AFAIK, when they were all made to compete against each other in MMA it quickly became obvious that Brazilian jiu-jitsu was top dog. Although modern MMA definitely takes in the best techniques from each martial arts style.
Is agile the Brazilian jiu-jitsu of software development?
The best techniques for MMA, it's still a sport; more realistic than traditional boxing, but then that's a pretty low bar. I've been training martial arts for 25 years and I wouldn't put myself in there for all the money in the world. It's brutally violent, and the most successful fighters are very well trained and don't seem to give a shit about messing their opponents up for life; but it still has nothing to do with martial arts.
Wrapping your legs around your opponent's waist and rolling around on the ground for minutes ceases to be a good idea the second you leave the ring. While breaking fingers, ribs, poking eyes, punching throats and kicking knees and groins suddenly become viable options. In most cases; the sooner you can get the hell out of there the better, because the risk of getting into trouble increases fast in a street fight.
BJJ isn't defined by rolling around on the ground for minutes, it's defined by the importance of training against resisting opponents safely, which most traditional martial arts cannot or are not willing to do.
I am sorry but this eye poke, throat punch nonsense has been debunked over and over again: a) those things are not nearly as devastating as they sound and b) in a fight both people can do it, more so the person who has positional control. Browsing youtube searching for street fights where BJJ is used is pretty illuminating as to exactly how effective it is. Short of MMA there isn't anything else quite as useful, though you are right that getting the hell out is the best option if possible.
No it hasn't, because it works. Otherwise they wouldn't be forbidden in the ring, would they?
There's plenty of Bullshit Do out there, no doubt. But there is also plenty of useful knowledge and experienced teachers that you miss if you assume that everyone who came before you was a complete idiot.
Many martial arts were honed into more or less perfection over hundreds of years by people just as intelligent as you and me, but with generations of experience from actual mortal combat. Living another day is a pretty good motivation for training and evolving.
Much of that is still around, but it's not being marketed. Because it's not what most people are looking for, it's too real and ego-killing. Because it's barely allowed; you can't spar out in the open with real knives or swords for example, you'll end up in a cell before you know what happened. And because it's been Disneyfied, by people like Jack Mace and Master Wong.
Once you've spent tens of years really training martial arts, as opposed to sports or pretending in silly uniforms; there's not going to be much to prove any more. If there is, you're doing it wrong. I prefer not fighting, people get hurt best case. So I can't really show you anything that looks like MMA, because that's just not how we train. And we don't do competitions; because there are no winners; just two banged up idiots, one happy and one sad. But for whatever it's worth this is me with a private student 3 years ago:
Your point that martial arts originally came from real, life and death experience is well taken. But wouldn't you agree that when that component is taken out, without the hard sparing needed to keep things honest, any art will tend to degenerate and fall prey to hucksters? See TKD in America for example.
I don't buy the idea that we have to pound the crap out of each other in a ring to prove that everyone is honest about their skills.
If you want to learn anything, you definitely need to spar; but sparring is not a competition, no one is actually trying to hurt anyone. The more experienced your partner is, the harder you can go without risking injury.
TKD suffers from the same sports virus as MMA if you ask me; just a different, less violent and more exotic flavor.
AFAIK, when they were all made to compete against each other in MMA it quickly became obvious that Brazilian jiu-jitsu was top dog.
Not really. BJJ was very successful in the early days of what we now call MMA because everyone was playing a new sport with new rules and those rules allowed new tactics that were unfamiliar. BJJ's style of ground fighting was alien to practitioners of many other styles and they hadn't trained to defend against it, but also crucially, within the rules of MMA taking your opponent to the ground is something you can often achieve and with relative safety, so BJJers initially enjoyed a big natural advantage by being able to move the fight to their territory. Fighters from other styles quickly learned to sprawl, posture up on the ground, and so on, after which BJJ still offered effective techniques but wasn't nearly as dominant as it had been in the early days.
The analogy is quite flawed anyway, though. MMA is a great sport for those who enjoy it, but it's still a sport and still has its own rules. What works in the octagon, with a fence around the outside and a clean, flat floor, between exactly two fighters wearing fight-friendly clothing, when both are unarmed and neither is allowed to employ "dirty fighting" techniques is... well, not necessarily what would work without those rules, whether in a different sport or in any sort of real life altercation.
BJJ was the top dog twenty years ago, when half of the fighters had no grappling skills. Now that basic grappling skills are standard, BJJ-focused fighters aren't winning very much. It wasn't actually objectively best, it was just the least-bad in an undeveloped field.
Not really least-bad, probably just most unique. Almost every other style stops and resets after someone hits the ground, so BJJ went where the others didn't.
It was the same as Ronda Rousey dominating women's matches when that section of the UFC started up. It doesn't mean that Judo is "better" than the other styles, the other competitors simply didn't know what to do with it, and now they do.
It certainly has parallels to trendy new software engineering styles "dominating" the field, though I'm not sure they lead to any more real "victories" compared to actual combat. Just because the time runs out on a software project doesn't mean that anybody actually won.
I don't particularly agree that BJJ is the top dog solo sport. In the early days of MMA, it certainly outcompeted fighters who were boxers, kickboxers, karate experts, etc, but there was a notable absence of certain sports, such as combat sambo, until recently. Khabib has shown how effective it can be against high-level BJJ practitioners.
> Although modern MMA definitely takes in the best techniques from each martial arts style.
No, it doesn't.
Virtually all historical martial arts styles not compromising effectiveness to adapt to some social constraint focus heavily on weapons. (Heck, even most of those compromising effectiveness to adapt to a social constraint do, unless the specific social constraint is the needs of a group completely barred by law or convention from arms.)
The “martial” in “martial arts” means “pertaining to war”—when was the last war you’ve heard about fought in exclusively one-on-one hand-to-hand combat without weapons?
> Is agile the Brazilian jiu-jitsu of software development?
I would say the various concrete methodologies marketed as “Agile” have approximately the same relationship to software development as BJJ has to warfare, sure.
Is agile the Brazilian jiu-jitsu of software development?