Warrior Training is Evolving
We’re adding South-East Asian martial arts to our Warrior Training technical repertoire including Muay Thai, Panantukan and Silat
The mixed martial scene at its inception gathered a mixture of martial artists from different disciplines into a common match-fight, representing in one place peaks and valleys in the landscape of combat. As a concept, this was an important tool for exposing both the affordances and limitations of the respective martial arts through these points of contrast. When posed against one another the respective martial arts were allowed to develop contingencies to account for their shortcomings through the typical ranges of combat. Over time however, it was possible to see the homogenisation of the mixed martial arts scene as common techniques proved as effective countermeasures in practise, in other words, the peaks and valleys flattened into the middle-ground that we see today in modern mixed martial arts.
Modern MMA would eventually become taught as a composite of striking, grappling and ground-fighting, usually leveraging Boxing, Muay Thai and Brazilian Jujutsu techniques. The distinction that this change created was that competitors were no longer attempting to master a singular martial art adapted through exposing it to specialists in other areas. This was the attempt to master a limited skillset from each of the constituent martial arts in a particular system of MMA. It can be argued that this happened because where martial arts of today are predicated on overcoming opponents who are untrained, modern MMA fighters are training to compete with someone who ostensibly boast similar, if not the same, skillset as themselves.
This presents an interesting problem to gyms teaching MMA. In essence the curriculum has to be divided into the main areas of combat, the afore-mentioned striking, grappling and ground-fighting ranges. In so doing, the question of what quantity of each constituent art is being taught and to what quality it is being honed arises. Unlike Kenpo, which relies on infinite principles from which techniques are derived, MMA is a technically driven art and relies on programming counter-measures to techniques that may be encountered in a match-fight.
In order to rediscover some of the peaks and valleys which arguably make mixed martial arts valuable, we have opted to augment our current system with some of the best practical fighting techniques available to us from Muay Thai and its forerunners, Filipino Panantukan and Indonesian Silat. We will be looking to hold Warrior Training courses with specialists in these martial arts and more to help us diversify our own system of mixed martial arts.
Though we’re changing the way we do Warrior Training, our philosophy remains the same:
No Belts, No Egos, Only Hard Training
