Three Arenas, One Body: Vietnamese Martial Arts and the Trap of Classification

Inside a closed arena in Hanoi, at the weigh-in of a youth mixed martial arts event, I heard the breathing of an eighteen-year-old boy trying to keep his balance on the scale. He had gone nearly two days without food to drop into his weight class. His skin was the colour of old paper, his eye sockets sunken, yet he still smiled when the number landed exactly on the line. Two hours later, a few dozen metres away, another athlete performed a form before a panel of judges. No opponent. No one to knock down. Only stances, arm lines, and breaths scored for difficulty and performance quality. Both are called “martial arts.” Both wear a gi. But if I used the first man’s win–loss record to judge the second, I would have committed an irreversible mistake. People call that a methodological error. I call it the first trap for anyone trying to understand Vietnamese martial arts today.

I have followed East Asian martial arts for more than twenty years, from youth tournaments in Incheon to the Olympic and Asian Games, and what caught my attention in Vietnam was not the medal count. It was the way three systems with entirely different logic are being mixed under a single label: traditional martial arts, sanda, and mixed martial arts. This confusion is not harmless. It shapes selection, pay, athlete healthcare, and even how a twelve-year-old child is taught to understand what his own body is doing.

A stadium so quiet that I could hear the breathing of the fight itself — that was the feeling as I stayed behind after a training session of the youth traditional martial arts team. No cheering, no advertising boards. Only the master counting the rhythm, and the student repeating a stance for the two-hundredth time. Vietnamese traditional martial arts are heritage, cultural memory, something passed down through families and villages. But when they step onto the international stage, they are forced to adopt a rulebook: either performance, scored as a form, or combat, contested in rounds. Vovinam being added to the programme of the 31st Southeast Asian Games, hosted by Vietnam in 2026, was a milestone — but it also raised a question never fully answered: are we honouring a martial art, or packaging it into a sport according to international standards?

Sanda sits on a different floor. It is the combat discipline of the wushu family, allowing punches, kicks and throws, with referees, rounds and points. The logic of sanda is closer to boxing and kickboxing than to a form. Mixed martial arts — the discipline now surging in Vietnam through youth events — operates on yet another system: rounds, points, submissions, and something the other two rarely mention, the finish before the time limit. In a form, the very concept of knocking an opponent down does not exist as a goal. Three disciplines, three measuring sticks, three understandings of victory.

And this is where I want to pause a little longer, because it is the part most fans, even the ones who watch a great deal, skip over.

When data becomes the star, martial arts start being told in another language. In sanda or mixed martial arts, one can measure significant strikes landed per minute, takedown defence, knockdowns, control time. In traditional performance martial arts, those numbers are meaningless. What can be measured is the difficulty of a stance, balance, the decisiveness of a movement. Both are martial arts, but one side measures damage and the other measures lines. Applying a single yardstick to both is something any seasoned scout knows is wrong, yet in amateur news boards it happens every day. I once saw a ranking of young fighters built from exactly one column: wins. One column. No weight class, no opponent, no context. Such a column, in the end, is a way of lying with numbers.

People say raw jade must be polished, but I believe it already shines from the mud. The mud here is not a decorative metaphor. It is the reality of small gyms, of provincial talent classes, where a child is spotted for the way he stands, not for a tournament he won. The problem of Vietnamese martial arts is not a shortage of talent. The problem is that talent is measured with the wrong yardstick from the very first step.

I once witnessed this during a working visit with a youth national team. A coach showed me two students. The first won almost every domestic event, with a fine record, and the press called him a prodigy. The second lost more than he won, but every time he stepped onto the mat he used a stance no one had taught him. The coach told me: this one has no record to show off, but he has the thing that is hardest to teach. I interviewed both for a whole afternoon, and what I realised lay not in technique, but in how the adults around them assigned value. The one with the fine record got priority training slots, was sent to big events, received sponsorship. The other was placed in the reserve group. If we look only at the rankings, we will miss the second. That is why I no longer read a fighter through wins alone.

