A Good Answer???

[TenTigers]

why don't TCMA guys compete in MMA type events?
Before anyone answers, let us agree that we are looking for mature, intelligent,thought provoking answers.
1) NOT-"Because we can't rip, tear,eye gouge,joint break..Bull$hit.
2) NOT "Because TCMA is outdated,or uses techniques that never worked...Bull$hit
3) NOT "Chi blasting, Dim-Mak, whatever crap you wanna call it-Bull$hit
4) NOT an excuse to promote yourself, your school, your friend's school,gym,basement, on yet another thread
5) AND NOT a back and forth adolescent argument that seems to happen on every thread lately.

I will speak for myself, I have had some students that were going in that direction, but went to school, or had a falling out-one did go on and become a pro kickboxer, though. For me, perhaps it's a numbers thing? I have a small school. Tiger Shullman has a handful of guys who regularly compete in K1,and Sabaki etc. But with over thirty schools, and 200 students in each, out of 6,000 students, I think ANYONE would be able to find five hardcore guys.
Perhaps it is the David Carradine type rep Gung-Fu has gotten that attracts people that are not looking for this type of training. Perhaps the guys who want it, are heading straight towards the mma, bjj, and boxing gyms. Not sure.
I have a few who are showing promise, time will tell.

[bodhitree]

People train martial arts for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the TMA communities attract people whose reasons do not include fighting competatively or to fight competatively in an MMA venue?

[TenTigers]

could be. We developed a bad rep ever since David Carradine, and the over commercialization of TCMA-especially McDojos claiming to be Gung-Fu when the actually did bad kempo, and all the guys in the seventies who made up crap they took from Shaw Bros movies, threw out their karate gis,put on black uniforms, changed their shuto blocks to tiger claws. ok fine. Maybe our rep has been so tarnished that we are only attracting a certain clientele.
A strong possibility. I can live with that. This leaves it up to the TCMA to develop a "marketing plan" to bring back their rep.
Still begs the question-what about the TCMA guys who were always doing it real, and the guys who are now?

[Oso]

a well trained and conditioned TCMA guy should be able to compete in any striking only venue with any size glove...they of course have to train for the ruleset and equipment that may be called for. Training/sparring in school w/ sanda/sanshou rules is a start. Being open for anyone to walk in to your school for sparring (with waivers and a good attitude from them) will help them get experience against unknown opponents. So will going out to other schools to spar with them.

They should also do well in a venue with throwing as well.

But, they'll have to cross train in a grappling art to learn how to move on the ground against a grappler unless you have the skill base to teach them yourself.

[Iron_Eagle_76]

Personally, I could careless about defending the honor of CMA. Why? That would be like an attorney saying they are going to defend every criminal in the world. How would they know who was innocent/guilty. CMA encompasses so many styles, ideas, and differences that it is way too general. It seems to me like CMA people want acceptance, they want sport fighters and MMA people to say, "We respect him/her because he/she does Kung Fu", rather than "We respect him/her because he/she is a good fighter". Back to the point, CMA contains styles that are good and styles that suck. Many other traditional arts have these as well. So why does every Kung Fu guy have to defend the honor of all things Chinese when it comes to fighting, who gives a s**t. Defend your style, your way of fighting, and your ideas of fighting and leave the other crap out of it.

[sanjuro_ronin]

Its a tough question to ask, perhaps it should be, "why do YOU as a TCMA not compete".

I bet the ansswers will be quite varied, but most wil be that it hold very little interest, I mean even in sport combat gyms like boxing and MT that are focused on competition, not everyone competes, so in most TCMA that are NOT focused on that, I would thing the number would be very much higher.

Competition was great when I competed, but I never truly focused on it, outside training fro an actual match, an most of the time I competed to test myself, not so much to get ranked and such.
Outside the testing thing it never meant anything to me, hence victory or defeat was largely irrelevant.

Unless competition is an active goal for a school or an individual, you won't see much focus on that.

