Martial arts

• 1. Introduction

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  Martial arts are codified systems and traditions of combat, yet some of the oldest of them survive not in dojos but in dances. The Ukrainian Hopak, the Polish Zbojnicki with its ciupaga axe, the Czech odzemek, and the Norwegian Halling all carry movements descended from fighting traditions. In India, practitioners hid their arts from colonial authorities by insisting that what looked like combat was merely a form of dance. The very phrase martial arts is borrowed from the Roman god of war, Mars, and was once used to describe the combat systems of Europe long before it meant anything Asian. So why do most people today picture a karate gi and a flying kick when they hear the words? Who decided what counted as martial, what counted as sport, and what counted as fraud? And how did a label coined in the 1550s come to describe everything from a Sumerian wrestling relief to a cage fight in Las Vegas?

• 2. Arts Of Mars

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  John Clements traces the term martial arts to an older Latin phrase meaning the arts of Mars, the Roman god of war, applied to European combat systems as early as the 1550s. For centuries the words pointed west, not east. The shift came in the 1960s and 1970s, when Hong Kong martial arts films and figures like Bruce Lee swept the term into mainstream popular culture during what became known as the chopsocky wave of the early 1970s. Up until the 1970s, Asian fighting traditions were more often called martial science, or martial sciences, and Chinese systems went by the name Chinese boxing. Some writers have pushed back on the word martial entirely. They argue that fighting arts or fighting systems would fit better, since many of these traditions were never martial in the strict sense of being created or used by professional warriors. That quarrel over a single word hints at how blurry the category really is.

• 3. Striking And Grappling

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  Unarmed systems split into those built on strikes and those built on grappling, with hybrid arts spanning both. Boxing, Wing Chun, Kickboxing, Muay Thai, and Karate teach the punch; Taekwondo, Capoeira, Savate, Kung Fu, and Taekyyon teach the kick. Bokator, Lethwei, and Muay Thai add the elbow and the knee, while Pencak Silat, Taijiquan, and Vovinam draw on other striking methods. Grappling answers a different question: how to take an opponent down and hold them there. Judo, Sumo, Aikido, Shuai Jiao, and Wrestling specialize in throws, while Jujutsu, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, Catch wrestling, Chin-na, and Karate apply joint locks, chokeholds, and submission holds. Pinning belongs to Judo, Wrestling, and Aikido; trapping and clinch fighting to Wing Chun, Filipino Martial Arts, Jeet Kune Do, and Muay Thai. The armed traditions reach for melee weapons, bladed arms and polearms, in systems such as eskrima, silat, Kalaripayattu, kobudo, and the historical European martial arts of the Italian Renaissance. Sometimes a single weapon defines an art, as with the Japanese kenjutsu and kendo for the sword, bojutsu for the staff, and kyudo for the bow.

• 4. The Inner Path

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  Traditional Korean martial arts place great weight on the practitioner's spiritual development, not just their punches. Styles such as Taekkyon, taekwondo, and Hapkido share a focus on inner peace, said to be reachable only through meditation and training, and they hold that physical force can be justified only in self defense. The Japanese share this instinct. Their martial arts are called budo, and the suffix do means way or path, signaling that the art is meant to guide the practitioner toward a spiritually fulfilling life. Iran carries its own version of this ideal. The Persian art of varzesh-e pahlavani, also called varzesh-e bastani or ancient sport, is a system that once trained warriors and first appeared in its current name and form during the Safavid era. UNESCO recognizes its rituals under the term Pahlevani and zourkhaneh. For many of these traditions, the body is only the entry point. The harder discipline is the one happening inside the practitioner.

