Martial Arts

The lethal combination of ancient fighting skills…

by

Owen Jones

Published by

Megan Publishing Services

http://meganthemisconception.com

Copyright Owen Jones 2022 ©

INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES

Believe not in anything simply because you have heard it,

Believe not in anything simply because it was spoken and rumoured by many,

Believe not in anything simply because it was found written in your religious texts,

Believe not in anything merely on the authority of teachers and elders,

Believe not in traditions because they have been handed down for generations,

But after observation and analysis, if anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, accept it and live up to it.

Gautama Buddha

––

Great Spirit, whose voice is on the wind, hear me. Let me grow in strength and knowledge.

Make me ever behold the red and purple sunset. May my hands respect the things you have given me.

Teach me the secrets hidden under every leaf and stone, as you have taught people for ages past.

Let me use my strength, not to be greater than my brother, but to fight my greatest enemy – myself.

Let me always come before you with clean hands and an open heart, that as my Earthly span fades like the sunset, my Spirit shall return to you without shame.

(Based on a traditional Sioux prayer)

–—

“I do not seek to walk in the paths of the Wise People of old.

I seek what they sought!”

Matsuo Basho

Hello and thank you for buying this book called ‘Martial Arts - The lethal combination of ancient fighting skills…’.

I hope that you will find the information helpful, useful and profitable.

When most people hear the phrase martial arts, they usually think of those of the Far East, and it is true that most of the ancient martial arts that people have heard of did originate there. However, most countries also developed fighting skills may centuries ago. For example, boxing and wrestling featured in the Olympic Games in Greece thousands of years ago.

However, there are also more modern recognised martial arts like French kick-boxing, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Korean Tae Kwando and Japanese Aikido. If you search online for ‘x martial art’, where X is your target country, you will discover more.

So far, we have only mentioned physical martial arts. There are also others like archery and javelin throwing. In other words, most people’s understanding on the phrase ‘martial arts’ is too limited. One should think of ‘martial’ as war(fare) and ‘arts’ as skills or methods. It opens up the scope of the words.

The information in this ebook on various aspects of martial arts both Eastern and Western is organised into 16 chapters of about 500-600 words each.

I hope that it will interest those who are keen on foreign and domestic martial arts.

As an added bonus, I am granting you permission to use the content on your own website or in your own blogs and newsletter, although it is better if you rewrite them in your own words first.

If you have any feedback, please leave it with the company you bought this book from.

Thanks again for purchasing this book,

Regards,

Owen Jones

Mixed Martial Arts

Mixed martial arts is greatly popular now. It is as well-liked as wrestling was in the Seventies and Eighties. The difference is that everyone knew that wrestling was choreographed, whereas mixed martial arts (some fans call it cage fighting) is not. Mixed martial arts is for real and for very high stakes similar to those of world championship weighty weight boxing championships.

Mixed martial arts or MMA used to be completely unregulated and that put many people off in the late Eighties and Nineties, but now that there are safety rules (some, anyway), this extreme sport has become more mainstream. There are now two types of MMA though, sport and street. The former is more governed than the latter where virtually anything goes.

Despite the growing popularity of mixed martial arts, there is still no real governing body for the sport, although there are quite a number of organizations vying for the privilege on both sides of the Atlantic. Britain has at least three companies trying to become the regulator of MMA in the UK. The USA approximately the same.

One of the top organizers of MMA bouts, if not the top organizer, is Ultimate Fighting Championship or UFC. They put on pay-per-view fights on cable television which can pay top fighters nearly a million dollars a fight! This just goes to show how popular mixed martial arts has gotten.

Aside from proceeds from pay-per-view and national TV, there is a huge amount being taken from spin-offs like videos, DVD’s and T-shirts. There are also collectibles, dolls and board games to say nothing of documentaries and books. Web sites on mixed martial arts abound as do blogs and forums. Most fighters also have Twitter and Facebook sites.

This has provoked youths of both sexes to join a gym and take up martial arts. This can only be a good thing. Training frequently will counteract the trend in Western children towards corpulence and will also help tackle bullying and street violence. Trained fighters hardly ever become bullies or muggers.

The fad for MMA appears to be fairly recent, but that is not the case. Inter-disciplinary martial arts fighting was well-liked in the 1890’s in Europe. Then there was the documentary film ‘Kings of the Square Ring’ featuring Muhammad Ali in around 1980. The modern craze took off in the early Nineties, but it is in full swing now.

Mixed martial arts, or pankration, was an Olympic sport 2,000 years ago and fans tried to reinstate it as such in 2004, although the movement failed, but who knows what the future will bring? A lot of powerful legislators believe that the sport is too violent and that it ought to be regulated more closely. The supporters and the fighters disagree, so we will have to wait and see which opinion wins out.

