What Does Functional Arts Offer For People Wanting Self Defence?

Why Functional Arts as opposed to learning one art in its traditional way?

Functional is opposed to traditional. Traditional means sticking to the past, with doing things they way that they have been handed down from teacher to student, since time immemorial. It is often about preserving a 'canon' of techniques.

Functional Arts emphasises learning concepts and material for experimentation and play. The practitioner as a living entity comes before the adherence to 'dead' techniques even if they are useless.

We all know what Bruce Lee's Tao of Jeet Kune Do had to say about the traditional!

Functional is not the same as 'sport based.' We do not necessarily train for athletic competition, although we can adapt our training for competition needs. We recognise that sports impose parameters on combat. Even no holds barred MMA fighting, which is the closest representation of all out combat in society, modifies how human beings approach combat. Have you seen slams, takedowns and suplexes being performed in cage matches where the thrown person recovers instantly and pulls guard or stands back up? I always wonder about how the result would be different if the fight took place on the pavement. That slam would most likely be a fight ender. What about if there were multiple opponents? Would it be a good idea to use your ground game in the same way? What about the fact that the environment contains objects that might be used as weapons or otherwise might affect the outcome?

If our arena is life then we cannot only prepare for the cage.

Functional means recognising limitations.

Every art has limitations. Boxers 'break' when they are in the clinch, thai boxers do not. Thai boxers do not train for ground fighting. Almost all martial arts do not sufficiently factor in weapons as a range of combat. Functional martial arts is about recognising all limitations, including our own! Rather than believing that we have the truth and others are misled, we are about ruthless evaluation based on what works.

If something doesn't work, let's discard it. Let's look at the concepts behind why something works and apply those concepts to our training, rather than following a bunch of techniques because that is our 'style`.