I mean - consider for a second that we currently have the most comprehensive martial arts practice in all of history, with the largest humans, best sports science, and all that.
Any top UFC fighter from the past decade could probably beat the fuck out of anyone ever before the year 1980. Isn’t that wild? Dudes who have (probably) watched Rick and Morty could beat the piss out of Alexander The Great or whoever the fuck. And it wouldn’t even be close.
Biting and eye gouging is banned of course, but even if it wasn’t, Brock Lesnar isn’t letting you even get close to that. I mean, speaking of Brock, even big pro wrestlers - medieval blokes would shit their pants on sight if they saw Scott Steiner going freakmode off the roids. Perc Angle. Big Show - like what - he’s a literal giant.
But what about Mark Zuckerberg? He’s a big guy. He does his MMA. I think give him a month to train and send him back in time. Hate to hand it to him, but he would crush.
Ummmm… probably not? History is full of warrior societies where they are trained in combat from a young age. It’s something they train for their whole lives. The only thing really going for fighters today is the fact that we are bigger on average than we were back then. But even then there were big people still.
Trained in combat to the best that they knew - but it wasn’t a highly commercialised and ultra elite pathway. They didn’t have advanced fitness, muscle gain, and recovery methods or in depth knowledge of nutrition. They didn’t have replays to analyse their fights, or a globally interconnected web of the most effective martial arts at the click of a mouse.
Think of it like this - how many top MMA guys use exclusively ancient fighting methods? Greco Roman takes you so far. Judo takes you far. Sambos newer but based on a wrestling tradition. But no one’s using that exclusively. The mix of all the most efficient methods is absolutely lethal.
Cuba doesn’t have most of this and their boxers dominate at the Olympics
Yeah, look who isn’t at the Olympics for boxing - most of the actual professionals. The first Olympics to allow professional boxers was in 2016.
And of course Cuba does have access to all of those things - they have all of the information in the world at their fingertips, and Cuban boxing is such a proud tradition that their fighters are clearly eating and training well. Same goes for their wrestling - but wrestling is an ancient sport based on an entirely different and less versatile combat skillset than UFC.
Nah, their gyms and technology are genuinely like a century old
https://ktwb.com/2024/02/19/cuban-boxers-reveal-secret-to-their-success-from-modest-training-grounds/
regardless, it’s boxing, and Cubans rarely ever test their mettle against uber elites. The Olympics is not representative of boxing at all. And nutritional/gym technology is just one small edge… It is the encyclopedia of combat knowledge we have now that swings the pendulum.
MMA fighters are more entertainers if im being honest. I know it sounds funny given that we are calling them “MMA fighters”. These people put in a lot of effort, but the violence they take part in is highly controlled, regulated, and done in bursts. Soldiers across history are trained to give it their all at all times, and a single mistake costs them their lives. People in MMA don’t have to worry about these kinds of things.
But in that - soldiers are trained for long marches, firearms, swordfighting, prolonged fitness in battle, whatever it may be - they are not solely trained on hand to hand, and aren’t built purely to go hand to hand fresh off the buzzer. An elite UFC fighter is. And that is all they master, day in and out.
Yeah, there’s regulations, but remove them and you get goring kicks or elbows to the backs of heads that they used to do in early MMA days anyway. The controls are in place for the safety of both parties - because if they didn’t have those regulations they would easily end up killing each other.
If UFC fighters are more entertainers than they are fighters, then it would stand to the test that army men today could take them on. Or other hardmen from around the world. That isn’t the case. They are guys who get put in a cage for 5 minutes at the time, with the intent of annihilating their opponent. 5 minutes is a long time. If theres no referee, their trained chokes are lethal, their arm and leg locks are crippling. And they can do those submissions (and strikes) better than any human civilization in history.
Their training is bitch made. They spar light and only go hard once every few months
Past warriors survived dozens if not hundreds of real combat to the fucking death
MMA fighters are soft af. At least choose Muay Thai fighters, those guys do real fights dozens of times a year
I don’t get why any of that matters. You’re stepping into a cage fighting ring. All that matters is winning using your hands. Past warriors survived ACTUAL combat. They have far less experience in a cage fight setting.
The amount of fights means nothing. Muay Thai guys are tough, but put them in the cage with cage rules and they lose - if that wasn’t the case then the game would be FULL of muay Thai guys because UFC money is comparatively so much better.
A UFC fighter isn’t going to be intimidated by some warrior. It’s just another muscly guy in small pants. And they will take them down with a thesaurus of takedowns, and finish them off with the most efficient chokes the world has ever seen. It’s like arguing our modern athletes wouldn’t win in long distance, or swimming, or literally any sport - they would dominate it.
Liberal brained. Muay Thai fighters have way too much pride in their sport and culture to do this. Same reason why Cuban baseball players don’t defect enmasse to the MLB
Warriors are trained to kill, idk what the ruling would be if they punched Khabibs temple and he instantly dies but that’s the only way they lose is if that’s illegal
Material analysis brained. Follow the money. If Muay Thai bred a shit load of elite all rounders they’d go to the UFC. That’s what’s happened with every other martial art that’s fed into UFC. That’s why there’s so many foreign fighters populating the leagues - a 30k USD contract to get concussed isn’t worth much in America, but it buys you a home in many places in the world.
Blokes in the army are trained to kill… It doesn’t matter. How are they even reliably punching Khabib in the temple, when he has shown himself to clearly be very hard to even take down or knock out, let alone one-punch. Go for the punch, Khabib double legs takedowns and then starts mauling you with his utterly impeccable wrestling skills. Have you ever sparred? It’s fucking impossible when someone has a large skill gap over you.
Army men today shoot when they fight
Past soldiers engaged in close range physical combat
Primarily with swords and spears and daggers. You would never really be without some sort of stabbing armament, even if it was just some piece of debris you found on the battlefield.
yes, ancient warriors are going to do terrible at a sport they have no experience with
same if you threw them onto a soccer or football field
modern civilization is hyper-specialized.
for real
I would destroy Genghis khan at eSports
no but in the ring I’ll allow them everything but grabbing the bollocks