The techniques you see in MMA are not new techniques. They’re just a blending of old martial arts techniques. In MMA, we’re just taking what works from a lot of different arts, then we make sure it does work.

How?

By experimenting. In MMA competition — outside of biting, eye gouges, and groin shots — everything else is pretty much fair game.

Once we identify a technique that we think might work, we have the perfect laboratory to do that. It’s hard to argue with results that say, ‘Here is a move that just failed six times in a row, and here is a move that just worked 20 times in a row.’ It’s hard to fight empirical feedback.

Yes, you can say, ‘I would just gouge his eyes,’ which happens in MMA occasionally. Or ‘I would just kick his groin,’ which also happens in MMA. Or ‘I would bite him,’ which MMA fighters don’t do. But those things are at the very top of the self-defense pyramid.

You have to pay attention to the rest of the pyramid because a lot of fighting takes place there. It used to be that you had to take people’s word for it that a technique was going to work. In MMA, however, you don’t have to take anyone’s word for it anymore; you can see if it works.

If you look at the big picture, you see that self-defense is about time and place. If I had tried a double-leg takedown on a samurai, he would have killed me. That would be the dumbest thing I could do. That environment is where the one-shot, one-kill concept of karate came from. If you didn’t hit the samurai with that perfect reverse punch, you were dead.

You may know 28 different mixed martial arts moves, but the guy just cut your head off. That’s what I mean by time and place. Karate was made by people who were being oppressed and who needed to defend themselves. They didn’t have anything, and the other guys had swords!

Does that make karate the most effective martial art you can do here and now? Not necessarily. If we find a technique from karate works as well now as it did then, MMA fighters will adopt it. There are millions of dollars on the line in MMA. It would be stupid for them not to borrow any technique that’s effective.

No art is off-limits when it comes to borrowing techniques. Money is a great impetus to push forward the evolution of fighting. If something works, we take it. In some ways, every art has something to give. If we can discover something that we didn’t think was going to work and it ends up working, that’s great. People will use it.

Getting back to karate, it has some great hand-to-hand moves and concepts like distancing. So trainers and coaches look at karate, and if something seems like it will work, we experiment with it. If it’s successful, we use it. For proof, look at Lyoto Machida. He’s an awesome fighter.

Here’s another example that will explain what I mean by time and place. In kung fu, people used the butterfly swords because that’s what they had and because they were fighting to the death. Now, we’re not fighting to the death and our weapons are different.

We’re not using butterfly swords, just like we’re not using muskets anymore. Everything changes. If one day we have lasers on our wrists, then all this stuff we do now with guns will be antiquated. We’ll have to move on.

This change is what makes it so exciting to be in the martial arts at this time in human history. It’s all made possible by the internet and video. We can watch people fight using techniques you’d never have seen otherwise because those techniques were developed on the other side of the globe. In the past, we didn’t have that.

If you were a Greek pankration fighter, you had Greeks and some Egyptians and maybe some other people around, but you didn’t have a lot of Japanese jujitsu masters coming to Greece so you could test your skills against them. Now we have hundreds of people moving around and mixing martial arts.

Video and the internet are big, but so are the connections we can now make with people from France, from Japan, from Mongolia, from everywhere. I can be anywhere in the world in 16 hours — from here to Australia or China. We never had that before. We had some people, like Morihei Ueshiba, who went to China, but not many.

We had a few people who cross-trained, but they were older guys who already knew a lot, and by the time they got somewhere different, they probably weren’t ready to ‘empty their vessel’ and learn something totally new.

But now, because of video, we can watch fights that happened yesterday or 40 years ago in the city we live in or on the other side of the world. And because of air travel, we can connect with martial artists from the other side of the world and train together.

So it’s video and travel that enable us to learn and to test techniques, and we have the immediate feedback of the fights. We never had that kind of laboratory before. It used to take martial artists months to get to other countries, and they might stay there for a month or two.

Now you can do all that in three days and then go somewhere else in another three days. Never has the world been this small. We get to experience these wonderful strategic principles, techniques, and methodologies from all over.

The reason some people are resistant to learning from the MMA laboratory is they’re invested in their art. Let’s say you spend 25 years doing silat and that’s your reality. And then some kid comes along and says, ‘We’ve been in the laboratory, testing all these things you do, and they work sometimes but not all of them work all the time.’ That’s hard for the silat instructor to take.

