One thing that MMA has going for it as a competitive art is that it’s well optimized for the specific type of fighting that takes place in an MMA ring. Some advocates will insist that the types of confrontations which take place in the ring are “real fighting,” and anything which less effectively prepares one for the ring is not as effective in a “real fight,” but it would be more accurate to say that MMA matches are a certain kind of fight, one which approximates only a certain subset of encounters one might have outside the ring.
For example, if one is hired as a bouncer at a club, it’s certainly probable that one will eventually be involved in “real fights,” where a person is seriously trying to hurt you without any rules to hold them back. But they’ll overwhelmingly be untrained people with a lot of alcohol in them, who, at the very least for the sake of your job if not out of ethical concern, you should try to avoid injuring too badly. MMA training would be poorly optimized for these sort of encounters, as it’s stripped of a lot of pain compliance techniques which would be handy in such a situation, and emphasizes many techniques which could result in your getting fired or possibly being sued or serving jail time.
If you’re mugged, you’d be facing a violent encounter where your assailant almost certainly has a weapon, there may be multiple assailants involved, and facing you in a fight is not their top priority. Generically speaking, the standard advice for these situations is “give them your money,” in which case no sort of martial arts training would leave you more prepared than any other, but some schools will teach not just techniques, but tactics for defending oneself in such a situation. An MMA school is unlikely to offer students such preparation, since that’s time they could be spending learning to better kick the ass of one guy in the ring.
A law enforcement officer, again, is likely to face “real fights” with people who may be high on drugs, wielding weapons, in large groups, or some combination of the above, where the objective is generally to restrain and arrest, or if their own lives are threatened, to respond with lethal force using deadly weapons.
And so on and so forth. One on one brawls of the sort that MMA training optimizes for actually form a fairly small and avoidable portion of all violent encounters, but it’s hard to arrange realistic comparative tests between martial artists of ability in any other kind of fight.
One thing that MMA has going for it as a competitive art is that it’s well optimized for the specific type of fighting that takes place in an MMA ring. Some advocates will insist that the types of confrontations which take place in the ring are “real fighting,” and anything which less effectively prepares one for the ring is not as effective in a “real fight,” but it would be more accurate to say that MMA matches are a certain kind of fight, one which approximates only a certain subset of encounters one might have outside the ring.
For example, if one is hired as a bouncer at a club, it’s certainly probable that one will eventually be involved in “real fights,” where a person is seriously trying to hurt you without any rules to hold them back. But they’ll overwhelmingly be untrained people with a lot of alcohol in them, who, at the very least for the sake of your job if not out of ethical concern, you should try to avoid injuring too badly. MMA training would be poorly optimized for these sort of encounters, as it’s stripped of a lot of pain compliance techniques which would be handy in such a situation, and emphasizes many techniques which could result in your getting fired or possibly being sued or serving jail time.
If you’re mugged, you’d be facing a violent encounter where your assailant almost certainly has a weapon, there may be multiple assailants involved, and facing you in a fight is not their top priority. Generically speaking, the standard advice for these situations is “give them your money,” in which case no sort of martial arts training would leave you more prepared than any other, but some schools will teach not just techniques, but tactics for defending oneself in such a situation. An MMA school is unlikely to offer students such preparation, since that’s time they could be spending learning to better kick the ass of one guy in the ring.
A law enforcement officer, again, is likely to face “real fights” with people who may be high on drugs, wielding weapons, in large groups, or some combination of the above, where the objective is generally to restrain and arrest, or if their own lives are threatened, to respond with lethal force using deadly weapons.
And so on and so forth. One on one brawls of the sort that MMA training optimizes for actually form a fairly small and avoidable portion of all violent encounters, but it’s hard to arrange realistic comparative tests between martial artists of ability in any other kind of fight.