seemed to not be a whole picture.
So, where is all this going? All my experiences in traditional martial arts and modern MMA have led me to believe that they are one and the same. I bet that if we could time travel and speak to the old masters they would be fascinated with MMA and would adopt many of the techniques and training methods. I truly think that we have a very skewed look at what our arts should look like due to geopolitical moves in the early 20th century, and I believe MMA is helping us get back on track now that the culture of the sport is changing. Today’s gyms are not like the ones from 20 years ago. They are full of dedicated and disciplined students. Some are there to fight professionally, some are there for fun and fitness, but all of them are there to explore effective techniques from many styles, and to embrace a holistic martial arts lifestyle. MMA was always where traditional martial arts were going, it just took us a little bit of time to get there.
-Aaron Kapiczowski
