Why do most western fights (e.g. wrestling, swordplay) seem like 2 bodies smooshing into eachother while eastern fighting (e.g. martial arts, fist fights) look compartmentalized and light?
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Western fights are brawn (quantity) while eastern fights are brain (quality).
This is a generalization and there are exceptions.
Have you ever heard of this thing called sumo wrestling?
There is no catchall way of separating fighting styles between west and east.
Western martial arts were more centered around being stronger than your opponent. They wrestled. Boxers squared off and hit each other in the head until one gave up. To be a man was to be strong and overpower your opponent. The struggle was your strength against theirs.
Eastern martial arts were more focused on the mastery of a skill. You devoted yourself to your art. So you showed off by demonstrating how your movements and distinctive school fought and could win against others. The struggle was your skill against theirs.
Y’all have never been in a swordfight, and it shows.
OP, you’re begging the question a bit and I’m curious what fights you’ve been watching that you characterize Western fighting styles as “two bodies smooshing into each other.”
Let’s take swordfighting as an example (I’m speaking here of knights-in-armor type swordfighting instead of, say, Olympic fencing). Swordfighting is a head game: if you just try to batter your opponent into submission you’re going to tire yourself out long before you accomplish anything. It is very, very hard to land a respectable shot on any moderately competent opponent in their guard, and this fact forms the core of it.
Defensively, your primary skill is in maintaining your guard. Every time you make a move you get pulled out of your guard, and in that moment you’re vulnerable. Likewise, any time your opponent strikes you it pulls you out of your guard at least a little. So you need to get good at minimizing how far out of guard you get and how long you’re out of guard. Minimize your reactions, reset quickly.
Offensively, your primary skill is pulling your opponent out of their guard. There are direct ways of doing this, such as bashing someone’s shield aside, but those aren’t nearly as effective as you might think. Mostly you accomplish this by maneuvering them into a position where they can’t effectively get back into guard (ex., their arms get tangled up) or they can’t get back into guard quickly (ex., they overextended on a strike). If you do that, you create an opening you can get a kill shot into. Of course, you have to do all of this while maintaining your own guard lest you suffer a terminal case of steel poisoning.
I’ve never been much for boxing or MMA, but once I became accustomed to thinking that way about swordfighting I started spotting some similarities in those sports. Boxing is a lot about maintaining guard and trying to get your opponent out of guard. Much like swordfighting, you can batter at your opponent’s forearms all you like but you won’t get anywhere until you connect with their chin.
I suspect a lot of the *perception* that Western martial arts are cruder and bashier than Eastern ones comes from their handling in movies. Ironically, I think it’s in part because moviemakers tend to be less familiar culturally with Eastern martial arts, so when they want to make a kung fu movie they figure they’d better hire someone who knows what they’re talking about. But when it comes to something like swordfighting they *more or less* know what the deal is so they don’t feel the need to bring in consultants, which is how you get nonsense like people swinging swords like they weigh fifty pounds.
There is no real truth to what you’re describing. You’re just getting a bit of confirmation bias and rolling with it to lump thousands of types and styles of martial arts into two categories you invented.
FWIW, eastern martial arts are overwhelmingly played for sport. The competitors are allowed to kick and punch, but they are prohibited from making real contact and “going to the ground.” There’s a reason you don’t see anyone show up to an MMA fight and use Wushu. While the gymnastics are great at building discipline and athleticism, they are not practical. Even people who have studied martial arts for many years tend to resort to basic punches, kicks, and holds because “basic” is what works.
If you watch MMA… and ESPECIALLY UFC 2, you will notice that many, many fights finish on the ground. People who want to do martial gymnastics aren’t interested in learning that. Sports like Tae Kwon Do, Karate, Judo, and Fencing all require the participants to stop once they score a hit or perform a throw. They don’t fight to the ground to beat someone’s face in or break a joint, which is why guys like Royce Gracie were dominant in the early days of UFC. People who grew up doing sport Karate were not prepared for an unstructured fight.
Bit generalised. But asian martial arts like karate and whatnot are basically dancing combined with fighting. It’s a form of art that is spiritual or serves another purpose besides simply fighting.
Western arts for the most part (things like fencing are a bit more refined) don’t have that. They are all about defeating the opponent
There is a lot of ignorance in this thread.
Asian martial arts look light and flashy because they’re either not tested or they are tested under rules that promote unrealistic attacks (I.E. Tae Kwon Do). Look at San Shou for an example of what Asian martial arts look like when they’re tested in competition: much different than all the untested forms of Kung Fu. And if you really want to see Asians smooshing each other, look up arts like Muay Thai and Lethwei.
For an example of the same watering-down happening to Western martial arts, look at pro-wrestling, which used to be a legitimate martial art called catch-wrestling. Pro-wrestling is no different than Wushu or any other martial art that doesn’t pit it’s practitioners against each other. These systems develop flashy looking techniques because they don’t need to be effective.
Western martial arts tend to be sports (which have never been mythologized by cinema) and so they resemble athletes attacking each other and do not possess any sort of mysticism.
Even boxing has changed: before gloves protected the fighters’ hands, matches used to possess much fewer head punches. Fighters used body punches and wrestling throws to wear down their opponents in order to achieve a knock out, which is easier against an exhausted opponent. Basically, the less rules a martial art has, the more they resemble each other.
TL;DR Every sport martial art looks like it does because of the rule set. Every non-sport martial art looks like it does because its practitioners never get tested and their training doesn’t need to be practical..
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