What is the difference between martial arts and martial sports? Martial art teaches you principles that you can apply to life skills. Martial art teaches you principles that you can apply to life skills....
Martial art teaches you principles that you can apply to life skills. So that when you leave the dojo, you can walk out and apply what you have learned in the dojo. That's where I think sports is lacking. In that very often now with professional athletes, they've got drug problems and money problems and all sorts of behavior problems and issues. And if they do well while they're playing their sports for five or six years that's an amazing feat in itself. But as soon as they're done, they gain all sorts of weight, they lose all of their health, and they don't know how to handle their money. So, they are not taught the principle things to apply to life. It becomes a game of winning and losing and it stays on the field when they leave. The art transitions more into everyday life.
Martial sports would be a martial art school that focusses on tournament fighting. They go for trophies. They're the best if they beat the other person as opposed to the art where they focus on the individual. If you and I go to the martial art school to study the art, we are competing with each other. We can use each other for drills and things like that, but we are going to be working to improve ourselves and we are going to be two different individuals with different goals and body types and all sorts of things. You may be going to gain weight and I am going to lose weight, who knows. But in sports, if you take the first place you leave thinking that you're the best. The other people leave thinking may be that you're the best too and they are not as good. It's more about winning and losing and it just loses the art part. I always joke and say it's like yoga in the Olympics because yoga is an art. It would be really funny to watch people do yoga and compete against each other. They would focus on who has the coolest outfit.
You see a kata, it's beautiful in its art form. But now you see a sport where people compete against each other with kata and it's who screams the loudest and who has the shiniest uniform, who has the coolest music and light show going on or who has got the shiniest weapon. It's missing the internal elements. It's missing the principle things that the art was developed for and now it becomes show and external. So, I think that the art has much more substance than the sport.