[cjurakpt]

I think one of the reasons is that, at least in terms of so-called "practical application", the "problem" that TCMA is trying to solve, vis-a-vis it's combat strategy (and this is, necessarilly, a gross generalization), is predicated on opponents using TCMA s well; meaning that, if the guy from the school down the street, or the provence next door is focusing on bridging and fighting under a certain set of cultural norms, then you are goingt to focus on countering that within the same context; one thing to remember is that until only the last few hundred years, travel for the vast majority of people was far more restrictted than it is today, and means of communnicaing very also limited and indirect (no such thing as YOuTube!); therefore, new ideas spread slowly and in fewer numbers, and so seeing the entire elephant was not typically an option - you got the ears, the feet, mybe the nose, and you worked with that; these days, the ability to compare efficacy on a world-wide stage has shown that bridging "works" pretty much when two people agree to stay in that range, which for cultural reasons might work, but for combat strategy makes no sense, especially when moving from striking to grappling range quickly, which are ranges that, if one person tries to "leave", the other person has much more ability to make them stay there - this doesn't work in trapping / bridging range, because it's too easy to break away back out to striking or move in and engage with grappling; so, since TCMA seems to, in general, favor bridging / trapping (even at long range, it seems like they are, in a sense, referencing that range as where to be most effective from), that's why it's not as competative against approaches that don't go for that

now, this may not be the whole story, but I think in order to see why things are as they are now, trying to understand the historical roots is useful, so at least looking in that direction seems to yield some clues...

[TenTigers]

I think that might have been the case in the past, but today-especially with the advent of the internet/youtube/forums, etc, more TCMA schools (not alot, but more) are doing the WC vs boxing,vs Muay Thai,vs grappling, or at least trying to add cross traiing-not because one is better than the other, but because to be able to fight, one needs to address the fact that people will come at you with things other than your own particular style's techniques.
Again, it boils down to numbers, I suppose.

[Shaolinlueb]

i think most guys think they are better off in an mma school. once you train kung fu for the ring, it becomes more of sanshou with jj mixed into it. traditional kung fu encompasses much more then that. imo there are much better things to study for the ring then kung fu. yeah i'm gonna get flamed for this, but kung fu was never about the ring. come on look at all those old masters in the ring. most of them were jokes. skills good, but fighting no.

kung fu fighters have become few and far between these days.

[MasterKiller]

come on look at all those old masters in the ring. most of them were jokes. skills good, but fighting no.

Funny. I always figured good kung fu skills should = good fighting.

[TenTigers]

I only know of that one fight
http://youtube.com/watch?v=4ixi2GLcd9s
and unfortunately, this one instance (and that deluca guy) are the examples that everyone goes to for their argument.

hmmmm, kinda the way I blame David Carradine for everything that is wrong in TCMA today....


(but it's true!)

[BruceSteveRoy]

i think it could also have to do with how rare it is to see a tcma school share space with a teacher from another style. but i think its par for the course that BJJ schools share space with muay thai classes. so if you do kung fu you have to pay tuition at two different places and that is costly. not to mention that many sifus are vehemently againt you going to another school out of fear of either losing the student (and the money) or having the student show the other school their style (losing potential money). i think the BJJ people are more laid back about cross training bc vale tudo matches have been going on for a long time in brazil so they know the need to cross train.

[Golden Arms]

From what I have seen, it seems to boil down to two main points:

Many people that come to the CMA schools arent the type that would want to compete in a full contact venue

and

Those that would like to compete end up competing in San Shou since doing throws and strikes doesn't require modifying the schools curriculum, but instead paring it down to some basics that can be developed fast.

As it stands right now, I feel any CMA school that actually trains striking in a decent manner (which seem to be few and far between from most of the tournaments I have been to, but they are out there), would still need to cross train their fighters in some sort of ground fighting so that their guys are not at a disadvantage in MMA, if that is the venue they wanted to train in. If you are going to go to two different schools, why not instead just go to one that teaches it all? And there we have why the MMA schools get a lot of the fighters.

[Oso]

really, this is just starting the same old kind of debate and it won't really give any new answers because there aren't any.

[lkfmdc]

I have one school, at any given time I probably have around 250 active students. Yet, at any given time I have 8 to 15 guys (and gals) training to fight and competing. I had a guy offered a K-1 MAX contract, the top of the striking game, he was young and stupid and wanted to get married and start "being responsible" (ie paying other people's bills for them) but right now I have a guy about to go to Japan to fight pro Muay Thai and a guy about to turn pro in MMA.

My school is about fighitng, so I get fighters and people who want to be fighters. The "kung fu culture", especially in THIS COUNTRY, is full of crazy people who have been spoon fed nonsense and eat it up. When I was "still a kung fu person" I was basicly doing the same thing, but every day I had piles of morons coming in my door who wanted to learn "secrets", "dim mak", "Buddha palm" etc.... CJURAKPT can attest to this sure enough.... Even today I get people who come in because of www.LamaKungFu.org who want to learn "Lama Pai".... inevitably if they ever actually step into a class, because heck if you want to learn Lama Pai you should be able to do one of those "basic" san da classes as well, they never make it out of the first class.... Today, people who want to do Kung Fu are looking for fantasy, it's the new LARP'ing martial art