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 