You may not realise it but there is a very good chance that the martial art you are learning could be an ‘eclectic’ martial art style. The word ‘eclectic’ simply means a mix of techniques taken from various martial art styles and so on by the way.
Mixed Martial Arts, MMA, for example is a simple way of saying that all the various martial art styles and systems are intermixed when competing in the ring. An ‘eclectic’ mix of techniques and fighting styles. However ‘MMA’ competition fighting does tend to be punches and kicks with grappling and wrestling style methods intermixed together in the main. There is also another form of ‘eclectic combat’ that some martial art schools teach. These types of martial art schools will advertise their classes as giving instruction in both karate, kickboxing, kung fu, Chinese boxing and so on. However these types of classes are often taught by people who have only ever really learned one type of combat of any true note in their lives. There are several things that show that to be the case when often a karate trained person will use a Japanese name to label what they do, or have clearly not done any real training to speak of in other combat styles, or have failed to do any real research to back up their knowledge of other fighting styles. A somewhat classic example is when they claim to teach both kung fu and Chinese boxing but fail to realise that both kung fu and Chinese boxing are in fact the same thing. Chinese boxing, not to be confused with kickboxing, was one of the main used terms to describe the various martial arts of China before the name kung fu came along back in the 1960’s and 1970’s as a popular catch all term. There are many examples of how such schools of ‘eclectic fighting styles’ have come along over the years and often not put together well as a result. A very misleading thing to do if a new student joins such classes thinking that they are being taught all sorts of combat systems all at the same time. In reality some martial art styles cannot be mixed, or should I say blended?, together or even taught separately for a number of reasons within a single school of combat. The reality is that various combat arts often conflict with each other regarding technique application and teaching methods. However it can be done if various fighting systems are merged together with a lot of thought by the instructors who know how to combine such various applications in a practical way. Sadly however that is often not the case and also in many cases such claims are somewhat bogus anyway. Taking Taekwondo and Wing Chun as a perfect example, due to being both ends of the martial art spectrum so to speak, combining these two distinctive combat styles would be more than impossible to merge together due to their very nature. While one is full of long range movement and high kicks the other is mainly hand strikes and limited, close range, dynamic movements by nature. To be able to blend not only such fighting methods together, and teach such a mix of applications, you would need a teacher who is fully trained in both fighting styles themselves, which is often not the case. Or to put it another way some instructors believe that they can do just that even though their formal training has been based on one or the other system only themselves in the past. For a related article on mixed fighting methods click >HERE< Comments are closed.
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