Laying the "Style Debate" to its final rest

For as long as I have been around martial arts of any kind, the same tired, useless "this" is better than "that" argument has raged. Whether it be a style, substyle, teacher, or training method, the whole thing can be summed up in the same two attitudes:



"My toys are cooler than yours".

"My dad can beat up your dad".

I don't know about you but I outgrew both of those attitudes by about the age of nine.

But it continues, and I begin to wonder if maybe it isn't just posturing or hubris that fuels it.



I wonder if the debate continues because the question itself is misunderstood. I say this because once I sat down and really, honestly thought about this, I came to the conclusion that I may be viewing this question in a different way than most of those who participate in such debates do, so clarifying the question from my point of view is what I will attempt to do here on the unlikely chance it will stop at least some small part of this foolishness.

On the argument of striking versus grappling, and the concept of "Styles" at all:

Most people who have had no formal training appear to grapple on natural instinct as a direct *result* of no formal training--apart from making/using weapons, humans' earliest form of fighting was to wrestle, before we even knew how to *fight*, we wrestled. Certainly I'm sure our distant predecessors used limbs to strike with, but striking in a scienced manner came a bit later because , from a purely "Man vs. Wild" perspective, human bodies , compared to other natural creatures, are not optimized to be used as weapons--even the strongest among our species don't have muscles and strength the way a gorilla or a yeti has muscles and strength, we don't have claws, we don't have jaws and teeth in the same way a bear, tiger, or crocodile has jaws and teeth. We don't have horns, we don't have natural armor the way a turtle, alligator or armadillo has--just a ribcage over our organs and a skull over our brain and good luck to you.

Our bodies aren't naturally optimized to be used as striking weapons, so it takes more training to GET them turned into striking weapons than to wrestle. That doesn't automatically render such training useless.

The thing you have to remember when you enter a discussion of "this" is better than "that" with regards to striking arts/takedown arts/groundwork/whatever, is this:

Striking and grappling were never *intended* to be taught seperately. And back in the way-back-when, they weren't. The seperation took place largely in the late 19th/early 20th centuries because of several factors: The disappearance of the old ways of war in an age when gunpowder was rising in dominance, a desire to keep the old traditions and "fighting spirit" alive anyway, and certain teachers , due to their own preference/temperament/physical makeup, choosing to emphasize certain techniques and dropping others, and *BOOM* thus were born "styles". Now as far as I can see it, that's all there is to "Styles", Okay?

Which then brings us to the next two sides typically argued from:



"All styles are equally valid"

"No style is perfect".

.Okay.

As to the first: If every style were equally valid, then any fully functioning human should be able to take it and make it work equally well--after all, humans are universally designed the same way, with the same nervous, muscular and skeletal systems, with the only difference being whether that human possesses either male or female reproductive organs which do not impair or impede the basic movement systems, right?



Not so fast.



Remember the reason "styles" exist to begin with that I went into above: People's morphology left them suited to crtiain movements more than others--Does this person have greater height? longer limbs? They may gravitate toward striking/kicking to capitalize on the reach afforded them by their morphology. How are this other person's eyes? not so good, or their corrective lenses were knocked off? Grappling/trapping range it's most likely to be, then--once you have hold of them you almost don't need to see them anyway. And so on, and so forth till we're sick of it.

We may have Universal human design, but we have Variable human proportions.

And when variable human proportions enter the picture, NOW is where all the "questions" start arising: when a technique is designed to work on a person's body a certain way, now these variable human proportions throw a "bell curve" of sorts into that technique's effectiveness level: One person's head might snap back a little, another's, a lot, a third not at all. One person's joint, once locked, may break at a certain pressure, another's at greater pressure, and that third one may even just muscle out of it.

The concept of the bell curve relating to varying human proportions is not original with me-I first heard it from Tom Sotis of AMOK, and credit him with introducing me to it. However this second concept grew out of a talk I had the other night in class with my current teacher, Mike Williams of the Martial Arts Research Institute, and over the last few days I've thought about it and can now hopefully put it forth in a way that makes sense.

This second concept brings us around to the second half of the argument I gave above: the assertation that "No style is perfect".


After all, if a fighting style were "perfect", everyone would gravitate to it, and there would be no need for any of the others, right?

Not so fast.

The first and foremost misconception that fuels this is to miscall any martial art a "fighting style".

Why?

Because they are not "fighting" styles, they are "training" styles. They were created with certain intended design parameters, invariably set by the style's originator, based on his/her training needs, to develop specific attributes to *aid* his/her fighting style in light of his/her gifts/limitations.

Without going into pages' worth of examples, anyone who has been involved with martial arts for any length of time will hear the name of any given style and a specific combat range( weapons, striking, throwing, trapping, groundwork, etc) associated with that style will immediately come to mind as a direct result of this specialization.

The problem with the "No arts are perfect" statement arises from these two things:

1) Within their intended design parameters, they are ALL perfect

2) For whatever reason( usually either an overdeveloped sense of "style loyalty", an ignorance of other styles/ranges and how they work, or lack of access to same) We seem to LOVE taking a style *out* of its intended design parameters and then expecting it to function as if we had not.

And *this* is where so many martial artists start to have so much trouble, and why so many styles get so much bad press.

Let's take as our example most all of the Asian stand up striking arts as they have come to be practiced in the US--ever since the Karate Kid movies we've all heard far more than our share of mocking "Daniel-San" jokes, there is no earthly way it is possible to count the sheer number of Bruce Lee noises the Great Unwashed have made at Kung Fu students, and I heard one person once refer to TaeKwonDo as "TaeKwonDon't". He thought that was the very height of wit. No matter.

The point is that over the last 20 years these and other styles have had their "real world" effectiveness cynically called into question at a level which does not seem to me to have existed in the past, after reading martial arts publications from before that time.

Based on my personal experiences the main culprits I can think of are these:

*An explosion of martial arts related movies around this time

*which then led to the public getting a flawed perception of those arts

*Which then led to many(not all) teachers changing their programs around to "give the people what they want" in order to remain financially viable

*which occurred at the same time as Karate/Kickboxing becoming organized into a sport format and TaeKwonDo being included in the Olympic Games

*Which then shifted the emphasis in most(not all) schools of those types switching to a teaching mode based upon those competitions

*All of which occurred at the same time training methods had to be softened A) because of the influx of younger children being accepted into classes and B) because if you trained those arts as they were meant to be trained you were in a country where eventually some soft, ego-bruised, thin skinned prick would sue you blind.

*Thus, when mixed martial arts competitions gained popularity again, most of them were not prepared for what they received because the hard contact without safety gear, and the inclusion of grappling techniques which were part of those styles ' original, intended design parameters, were absent, but the practitioners carried on as though no changes had been made.

It isn't that the original arts don't work, but all of these events conspired to take them further and further out of their intended design parameters.

If left within their intended design parameters, *all* the arts are perfect--It's US that keep screwing them up!

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