• 5. Ancient Combat

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  Cave paintings in eastern Spain, dated to between 10,000 and 6,000 BCE, show organized groups fighting with bows and arrows, the oldest known art depicting battle. Human warfare itself reaches back to the Epipalaeolithic and early Neolithic era, with similar evidence found in mass burials excavated in Germany and at Jebel Sahaba in Northern Sudan. Wrestling stands as the oldest combat sport, rooted in hand-to-hand fighting. Belt wrestling appears in Mesopotamian and Ancient Egyptian art from around 3000 BC and later in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, while the earliest known boxing image is a Sumerian relief from the 3rd millennium BC. Asia developed its own deep traditions through cultural exchange. During the Warring States period in China, from 480 to 221 BC, martial philosophy flourished, captured by Sun Tzu in The Art of War around 350 BC. Legend ties Shaolinquan to the arrival of Buddhism and Bodhidharma from India in the early 5th century AD. In Southern India, written evidence stretches to the Sangam literature of the 2nd century BCE to 2nd century AD, the earliest precursor of Kalaripayattu.

• 6. Becoming Modern Sport

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  In 1882, Kano Jigoro established the Kodokan School of judo, having studied older forms of jujutsu beforehand, and with it launched judo as a sport. The mid to late 19th century marks where traditional fighting systems became modern sports. In Japan, this period produced modern judo, jujutsu, karate, and kendo from Edo-period schools that the Meiji Restoration had suppressed. Europe codified its own contests. Modern boxing began with the rules of Jack Broughton in the 18th century and reached its present form under the Rules of the Marquess of Queensberry in 1867, while modern sport fencing took shape as French and Italian military academies set rules, leading to the Federation Internationale d'Escrime in 1913. Western fascination with Asian arts grew toward the end of the 19th century alongside trade with China and Japan. Edward William Barton-Wright, a railway engineer who studied jujutsu in Japan between 1894 and 1897, became the first man known to teach Asian martial arts in Europe, founding an eclectic style called Bartitsu. The Olympics absorbed these sports quickly, with fencing and Greco-Roman wrestling appearing in 1896, and wrestling and boxing in 1904.

• 7. Screen And Cage

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  Bruce Lee is credited as one of the first instructors to openly teach Chinese martial arts to Westerners, and the late 1960s and 1970s saw media interest in Chinese arts surge around him. The kung fu wave of Hong Kong action cinema in the 1970s, especially his films, carried martial arts into global popular culture. Hollywood followed in the 1980s with films like The Karate Kid in 1984 and Bloodsport in 1988, producing action stars with real martial arts backgrounds such as Jean-Claude Van Damme and Chuck Norris. The cinema boom had a darker twin. Rising demand in the 1970s spawned numerous low quality or fraudulent schools, and fictional depictions fueled the ninja craze of the 1980s in the United States. Comic books circa the 1960s and 1970s, read mostly by adolescent boys, carried fraudulent ads for training programs. Colored belts, introduced in the seventies to show progress through the lower kyu ranks, proved commercially viable and were exploited by degree mills nicknamed McDojos and belt factories. The combat side evolved too. In 1993, the first Pancrase event was held in Japan, Brazilian jiu-jitsu proved effective in mixed martial arts during the 1990s, and the first Ultimate Fighting Championship, later renamed UFC 1: The Beginning, drew on the Brazilian Vale tudo tradition.

• 8. Contact And Endurance

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  Sparring divides into light-contact, medium-contact, and full-contact, set by how much force may strike an opponent. In light sparring a punch is pulled at or before contact; in medium-contact it lands without full force, scored on points rather than knockouts, with a referee watching for fouls and judges marking scores as in boxing. Fighters may be barred from certain targets, forbidden techniques like headbutting or groin hits, and required to wear protective gear on head, hands, chest, groin, shins, or feet. Full-contact changes the stakes entirely. Strikes land at full force, and the aim is to knock out the opponent or force a submission. The original UFC 1 had no scoring at all, though most competitions now use judging as a backup. Kyokushin karate demands bare-knuckled, full-contact sparring in only a gi, mouthguard, and groin or chest guard, allowing kicks, knees, and punches but barring punches to the head. Its hardest test is the 100-man kumite, 100 continuous rounds against fresh opponents, a trial of endurance and spirit that only 30 people have ever completed. That number, set against the hundreds of millions who practice some form of martial art worldwide, measures the distance between taking up the art and reaching its outer edge.