Choosing The Best Martial Arts Style

Martial Arts are more well-liked in the Developed world than ever before, but which one should you choose to study, if that is what you have resolved to do? There have always been masters of the traditional, ancient, martial arts have established their own styles.

Aikido and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu are examples of this, but now it seems as if more masters are attempting to set up their own disciplines than ever. Look at Bruce Lee’s own particular style and Gracie Jiu Jitsu.

This makes it even harder than ever to decide on which martial art to study or indeed, whether to train in the fantastically popular sport of Mixed Martial Arts, which is really contested by fighters who have studied several martial arts.

There have been contests to find out which is the best martial art for more than a hundred years but the jury is still out. Some times one discipline wins and other times a different one does.

Perhaps it depends on the ability of the fighter rather than the sport itself. Muhammad Ali with boxing won the championship known as Kings of the Square Ring in around 1980.

Maybe the first thing to do is ask yourself why you want to learn a martial art in the first place. All fighting styles will teach self-defence, self-confidence and self-discipline and they will all allow you the chance never to get bullied in unarmed fighting again whether it is in school, in a bar or on the street.

You ought to also examine your self and your body sort. Some combative arts are extremely athletic. Look at the jumps and high kicks in Tae Kwon Do, while other styles are a little more laid back like Jiu Jitsu and Judo, because they teach you to use your opponent’s impetus to gain an advantage.

Karate and Kung Fu require fast reflexes. Bruce Lee could stand three feet from a person who had a coin on his open palm; raise his hand from his side, snatch the coin and replace it with another one in 5/100 ths of a second.

Not everybody is going to be able to train long enough to do that, but I think that not all body kinds would permit it anyway.

It is a decent idea to rent a few DVD’s on the different fighting styles and attempt to work out what appeals to you personally. If you find that you like a number of them, why not go down to a local dojo that teaches mixed martial arts?

The trainers there will be less prejudiced in favour of one skill and will have experience with diverse body kinds and temperaments.

Make sure you spend some time choosing a respectable gym or dojo to go to for advice. Most places will give you an interview and a free first lesson. If you explain your predicament, they are certain to be able to help you come to the correct decision about selecting the best martial arts style for you.

Mixed Martial Arts Through the Internet

Most individuals know the Net as somewhere you may do some investigation, purchase and sell items, play some games and keep in touch. This is how most individuals interact with the Internet and there is nothing wrong with that. However, with a couple of adaptations to technique, you can use the Web to sell yourself rather than items or services.

I do not mean the slave trade here, I mean using the Internet to make yourself well known or even famous. This would be helpful, if you were a performing artiste, a writer or a fighter, say a mixed martial artist. The trick is to learn how to build a buzz around yourself and I do not mean with flies and nasty smells.

The first thing to do is think of a catchy, relevant name. This may not be appropriate for a writer unless he wants to compose under a pen name. Let us call our mixed martial artist Johnny Two Hammers. Then you need a logo. Let us use two crossed mallets like a give way sign.

Now start building your web site with plenty of photos of yourself in fighting poses (all with an alt description), a biography, a list of up-coming fights and a list of results. Make sure that the logo is on each page and make a special image file of it known as fav.icon. Upload fav.icon to the root folder of all your websites. This ensures that all your web pages are distinct when they are tabbed.

Next, take your fav.icon (favourite icon) and create a jpeg image of it and name it something like my_avatar.jpeg. Join as many social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter et cetera as you are able. Join, say, twenty each day for a couple of weeks.

The top social media sites change fairly frequently, but you can do a search on them as well and you will get a list of hundreds of the current hotties.

When you join a social media site, fill out your profile and upload your avatar. Keep track of which ones you have joined and try to use the same log in details for all of them. All the best SM sites will cross-post your message to other SM sites. Make sure you make a note of which are the most well-liked and join them.

These SM sites will allow you to enter an email address and at least one website URL. Do it, but you may like to try to get sneaky by entering some of your SM home pages into some of the SM sites. The concept being that SM1 promotes SM2, that promotes SM3 that promotes your web site.

With a little planning, you can make this quite magical, so that one post to say, Plurk, triggers off dozens or even hundreds of messages. Make a point of sending twelve messages a day. Try to make a group of followers by telling them details that they cannot find out anywhere else (for a few days). Make your adherents feel ‘in the know’.

If you work on this friendship-ring building, you will soon have thousands of individuals recognizing your name and logo, but it has to be genuine - you have to stick with it and provide real insider knowledge.

Submission Wrestling and Mixed Martial Arts

The term ‘submission wrestling’ is a bit of a blanket term actually, because it refers to bits of many of the different martial arts and is not a real martial art itself, although some may argue that it is, but that it has been integrated into other martial arts, masking its own unique history.

Contemporary myth has it that submission wrestling is derived from Catch Wrestling (or Catch As Catch Can Wrestling), which began in Northern England in the late Nineteenth Century. However, the Vikings had a strong presence in northern England 1,000 years