And once we speak of the body, we must speak of the thing every combat discipline hides under the mat: the weight cut.

The boy on the scale was not an isolated image. Rapid dehydration to make weight is common practice in mixed martial arts, boxing and sanda. The consequences are real and measurable: kidney failure, rhabdomyolysis, fainting at the weigh-in, and in the worst cases death. In developed martial arts nations, people have moved to measures such as multiple weigh-ins, weigh-ins close to fight time, and baseline weight tracking. In Vietnam, those measures are still new, still lacking, still dependent on the goodwill of each organiser. The highest price is always paid by young athletes, who do not yet understand their own bodies but have been taught that the number on the scale is everything.

Fear is harder to fix than the body. I have spoken with fighters returning after knee or shoulder injuries. The physical wound heals in a few months. But the reflex to dodge, the flinch before a blow, takes years to return, sometimes never. In football, this is measured in players who come back too soon after a torn ligament. In martial arts, it appears in those who return too soon after a knockout, and pay with their whole career. A coach once told me that what frightened him most was not the moment his student was knocked down, but the moment the student stood up too fast.

There is another layer rarely mentioned: the manager. In recent years, Vietnamese fighters have begun to have agents, contracts, images. That is progress. But the noise they create can also distort the market. A fight is staged not because two people deserve to meet, but because their story sells tickets. I do not oppose professionalisation. I only want to say that when a martial art moves from the training mat to the market, the first thing put up for valuation is not the technique, but its appearance.

This is where I must say what few want to hear. If there were only one change for Vietnamese martial arts in the next ten years, I would not choose investment in academies bearing a former star’s name, nor big-purse tournaments for publicity. I would choose systematic training of grassroots coaches, and the introduction of combat-sports medicine from the youth level. A gym with good coaches produces talent on its own; an academy with a famous name but no process produces only contracts. I say this not to deny the former fighters now opening gyms. I say it because I have watched enough to know: the halo of a name cannot replace the ability of a teacher.

In Incheon, where I once began, I learned this from a nineteen-year-old long jumper. I once sat for three hours just to hear him describe his textbook-wrong run-up. That piece was not built on a record, but on a technical detail the eye usually skips. It taught me that true value often lies where no one measures. Vietnamese martial arts are the same. If we look only at medals, we see a settled picture. If we look at unfinished stances, at children starving themselves to make weight, at talents benched because they have no record, we see a very different picture.

At forty I no longer chase transfer news, but slow down to hear the story behind the number. Perhaps that is why I now spend more time at empty training sessions than at finals. There, I hear more clearly who is truly growing, and who is merely chasing a medal to trade for a sponsorship slot.

So before closing, I want to pose one counter-intuitive question. A common assumption holds that to develop martial arts you must specialise, must choose one discipline, one weight class, one path. That is true at the elite level. But at the foundation level, I believe the opposite is true: it is diversity that expands human limits. A child who learns traditional martial arts to understand the body, learns sanda to learn contact, and only later chooses one discipline to specialise — that is a far healthier path than forcing a twelve-year-old to choose a weight class before he can choose himself. People often mistake diversity for a lack of focus. But in sport, diversity at the base and specialisation at the top do not conflict at all. What conflicts is forcing a child to specialise before he has the capital to specialise.

When I look back at those three arenas — the silent form arena, the sanda arena loud with referees, the mixed martial arts arena full of young spectators — I see they are not in opposition. They are three answers to the same question: how far can a human being go within his own limits. Sport, in the end, is the common language for answering that question. And in that language, what makes people stop is not a medal, but the moment a small body, sallow from dehydration, manages to stand upright on the scale and still wants to fight.

If someone asked me where to begin reforming Vietnamese martial arts, I would not answer with a tournament. I would answer with another question: are we teaching our children to believe in the number on the scale, or in the body that will have to stand behind that number for the next twenty years?