For those that train MMA, what attracted you to it and moved you away from TCMA
(if indeed it did move you away)
This could be a short lived thread seeing as most of the guys that probably would have replied have been banned :) but hey ho
What attracted you to MMA training and if you (like I did) moved towards MMA and away from TCMA why did you do this? What made you move towards an MMA way of training and made you give up your TCMA ways, and if you still train you r TCMA again what made you stay and combine the two?
For me I got bored and annoyed with all the b*ll**** in the TCMA world: the back stabbing, the looking down on other arts and ways of training, the endless weapons and form sets which seemed to have little to do with actual fighting etc
Most of the training I did seemed to be put there to make people feel like they were training to fight without actually doing the hard work, the forms, the conditioning of the arms and body, the hand conditioning, the ging training all was good BUT it seemed to be separate and distinct from the fighting aspect and way to : no one looked like they did fighting when they were doing forms, no body used all the techniques they learned, when they sparred they still fell back on the basics and looked nothing like the style was meant to look, people who did the hey gung stuff still got dropped when they actually sparred from body shots, and even the sticky hands stuff seemed half hearted, we stopped before the natural conclusion of the movements i.e. clinch and throwing
Another major factor was we always seemed to be training to beat a similar style rather than what we were most likely to face: we worked on how to defend and overcome guys who attacked like we did, who fought like we did, rather than how to beat guys we were likely to face: boxers, thai guys, judo guys etc
I also disliked the styles inability to admit it actually did not cover some aspects: we tried to find takedowns in our forms that simply were not there and defences for takedowns that simply would not work rather than admit the short comings and go and learn grappling, we trained against bad hooks and upper cuts that were not thrown properly or set up correctly because people would not admit they did not actually know this stuff
But the number one problem I had with it was the general belief that fighting SHOULD look like how we train and should conform to OUR systems believes about fighting, rather than we should train to look like and react to actually what is out there.
So I was attracted to MMA (and grappling in particular) because it makes no pretences about what fighting should look like, it simply accepts what it is and trains to overcome what is out there: it grows and learns all the time and you know where you stand in terms of how good you are at stand up clinch and ground fighting there is no guess work about how good you might be or how you might do if facing this or that opponent, you learn from direct experience. All the training is linked directly to how you perform on the mats or in the ring. Most of the class time is spent with a partner for the most part strength and conditioning is built into your practise so you are alwys growing and learning and getting in better condition.
Now it could be that I simply learned cr*p TCMA, (I tend to think not as my master was well known in the UK) and I trained at more than one place, and actually one of the schools I trained at was becoming like an MMA gym in that they were experimenting in grappling (wrestling and judo) and doing much more sparring, but when I left there was still a massive dichotomy between the number of techniques people know and the number of sets they learned, and what they can actually pull off in sparring, and this was a problem for me.
So for you that now train MMA what made you move away from the TCMA crowd?