# What form of martial art do you practice?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-form-of-martial-art-do-you-practice/200378>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [September 8, 2003, 9:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-form-of-martial-art-do-you-practice/200378 "2003-09-08T21:00:40Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 5

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**Author:** ![green\_dragon\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/13edae/32.png) [@green\_dragon\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/green_dragon_1)\
**Post date:** [September 12, 2003, 10:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-form-of-martial-art-do-you-practice/200378/81 "2003-09-12T22:24:08Z")

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OK seeing as we’ve got a whole bunch of martial artsy types around at the moment, here’s a topic for debate:

What, in fact constitutes a martial art nowadays?

For instance, there’s a big distinction between the Taekwondo you see on the Olympics and traditional Taekwondo. Clubs which focus on competitions often neglect to teach the forms (poomse/kata, whatever you wanna call em), hand techniques and even some of the traditional kicks. Is this cut-down, largely useless for real combat, ‘sport’ taekwondo as much of a martial art as that from which it came?

Same can be said of Judo - how many Judo practitioners out there are aware of, let alone pracise, the Judo forms?

What constitutes a martial art? Boxing maybe be an effective combat system, but should it be thought of as a martial art? Contrasted to things like Shaolin, Wu-shu, all the various types of Karate etc, it seems to lack some of the elements of self-expression that, to me anyway, lift something from a “skill” to an “art”.

Anyway, enough rambling from me, you get the picture as to where I’m coming from, I’ll be interested to hear any thoughts on the subject 🙂

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