Not always. Even with your concept of “combatives”, if you don’t maintain skill sets it’s like buying a gun, taking a basic hangun course and thinking you are now “good to go.”
You can be a martial artist without being devoted to specific systems. I have been a martial artist since 1977, or at least that is when my instruction began. I have been exposed to 40-60 styles or systems in that time and devoted a year or more to about 20-25 of them. I have what we’ll call an advanced working knowledge of half of those and I’m qualified to teach about 8 of them.
But a long time ago I stopped practicing style or system and simply focused on elements of each system which I found particularly suited my needs. As my needs changed and evolved over time, the elements prioritized and evolved accordingly.
I may only practice 8% of a given system, but I will do it for the rest of my life for so long as I am able because I gain some benefit. This is the nature of martial arts.
Rigidly defined, excessively codified programs of instruction are largely a mid 20th century construct. On Okinawa in the late 1800s there may have been 40 or more famous kata, but for each village style a student typically practiced no more than three and it was rare for a “style” to contain 5 or more kata. But when karate transmitted to Japan in the 1920s comprehensive systems were created in an effort to catalog every single known kata and by the later part of the 20th century systems like Shotokan had as many as 28 kata to be mastered as the Japanese took the existing body of knowledge and expanded upon it.
This was the “classical mess” Bruce Lee sought to simplify or abandon with his “Jeet Kune Do” concept. But in many ways, Lee simply rediscovered the wheel. If you go back to ore Meiji Japan no fighter devoted himself religiously to a single system, in fact survival meant knowledge of most systems or at least the fundamentals of most systems. In China when martial arts were a matter of life and death, nobody was concerned with creating and mastering overly complex techniques that would break down and falter when real resistance was encountered. They were interested in proven and established methods, especially applications which weren’t immediately obvious or predictable.
You could call what they did and their approach to martial arts “combatives.” Of course once a student has trained for several years and become proficient, the reality is he needs a teacher less and less. He simply has to continue his training to an effective level. It’s a lot like being shown the basics of defensive shooting, supervised over a few years of practice by an accomplished shooter and then learning to “make it all work and fit - for you.” Once this is done, continued practice is all that remains.
In the same way, with unarmed combat you reach a point where you don’t “need” a teacher anymore. But it’s hard to get monthly fees from somebody once they reach that point so elaborate “lifetime devotion” systems were created. Imagine if Larry Vickers expected everyone who trained with him to show up every week, 3-4 days for a couple hours and for you to do so for at least 5-7 years to be considered an “expert” and devote three to four decades for him to declare you a “master.”
Well that is kind of what a lot of martial art systems have attempted in order to maintain life long students and their tuition. Sounds crazy right? And this is why they are finding themselves largely abandoned and most commercial schools have been reduced to little more than motivational day care for children.
In order to teach what I consider martial arts the first thing I had to do was abandon my efforts to teach commercially. 80% of new students have no idea what real martial arts are and when they find out it sure isn’t something they want to pay for. So you either lose students when the hard work starts or you do your best to cater to their Shaolin temple, Karate Kid, Shaw Bros. expectation of what they think martial arts are.
The other problem is generally your most talented students don’t have a lot of money and the people who do have a lot of money see your instruction as a commodity they purchase that you service to them according to their expectations. The first contributes nothing to supporting your school, the second is almost impossible to teach.
So I stopped teaching for money. I accepted personal students only if they seemed to be good candidates who would survive the training. I recognized others who would simply be wasting their time, my time or both and referred them to a school that was more in line with their expectations.
And I still have personal students who began training with me in 1991. They haven’t needed a teacher for a long time now, but they are personal students and we enjoy training together as we explore our continued fascination with the martial arts. When I travel home to Iowa, I still train with students I began teaching in 1983, most of them have their own students of course.
And whenever they can find the time, my teachers will sometimes show up to work out with us. It’s a lot like Sunday dinner for Italians.
