The Chinese have an interesting relationship with martial arts. In their minds, they pretty much came up with the entire concept – though, of course, being Chinese, as far as they are concerned, they came up with EVERYTHING of any importance, ever. (For those who haven’t interacted much with the Chinese – they are objectively the biggest racists and cultural chauvinists that you will ever meet. I like them, up to a point, but they come from a low-trust, high-density society which is thoroughly alien to Western eyes.)

In China, wushu – what you white-skinned red-nosed devils (their terms for you, not mine) call kung-fu – is considered a national pastime, art form, and point of pride.

But, the Chinese have had to stomach some hard lessons about the impractical nature of traditional martial arts like wing chun and kung fu when pitted against modern combat-sport disciplines like muay thai and MMA, and honestly those lessons haven’t gone down too easily for them.

That is why Chinese traditional martial artists keep challenging, and getting challenged by, MMA practitioners – and keep losing horribly:

The MMA fighter in those two videos was the same guy. If you know something about fighting, you can see that he needs a bit of polish on his boxing techniques. His kicks are good, but he telegraphs his punches and it’s very obvious when he’s winding up to throw a big shot. His stance is a bit weird – more of a low “bladed stance” for boxing than the more upright muay thai and kickboxing stances that you typically get among stand-up strikers.

So it’s fairly obvious that his striking is decent but not amazing – certainly not up to the standards of someone like Buakaw Banchamek, who is known for his incredible conditioning, speed, power, and explosiveness, but is not actually considered a particularly technical fighter by his Thai colleagues and countrymen. (Seriously – despite being the most famous nak muay in the world, Buakaw Banchamek has never actually won a major stadium title in Thailand. And he fights foreigners exclusively.)

Never mind comparing the MMA fighter in those videos to seriously accomplished strikers like Saenchai, Anderson Silva, or Israel Adesanye. He’s nowhere near that level.

And he is STILL absolutely destroying traditional martial artists who have plainly never fought under real combat conditions, and who have no idea what it is like to take serious impact.

It is an unfortunate truism that in order to understand how much of a beating you can take, you have to take repeated beatings. That is how you can gauge your level of skill and readiness in anything – whether it be combat sports or life itself.

I remember being kicked in the face about three times in a row by my martial arts Grandmaster back when I was a yellow belt and still had no idea how to spar properly. He didn’t even kick me very hard. He just sort of lazily looped his left foot up over my right glove and his foot cranked my head around but good.

I felt like I’d been hit by a truck. And, again, from his point of view, it was light contact.

(He just grinned, laughed, and said, “You owe me ice cream!”. And then he did it two more times. The school NEVER ran out of ice cream after that…)

The two traditional martial artists in those two videos plainly have never even taken that level of contact. Otherwise they would know not to be fooled by leg kicks designed to make them drop their guards – which is exactly what they do. If it were me in that ring with them, I’d have done the same thing as the MMA guy – only with my right leg since I am right-handed and stand orthodox – and then, after landing a few hard leg kicks, which are devastating in their own right, I’d simply loop my leg up and hit the other guy in the face.

It is not very difficult to kick people in the face – just takes a bit of practice.

It is difficult to learn how to defend such strikes effectively. You have to spar a lot, and you have to abandon a lot of the traditional stances and forms and kata that you are taught in order to learn how to anticipate such things.

Here’s the thing about “traditional” martial arts: they train you to fight under very specific circumstances in very specific ways against very specific attacks. Every form or technique that you learn is against an anticipated type of attack. Every counter and block that you learn is made under a known set of rules and conditions.

But real fighting is not specific. Attacks are not easily anticipated. The rules are not necessarily going to be known, never mind favourable.

If you are fighting in a sanctioned MMA or combat-sport event, then yes, the rules are made clear to you. But the potential for grievous bodily harm is very real. Not for nothing has Toe Rogan referred to MMA as high-level problem-solving under severe pressure with devastating consequences for getting it wrong.

And that helps explain a big part of the reason why these “traditional” martial arts fail when pitted against more modern combat forms.

Here’s another part of the reason, explained rather well in a video about why it is that traditional Chinese martial artists keep failing to win against skilled MMA fighters in cage matches:

As the video points out, a key element missing from the Chinese traditional martial arts mindset is adaptation.

The Chinese masters think, very arrogantly, that their traditional styles don’t need to be updated or changed. They think that they don’t need to pit themselves against other styles of fighting to grow and change as martial artists. They become complacent and static, and as a result, they get exposed awfully quickly.

In the real world, however, fighting styles have to change and adapt to move with the times. You will see this with almost any modern art used as a basis for MMA these days.

Take muay thai, for example. These days, you cannot become an MMA fighter without having at least some background in muay thai, because of the devastating striking power that muay thai techniques give you. But there was a time when muay thai itself was becoming staid and complacent. The rules became ossified and focused heavily on awarding the most points for big showy kicks. MT competition rules in Thailand gave maximum points to trips, throws, and kicks to the body or the head.

The highest points you could get in MT were from kicking your opponent directly in the neck – and if you’ve never experienced what is like, imagine someone taking a golf club and hitting you with it so hard that the shaft wraps around your neck, like in an old cartoon.

Over time, nak muay and coaches alike came to believe that MT fighters simply could not be beaten on the basis of their extremely powerful kicks, clinch work, and elbow and knee strikes.

