There are 3 basic unifying factors in martial arts: 1) history, 2) range, and 3) attribute. The first is history. If we remain factual and fair, we would readily admit that there is no originality in martial arts. Many wars have been fought in history and even the most isolated regions of the earth have been influenced by other groups of people who may have had very different systems of thought and approaches to fighting and life in general. Therefore, either willingly or unwillingly, various ideas and systems converged together and thus gave birth to other new ideas and new methods of looking and solving problems. This is just a historical fact. One can take the history of any martial arts system on the planet (Judo, Jujitsu, Kali, Wrestling, boxing and etc), and trace it back as far as you can go and you would find out that the arts themselves owe their developments to historical forces (groups, individuals, wars, trade, cataclysmic events, etc) that changed, shaped, and evolved their present systems into what they are today. Martial arts have the unifying evolutionary forces of human race imprinted right on the backbone of the history of a single Homo sapien's race---and even further back, depending on how far one likes to go. Therefore, our martial arts systems, either directly or indirectly are all related within the web of the human history. That’s just irrefutable.
The second unifying factor in martial arts is range or distance. There are four major distances; and if we count the sub-ranges, we would have 9 ranges total which concludes our empty hand fighting. If we include the weapons we would have a total of 15 intricate ranges. But for the sake of this short article, let's just stick with the four ranges of Kicking, punching, clinching/trapping, and ground fighting. There are many arts in greater or lesser degree that share the clinching range. There are many systems that share the kicking range. Many arts share grappling range, and yet others share the punching range. Range was not an invention, but a discovery of the primitive anatomical juxtapositioning, and the geometry and physics of two limbs, or two organic or nonorganic bodies. Moreover, the discovery itself was not by choice, but was compulsory through environmental demands, and thus contributing to the expansion of brain capacity and abstract thinking, which later had to reflect in analyzing abilities, problem solving and survival. Therefore, in martial arts we are unified by sharing the discovery of certain common ranges----despites our differences in how we behave in each range.
The third unifying factor we have in martial arts is directly related to attributes. Keep in mind, attributes such as speed, timing, footwork and so on, are only names that we humans have decided to characterize certain physical phenomenon. However, timing or speed, or footwork, just to mention few examples, are totally blind and unbiased to the type of physical activities in time and space. They really don’t know if it is football, or baseball, or running, or swimming, or MMA, or Wing Chun, or Savate, or JKD or Jujitsu or the rotation of galaxies, or bull riding, or golf. They are absolutely blind to all that. They just do not care!! Therefore, we as martial artists, regardless of our systems or no systems share the same phenomenon and are under the same umbrella when it comes to attributes. No one on this planet is exempt from this fact.
In short, I like to say that it helps if you look at your training in a more unified fashion, rather than the usual way most martial artists look at training, which is very compartmentalized and non-synergistic. The more unifies your vision, the less distracted you become with the superfluous rudiments of fighting and training.
SHAHRAM MOOSAVI
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Photo: Floro Villabrille