One Ruler Is Not Enough for Every Arena: Dissecting the Three Analytical Frameworks of Martial Arts

At a press room in Incheon, a young colleague asked me a question I could not answer immediately: “What exactly is martial arts?” The question sounded naive, but it landed precisely on the spot where every analytical table I had ever built was quietly lying.

Picture three moments on the same tape. A taolu athlete completes a routine with a difficulty score of 3.4 and a performance score of 8.7 — the total is a number added and subtracted under a judging code. An MMA fighter ends a bout after 47 seconds of the first round with a choke. A sanda fighter wins 2-0 after three rounds, in which judges counted only legal strikes and deducted points for illegal throws. All three are called “martial arts”. And all three, in most articles I read, are analysed with almost the same vocabulary.

That was when I realised the problem is not the data. The problem is the lens. You cannot measure a routine by knockout rate, and you cannot read an MMA bout by difficulty score. When the label “martial arts” is used to bundle three disciplines with fundamentally different operating logics into one place, every analysis that follows begins to fail at the framework-selection stage.

Today I want to tell that story — not as a professional complaint, but as a dissection.

Context: why “martial arts” is a dangerous label

As a sports journalist, I always have to remember one basic rule: before analysing a sport, you must identify which rules it operates under. In football, that means offside and goals. In athletics, it means the clock and the distance. But with martial arts, that rule is often skipped for a very simple reason — the phrase “võ thuật” in Vietnamese, like “martial arts” in English, is an umbrella category that is far too wide.

From a technical perspective, this category can be split into at least three strands that differ in nature.

The first strand is performance martial arts, typified by taolu (Wushu). Here there is no opponent, only one athlete and a judging panel. The athlete competes against their own routine, and the ruler is technical difficulty plus performance quality. The score is a contract between the athlete and the code, not the outcome of a contest.

The second strand is rules-based combat martial arts, typified by sanda (also part of Wushu) and similar disciplines. Here there is an opponent and there is contact, but victory is not always decided by knockout. Most of the time, the result is determined by counting legal strikes and handling technical errors.

The third strand is full-spectrum combat martial arts, typified by MMA, professional boxing, kickboxing and Muay Thai. Here, victory is defined by fight-ending outcomes (knockout, technical knockout, submission) or by judges’ scorecards after a fixed number of rounds.

Sounds clear. So why, in reality, are these three strands still treated as one?

For three reasons. First, the media — especially social media — prefers short labels for display optimisation. “Martial arts” is far more compact than “performance martial arts”, “sanda” and “MMA”. Second, general audiences usually care only about the shared emotion of martial arts — discipline, hard training, the spirit of overcoming adversity — and none of that distinguishes Wushu from MMA. Third, analysts themselves are sometimes lazy. Instead of building a separate framework for each discipline, they copy the familiar vocabulary — records, win rates, knockout rates — and apply it to everything.

I understand that appeal. But I have seen its cost.

In 2026, while I was a statistics student in Incheon, I wrote a long analysis of a regional Wushu event in which I used competition results to rank taolu athletes. I remember a reader commenting that my ranking was “as meaningless as scoring a dancer by wins”. At the time I was annoyed. But they were right. I had applied a fight-arena framework to a performance stage, and I had not noticed.

Since then, I always ask myself the first question before writing anything about martial arts: what does this discipline measure?

Core analysis: three frameworks, three invisible languages

After several years, I have systematised them into three frameworks. I do not present them as a rigid formula. I present them as three different ways of looking at the same background.

Framework one: difficulty score, performance score and the loneliness of the performer

In taolu, an athlete’s result is split into two components. The difficulty component assesses quantifiable elements — the number of acrobatic moves, the complexity of balance techniques, the level of execution. The performance component assesses something far harder to quantify — speed, amplitude, decisiveness, rhythm, and what Korean coaches call “jeonggi”, the aura that creates pressure even in stillness.

The interesting thing is that here, data does not tell its story through ratios. It tells its story through drift. You can look at a scorecard and see that an athlete lost 0.2 on difficulty but compensated with 0.3 more on performance. That is a story about the strategic trade-off between risk and safety — and it has absolutely no room for the concept of “knockout”.

When I sat in the third row of an arena in Jincheon, watching a young taolu athlete perform a sword routine, I suddenly understood why people call this martial arts. He was not hitting anyone. But he was fighting the harshest version of himself. And the judges, despite a transparent scoring scale, still had to do something an MMA referee never has to do: issue an expert aesthetic judgement.

That is why a raw statistical table is never enough for taolu. Numbers can only tell the visible part. The submerged part — the thing that decides between 8.7 and 8.9 — lies where statistics cannot reach, unless you know what this discipline is measuring.

Framework two: strike counting, error handling and the fragile boundary of sanda

Sanda sits in the transition zone between performance and full-spectrum combat. It has opponents, contact and knockouts — but most bouts are decided by points. A three-round sanda bout is not a race toward a finish. It is a race to accumulate legal points without making mistakes.

Here, the data set becomes far richer. You can measure legal kicks per round, successful throws, deducted errors and — most importantly — the win rate of a primary technique. But there is one big trap: sanda looks like a simple kickboxing bout, while in reality it is a combination of striking and grappling. A fighter can lead on striking points, then lose everything by conceding two consecutive throws.

In my experience covering sanda bouts, I have found that what decides the outcome is usually not which fighter hits harder. It is which fighter controls distance better. Distance — that invisible thing no statistical table displays clearly — is the protagonist of this discipline.

