Three Streams of Vietnamese Martial Arts and the Trap of One Shared Word

Three Streams of Vietnamese Martial Arts and the Trap of One Shared Word Late one afternoon in a small training hall tucked deep in an alley off Nguyen Thien Thuat Street in Nha Trang, I sat in the last row, my lined notebook open on my lap and a two-colour pen clipped to my shirt pocket. On the floor, a nineteen-year-old fighter named Tran Nhat Minh was running through his form one more time before an assessment. He did not punch or kick; he only turned, sank into his stance, then stopped on a single beat. The coach said nothing, only tapped his pen lightly on the wooden edge of the platform. I wrote in my notebook: “15:42 — stopped exactly on the beat, not one movement wasted.” Three days later, in the same city, I was at another floor. There, a sanda fighter named Le Hoang Phuc drove a kick into his opponent's ribs, the referee separated them, and on the scoreboard the points were added by an entirely different logic. Both afternoons are called “martial arts,” yet they cannot be measured with the same ruler. That is what I want to tell today. Every season has its own pulse; you only need to be willing to listen. Three streams living side by side In this trade I learned one simple thing: name it wrong and you analyse it wrong. Vietnamese martial arts today hold at least three major streams living together, and each runs on its own logic, almost impossible to place on a single scale. The first is modern combat sports: boxing, Muay Thai, kickboxing, and mixed-discipline floors. There the central question is win or lose, a knockout finish or a points decision, and what the finishing rate looks like. A fighter is measured by wins, the quality of opponents, and the ability to end a bout early. The second is performance, which insiders call forms. There is no direct opponent. Scoring weighs difficulty, precision, and quality of execution. A beautiful spinning turn can be worth more than a heavy punch, because the ruler is technique and artistry, not fighting effectiveness. The third is sanda — a combat discipline allowing punches, kicks and throws. It sits between the other two: it has direct combat, yet carries within it the technical system of traditional martial arts. For that reason, sanda is the most misunderstood of all. All three appear on Vietnamese floors, all are called by the same two words “martial arts,” yet they share no scoring system, no training philosophy, and not even a definition of victory. Where the ruler actually sits Sitting in the last row of the forms assessment, what I recorded was not the kick. I recorded the breathing. The fighter stopped on time, held his balance, and more importantly kept control of his body through every movement. In the performance stream, the reliable data is not the result but the stability of the movement across repetitions. A form is scored on whether the athlete can reproduce that same movement on the tenth attempt. In the combat floor, by contrast, I count how many strikes a fighter throws and how many land. Based on my experience covering these bouts, in the last three fights of one young striker, landed strikes per minute dropped sharply in the third round — a sign of fading stamina, not fading skill. This is the kind of data fans usually overlook, yet it says more than the final scorecard. Over a recent season I ran my own tally: in the combat group, the share of bouts ending before the limit runs clearly higher than those left to the judges. That number does not say one fighter is better than another; it only says that in the combat stream an early finish is part of the rules of the game. In the performance stream there is no notion of an early finish at all, because every routine runs the full distance from start to end. Sanda demands I watch both. A sanda fighter can win by strikes, but can also win with a well-timed throw. Points are added by how effective a technique is, and a clean throw is sometimes worth more than three landed punches that cause no effect. I remember once following a Vietnamese team to a regional arena. Before competition, the coaching staff handed each athlete a sheet stating the rules applying to their weight class. The sheets differed from event to event. Outsiders saw only a squad in matching uniforms; insiders saw three rulebooks stacked on top of one another. That small detail — a different sheet for each class — is exactly what I always record, because it reminds me that there is no single shared ruler at all. According to data published by the organisers of a regional multi-sport games, combat events are divided by weight class, and each class applies its own rules on the number of rounds and the scoring method. This is a fact I always re-check before writing, because mix up one weight class and the entire analysis behind it goes wrong. A common misunderstanding from outside What outsiders usually get wrong: they assume all fighters are alike, that years of training automatically make someone good at fighting. I have sat through enough sessions to know that is not true. Someone who has trained forms for ten years may have beautiful body mechanics yet has never stepped onto a combat floor. Conversely, a professional striker can win again and again without knowing a single traditional form. When writers fail to separate these three streams, they accidentally fold different stories into one headline. They write about a performance athlete as if he is about to enter the ring, or describe a striker as an artist. The result is that readers are misled, and the fighters themselves are placed under expectations that were never theirs. A young colleague once asked me why I did not report on a fighter who was going viral. I answered that I did not yet know under which rules he competed. The answer made him laugh. Three months later, when the event took place, people realised he only performed forms, and did not fight. Public trust had been misplaced over one vague word: “martial.” That is why I write slowly. I write slowly because I want to remember for a long time, like someone keeping the beat for the whole field. The next internal signal Now, whenever I sit at a Vietnamese floor, I ask myself three questions: what are the rules here, what is the ruler, and how did the winner actually win. Those three questions keep me from confusing three streams that were never the same. An empty arena, yet I hear the applause of those who refuse to give up. Vietnamese martial arts do not lack good people. What is missing is writers patient enough to tell them apart. When we name each stream correctly, we finally see the true pulse of each, and can finally respect the fighters who have quietly walked their own path.