There seems to be some confusion regarding mma and making stuff up as we go along.
mma as it stands now Is a result of an art adapting to a competition. Rather than a competition deriving from an art.
so the art itself is a fluid concept. There is a constant testing innovating and re testing of ideas. The contest is the crucible in which the art is created.
this fluidity means that new terms and new ideas are created constantly..
yes we make stuff up as we go along. Different gyms will call the same techniques different things. Or have entirely new techniques.
so in doing mma or talking to a mmaer you may have to deal with terms like the abracadabra kick or the vertical round house.
my point still is here so long as you can do it. And so long as you can make yourself understood. The names are less important.
There's is no confusion. MMA is what it says it is
MIXED MARTIAL ARTS. Note the word
ARTS, it is not
AN art adapting to anything, it is techniques from many styles being used together in on competition. The arts are ones we all know and love therefore there aren't 'new made up' techniques just the adapting of existing techniques for a specific competition.
It is becoming a style with it's amalgamating of techniques, as people train MMA as opposed to single styles. Those of us who were early into MMA didn't have the luxury of being able to train MMA as an entity, we had trained single styles and had to meld them together ourselves.
No, we don't make stuff up as we go along, what we do is find techniques we like for our size, weight, build etc and adapt them to suit us, we discard those techniques we find don't work for us BUT they remain techniques that you will find in martial arts so they will retain the names they had then. An 'abracadabra' kick is a front kick, it will always be a front kick that someone has
slightly adapted to make it work better for him, now most people have a kick they think is 'magic' for them, it doesn't mean we all now call that kick 'the magic kick'!
There is nothing new under the sun, the times we've had someone come in and claim they have found a 'new' technique only for them to show us and we say yeah, it's been done before, it may differ slightly but it's not new. there are only so many ways you can actually kcik punch and even grapple. yes people do things a bit different from each other but the techniques are the same whoever is doing it and rarely to be honest do people call things by very different names.
Al this talk of 'crucibles' and 'testing, innovating, creating' etc is publicity speak, what you get from commentators hyping up a fight night. I can tell you now that the techniques we use now would have been used in Pankration way back in Ancient Greece!
Do we make things up as we go along...no. What we do is watch, learn, adapt, see what works, see what doesn't in techniques that come from all and any arts that have been around a long time.
I think you miss the point about what is exciting about MMA. it's not the training, it's the competition against yourself. We train the techniques we know work for us, we have them honed sharp and ready to use, we know our game plan and then we fight, the challenge of getting your opponent where you want them, avoiding them getting you where they want you, thinking tactically while striking, thinking moves ahead when grappling, see if you can take that hit and carry on and more. That's the excitement, the draw and lure of MMA. We used martial arts techniques that people have been using for years, we mix them up and we fight. That's enough, that's excitement, that's life if you love competition and challenging yourself.
It's nonsense to say we make up kicks, we make up strikes because I can tell you for a start in any given fight I can tell you what techniques are used and most likely what style or art they are used in, any competent martial artist can. It does matter what things are called because it allows people to understand what you are talking about....'a vertical roundhouse kick' tells people nothing other than ther is no such thing.
Oh and the 'showtime kick'?.....it's a mawashigeri, a roundhouse kick, that he comes off the cage and spins afterwards doesn't make it anything different. It's not made up at all, the spin at the end? it can be used to go into another technique, a lot of styles can do that.
