It used to be the case that if a person chose to do a particular martial art that they stuck with it for a long time. Rarely did they delve into a new martial art as it was considered to be an act of disloyalty. I remember myself when I was training at a particular Wing Chun place in the city I was scolded when they found out that I was also training jiujitsu and kick boxing. My response at the time was that “you are no teaching me anything new so I want to try something else as well. Besides I am a customer and a student of martial arts and I will do what I want”.

As we know MMA has since taken off. And although I don’t claim to be the catalyst behind it, it was like minded people that brought about this new phenomena. Which brings me to wrestling.

Martial arts used to be broken down into traditional and modern categories. Even though wrestling has its roots in ancient time and is far older then either karate or kung fu, it was often thrown in the modern camp. Ironically it was in the same company and boxing and kick boxing, two arts that historically are also far older then the “traditional arts”

These days wrestling is part of any serious mixed martial arts training regime. If you are not wrestling in one form or another then you are kidding yourself. The other day I saw a wing chun “master” questioning the need for training ground work. His absurd theory was that training to fight on the ground was akin to training to fight in the water. His thoughts were that wing chun is applicable every where. Even flying through the air. As a wing chun practitioner myself I felt embarrassed that this person was claiming to represent Wing Chun and disturbed that he was saying this to people who may very well believe him.

You see Wing Chun has a long history and has likely been refined over the years. Whilst it doesn’t have a ground work or wrestling element now you can bet your bottom dollar that those who utilised it as a facit of their training all those years ago also had some sort of wrestling training in their repertoire. Wing Chun would not have been the only element of their training, it would have been just one aspect of it and wrestling definitely would have featured prominently.

After Shoalin was burned down and the arts scattered for a long time the different system were isolated from one another and people began to think of them as competing arts and not complementary arts. This was a great loss to kung fu and martial arts as a whole as it stunted the evolution of martial art in China and by extension in the world. Thankfully fast forward 300 years and this split was rectified by MMA and the arts were once again unified.

If you want to be serious about your martial arts you must integrate some form of ground work or wrestling into your training. If you want to do wrestling then you need wrestling mats. If you need wrestling mats then a great choice is EVA interlocking jigsaw mats. And if you need interlocking EVA jigsaw mats then look no further then Ezy Mats or Southern Cross Mats. With these two gym mats suppliers you can’t go wrong. So in the future if you want interlocking jigsaw mats you know who to call.