But they forgot about how useful real boxing skills are in fighting.

It took an invasion of foreigners – farangs, as the Thais call them – with strong backgrounds in Dutch kickboxing, to change that mindset. The Dutch fighters, like Ramon Dekkers and Rob Kaman, had much bigger and more muscular upper bodies than the Thais did, and used that to their advantage by focusing on boxing rather than kicking. And when they started knocking out Thai fighters with their hands, the Thais had to sit up and take notice – and they were forced to realise that their emphasis on mostly kicking and knees was not helpful against fighters who could neutralise those strikes.

So the more traditional styles of muay thai had to change and adapt. And they did. There was serious cross-pollination in the 1990s between muay thai and kickboxing. The nak muay began training more in boxing techniques and started learning how to knock people out with their hands and focus on their footwork, rather than simply throwing those extremely powerful baseball-bat kicks that muay thai is infamous for. And the kickboxers began to abandon their sideways stances – because these would expose them to extremely painful and brutal leg kicks – and learned how to operate within the clinch, which traditional savate and Western-style kickboxing simply didn’t bother with.

Or, take Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Now, BJJ guys would love to have you believe that their style beats everything. It really doesn’t. As with all martial arts, BJJ evolved out of earlier art forms – jiu-jitsu itself was developed in Japan centuries ago, and eventually splintered into a number of different schools, one of which took in a student named Jigoro Kano. It was Kano-sama who eventually created the discipline that we know of today as judo – and he in turn fostered a number of derivative disciplines, one of which became known as Kodokan judo.

Practitioners of Kodokan judo made their way over to Brazil, and one of the students of this particular art form was, of course, the legendary Helio Gracie, whose name is absolutely inseparable from the origins of BJJ. It was from Helio and his brother Carlos that the Gracie style of BJJ developed and took shape.

At the time that BJJ was being developed, the Gracie family realised that they needed to test their art form against the most popular martial arts of the time – and in Brazil, that meant getting into street fights with capoeiristas, who practiced the highly acrobatic and over-the-top hybrid of dancing and fighting that Brazilians call capoeira.

The Gracies won virtually every encounter that they had with the jumping twirling spin-kickers, simply by taking them straight to the ground and beating the snot out of them. And that is how BJJ began to take the world by storm – and when it came time to setup the first real globally televised and advertised MMA competitions, BJJ’s effectiveness against single-discipline fighters who focused only on the stand-up game became immediately self-evident.

However, BJJ is NOT the be-all and end-all of martial arts, and no amount of bloviating from BJJ practitioners can change that fact.

One of the most famous early contests between BJJ and a rival style came in the form of a match-up between Masahiko Kimura – the man for whom the infamous kimura arm-lock technique is named – and Helio Gracie. Because judo is a much more aggressive grappling-focused art that makes heavy use of sweeps and throws to get you to the ground, while BJJ starts on the ground and doesn’t concentrate quite so much on how you get there in the first place, the smaller and lighter Helio Gracie was thrown repeatedly by the larger and more aggressive Kimura.

The match eventually ended with Kimura snapping two of Gracie’s bones, because Helio Gracie refused to tap out against the kimura arm-lock.

In fact, two of the best fighting styles for nullifying BJJ techniques on the ground are judo and Graeco-Roman wrestling. It is not an accident that these days, every top MMA fighter has to study wrestling as a base art alongside a striking style such as muay thai or kickboxing. The days when BJJ fighters ruled supreme over the MMA world are basically long gone. It used to be the case that BJJ provided most of the skill-set needed on the ground to defeat strikers – but the strikers learned and adapted and figured out that you don’t need 15 different ways to submit someone through an armbar, you just need to know a few armbar defences and a relatively limited submission techniques.

The point of all of this is that different arts learned and adapted and cross-pollinated. That is why MMA is so exciting to watch, and so interesting. While you rarely get a straightforward style match-up anymore, you do get to see emphases on different skill sets. And when one combination of styles beats another, that combination is then studied and explored and people adapt to it.

Arts that do not adapt, are not realistic. They are useless in real fights. And that is why “traditional” martial arts, especially Chinese and Japanese arts, are considered obsolete these days.

This is not merely true of East Asian martial arts, by the way. In south India there exists a martial art called kalaripayattu, which is an art based around sword-fighting. It should not be surprising that very few people practice it these days, because swords are not exactly common weapons on the streets these days, and shields are even less so. That art has not adapted to modern weaponry and combat situations, and as such, it is dying out.

For those of you who are looking to study a martial art, the rule of thumb that I can give you is to look at what trained killers study – which is to say, what MMA champions study. You will find a small number of arts that keep coming up:

Muay thai, BJJ, combat sambo, wrestling, judo, and kickboxing.

There is no one “magic” style that defeats everything else. Such a thing simply doesn’t exist. The best that you can hope for is a style that allows you to defend and attack as close to simultaneously as possible.

The broader point of studying martial arts is that, just as arts themselves have to adapt to the times, you will have to adapt to the art that you study, and the people that you study with. And this is very much to the good. The benefits of studying martial arts are wonderful and many-fold.

But, ultimately, if you end up studying an art that insists on archaic methods and forms and refuses to move with the times… well, you aren’t training to defend yourself. You’re training to wind up beaten to a pulp.