Sport Martial Arts Have Rules

While this is a good thing for people who are practicing the sport for sport's sake, it is often viewed as the sport martial art's downfall when it comes to use in a real combat situation. But this also means that sports martial arts' rules can give us powerfull insights into what will likely work in real combat situations!

If we analyze these rules and why the are created, at least two important goals of these rules should become apparent: the safety goal and the competitive goal.

The Safety Goal

Many rules are designed to create a safe competitive atmosphere. This is the rather more obvious type of rule. These rules tend to eliminate entire categories of techniques which are deemed to be hard to perform safely in a competitive environment. This elimination of techniques is, of course, not limited to competitive sports, many of the do martial arts eliminate at least those techniques which they feel are not easily practiced (even non-competitively) without causing injury.

The Competitive Goal

Not quite as obvious are those rules which are not really for safety but those which are designed to foster a competitive environment. These rules tend to be rules which hamper defense and those which outright encourage/demand attacking. This makes sense since people are usually competing either for their own entertainment or for the entertainment of others and this requires a fight. It would be rather boring to watch a fight where the competitors could just walk away from each other! :)

A Combat Viewpoint

So how can we use these observations to our advantage to train for 'real' combat situations? The foremost thought would be to explicitly research and train all the techniques/actions which are forbidden by these rules!

If a technique is unsafe, it is probably a very effective disabilitating technique. I am not suggesting that these are secret techniques, but that we have been simply so brain washed into thinking that fighting consists of the techniques used/practiced in sport martial arts and that few people even search outside of this region for practical combat techniques.

If we analyze competitive rules we will often find the best way to defend against entire ranges of techniques. We will also realize how much this training is designed to keep a fight a fight, preventing it from ending quickly! Since we probably want to actually learn defense and how to end a fight quickly, these rules once again will potentially help point us in the right direction.

Next: Sports Rules Analysis