I once watched a fighter lead 8-4 after two rounds at a domestic event. In round three, he lost composure, rushed into the clinch and was thrown twice. He lost 9-10. A summary written a year later could easily say he was “mentally weak”. But if you examine the footage of each exchange, the cause was not psychology — it was a wrong tactical decision at the thirtieth second of round three, when he chose to close the distance exactly as his opponent launched a signature throw.

That is the kind of story metrics cannot tell. It is not the fault of the metrics. It is the fault of the person who reads metrics without reading context.

Framework three: finish rate and the multi-layered truth of MMA and boxing

This is the most familiar terrain. In MMA and professional boxing, victory is clearly defined, and the language of statistics is more developed than anywhere else in combat sports. You have win-loss records, knockout rates, submission rates, average rounds per fight, strikes absorbed, knockdowns, takedown defence rates.

But precisely because the statistical language is rich, this is also where mistakes are easiest to make — because abundant data creates a sense of understanding without guaranteeing understanding.

A fighter with a 20-3 record and an 80% knockout rate sounds like a monster. But if that fighter’s three losses came against the same kind of opponent — those with good takedown defence and the ability to maintain distance — then that 20-3 record says nothing about the upcoming fight. It only says something about the quality of the opponents faced.

This is the lesson I learned while building my own prediction models. In sports analysis, people often ask: “Who is stronger?” But the better question is: “Stronger in what context, against what type of opponent, at what stage of a career?”

The danger of martial arts statistics lies not in numbers being wrong, but in correct numbers being used to answer the wrong question.

I remember a late evening, rewatching footage of a major lightweight bout. The statistical overlay showed one fighter landing 120 strikes, the opponent only 85. It looked like a one-sided fight. But when I replayed it round by round, I saw clearly that most of the 120 were thrown while being pushed to the cage, while the 85 were thrown from an offensive position. The actual fight played out the opposite of the stats overlay. And the winner on the scorecards was the one with fewer landed strikes.

That night I sat for a long time after turning off the machine. Fourth place haunts me more than any gold medal, because it is a story of resilience — and in this case, the gap between number and truth was equally resilient.

A counter-intuitive angle: three frameworks, three blind spots, and what nobody wants to admit

At this point, the story seems simple: use the right framework for the right discipline. But reality is more complex, and I want to be honest about that.

Every framework has a blind spot. And that blind spot is often concealed by the very overconfidence of the person using it.

With taolu, the biggest blind spot is disguised subjectivity. The difficulty scale sounds very objective — there is a code, there are thresholds, there is process. But in the performance component, the judges still have to use aesthetic judgement. And because of that, part of the result is always human — where memory of an athlete, a nation, a tradition can subtly influence scores.

With sanda, the blind spot is the confusion between “control” and “passivity”. A skilled fighter can win by controlling tempo, timing strikes and defending solidly. But audiences, and the media too, often prefer those who charge in. The result: beautifully technical wins are seen as “boring”, while reckless losses are seen as “brave”.

With MMA and boxing, the blind spot is what I call “the halo of the big number”. Because there are so many metrics, analysts tend to pick the most impressive rather than the most relevant. Knockout rate is always more attractive than takedown defence rate — but in a specific fight, the boring metric is the key.

And here is the contradiction I want to put on the table: the more you specialise in one discipline, the more you risk losing the ability to see that discipline from the outside. Meanwhile, standing between multiple disciplines offers an inverse advantage — you see patterns that specialists miss, but you lack the technical depth for fine judgement.

I have never run a single step in my life, yet I understand how to touch the finish line with my heart. But I must admit: understanding with the heart does not replace understanding with a rulebook. Both need each other. And the job of a sports writer is to stand precisely at that intersection.

Every sporting record is a reminder: a limit is only a whisper that has not yet been heard. But that whisper must be placed in the right room with the right sound system. Put it in the wrong room, and you will hear noise.

Why this matters more than an academic debate

You may think this is just about classification. But it has practical consequences.

First, it affects how a fighter is evaluated. If a journalist uses an MMA framework to read a sanda bout, a points winner can be described as “lacking finishing power” — when finishing power is not the goal of that discipline.

Second, it affects how a discipline develops. When the media always judges every sport by the knockout standard, points-based disciplines come under pressure to change their rules for more finishes — and that can destroy their technical identity.

Third, it affects the audience itself. An audience that understands three frameworks will watch three disciplines with three different eyes. An audience with only one framework will always feel something is missing, and will blame the discipline instead of the lens.

During transfer windows and major tournament cycles, the louder the noise, the easier the signal is buried. Fans are drowning in rumours — and what they need is not more news, but a filter. A first filter: what is this discipline measuring?

From that fourth-place finish in Tokyo, I learned that quiet failures often carry more information than loud victories. Tokyo did not give him a medal, but it gave me a story to tell forever. And in that story, I am not allowed to use the wrong ruler.

What remains after the tape is switched off

I do not believe in turning sport into a maths problem with only one answer. These three analytical frameworks are not three boxes to lock three disciplines inside. They are three languages. And like all languages, they are only useful when the speaker knows which language they are speaking, to whom, and for what purpose.

Sport is a dream that has been quantified; I am merely someone who records that dream in words. But to record it correctly, I must know what that dream is measured by — the difficulty of a movement, a legal throw, or a single moment of a fight ending.

The question I leave with the reader, and with myself in every next article, is not “who is stronger”. It is: are we applying a ruler to an arena that was never designed for it — and do we even realise we are doing it wrong?

Emotion is a glass vessel; only by holding it steady can we tell the story. And perhaps a correct ruler is also a way of holding the vessel — so that emotion does not spill over and blur the truth.