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Anonymous06/24/26, 23:24No.264576are martial arts losing their essence?
i've been thinking about how martial arts have been losing their essence (mainly self-defense) due to monetization and shitty federations. i mean what the fuck is up with charging money for exams and belts?? i mean of course they are gonna give you the fucking belt if you pay for it, so what's the point of the system? back then, there were just black and white belts, nothing else and no charging for becoming a black belt, just raw technique and knowledge, and actual use of the art (self-defense as well).
i say this as an actual practicioner of taekwondo itf and i admit it has the stupidiest ferderation system ever (there are like 8 different branches, each claiming that they teach the "original taekwondo" while not teaching throws, takedowns or submissions) as well as the dumb fucking pay-for-your-exam-and-belt shit, as if the monthly fee didn't exist. it's ridiculous and sad, and i realized this now since i've been doing boxing and judo and holy shit it's a whole different world; boxing is awesome and has no charges besides the suscription and equipment, the rest is just training and sparring; same with judo except there are exams but they are like once a year for every student, unlike other arts where there is an exam every three months for everyone.
so i wanted to ask, what do you think? are martial arts getting worse due to greed? are there any exceptions (like boxing or judo in my experience)?
personally, i'll keep doing taekwondo 'till the red belt, because i like it a lot and it was my first martial art, but i'm not gonna pay like 200 dollars for a black piece of cloth on ny waist.
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Anon06/24/26, 23:49No.264577
If you go further back you start to run into masters asking for arguably even larger sums of money. Ip man's teacher supposedly required 20 taels of silver(3k~15k$) just to get your foot through the door and earn the priveledge to pay monthly fees.
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Anon06/25/26, 09:18No.264593
Boxing is a martial art too. Martial arts have always been this way, everyone has always claimed that their style was the best and tried to profit off of it. This has caused splintering throughout history. Look at how many different styles of kung fu have branched out of the Shaolin Temple alone or how many Koryu Kenjutsu schools are the result of schisms if you want historical examples. I believe boxing and judo are more of the exception than the standard, even historically. If you look around you can probably find some style that will fit your expectations, even if it isn’t initially what you were looking out for. I accepted that I wasn’t going to get what I wanted out of the local karate schools so I found an MMA gym where a couple of the striking couches had professional kickboxing records.
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Anon06/26/26, 02:10No.264648
McDojos and money making schemes has always been a problem even during the "golden era" of martial arts in the 70s and 80s. My teacher's been training since the 70s and he remembers Taekwondo schools that rebranded to Karate schools because of the hype. Unfortunately for eastern martial arts you have to get pretty lucky to find a good teacher let alone a good school and I don't think that will change anytime soon. That being said good schools and teachers exist out there and will teach without big commercial spaces or huge classes. My school isn't perfect, but its damn well better than what other people are doing around here.