Remember in the ’80s when everybody argued about things like that? They’d be like, ‘I’ll blast you through the wall with my ki power.’ ‘Oh, no, my karate will stop you!’ It’s an old argument. And then the Gracie family said, ‘You do yours and we’ll do ours.’ That’s what enabled us to actually put things to the test — again, outside of biting, eye gouges, and groin shots.

By the way, there’s plenty of eye gouging and groin shots that happen inadvertently in MMA, and they can be very effective. So when you’re teaching self-defense, the lessons of MMA are still useful. You eye-gouge a certain way because of all those times it was done that way in a match illegally. This is what worked, and this is what didn’t. It’s the same with groin shots.

Of course, it all changes when you’re fighting more than one person. MMA is for one-on-one fighting. However, you have to address certain things whether you’re fighting three people or one. If you don’t know how to get up off the ground, if you don’t know how to do a sprawl and stay on your feet when three dudes are trying to beat you up, you might be in trouble on the street.

I’m not saying MMA is the answer for all self-defense, but for one-on-one combat — even if it’s within a multiple-opponent scenario — you’re not going to find anything better.

In a nutshell, the difference between street fighting and MMA fighting involves environment, tools, and numbers. In a match, it’s one-on-one in a static environment with just the tools provided by the human body.

In a street fight, it’s the opposite. You might be using a book or a chair as a weapon — or the desk, which you might push your attacker over. There might be three opponents, and if there are, it would be silly to do a double-leg and get on top. But that doesn’t mean the double-leg and get on top doesn’t work for one-on-one. The techniques used in MMA are very tested. Which techniques you use, now that depends on the environment.

If your opponent has a knife, the game changes. If your opponent has a gun, the game changes. It’s all about what you should do at any given time in that environment. Is a move effective against one person? Against three people? Is it appropriate for what you’re dealing with?

You can’t naysay about the techniques themselves because they’re tested all the time in the cage. In self-defense, how do you know whether something works? Maybe you’ll get into a street fight, maybe not.

People sometimes claim that because certain targets on the body [like the throat] are off-limits in a match, an MMA-trained fighter would have trouble targeting them on the street. In training, I get hit in the throat a lot.

In competition, fighters get hit in the throat constantly. It’s not illegal to hit the throat in MMA. It sucks. But there’s a myth that a strike to the throat is going to stop a person immediately. In actuality, it’s very hard to target. Will a throat strike stop the fight? Yeah, sometimes, but sometimes not. I wouldn’t rely on it in self-defense.

It’s not unlike what we had in the ’80s with ‘I’ll just side-kick you in the knee. All it takes is 10 pounds of pressure to …’ In MMA, we tested this using every kick possible — because kicking the knee is not off-limits in competition. We hit knees with everything but the kitchen sink, and I think we’ve had maybe one incident.

In contrast, a strike to the groin will stop a fight, and that makes it a great street-fighting technique. If I was in a street fight, I’d try to choke the other guy unconscious, hit him in the groin, and poke him in the eyes.

However, again, those things are the top of the self-defense pyramid. If your opponent tackles you, all of that’s now irrelevant. If he mounts and starts pounding on you, you can’t reach his eyes and good luck trying to hit his groin. What are you going to bite, his leg or maybe an arm? The top of your self-defense pyramid needs to be built on strong fundamentals.

If you can reverse the mount, get into a guard position, and stay out of trouble there so you can use a bite and maybe bring in a throat strike, that’s a much better skill set to have.

If you look at the evolution of MMA, you can see that there have been so many changes involving so many techniques that were brought in. We had the Brazilian jiu-jitsu guys who could choke out anybody, then the wrestlers who could sprawl and stop anybody, then the kickboxers who could knock out anybody.

We’ve been through so much in such a short time because the techniques get tested over and over. You learn that it’s about appropriateness. Sometimes people misunderstand it and think it’s about efficacy, but it’s not. You wouldn’t do a double-leg takedown in a bar fight against six guys. However, if one of them does it on you, you’d better know how to get out of it, and that’s what MMA does best.

Remember that everything I said pertains to being more effective in MMA and self-defense. If you train in your martial art for other reasons — maybe for point sparring, for kata competition, for health, or for relaxation — continue doing exactly what you are doing.

All martial arts are wonderful.

Contributor Greg Jackson’s website is jacksonwink.com.

Photography by Ian Spanier

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