The Data Silence in Vietnamese Martial Arts

On the fourth training session of the week, in a small gym tucked deep in an alley of Bình Thạnh District, the coach still takes notes in white chalk on an old board: the fighter's name, the number of rounds, a few abbreviations for strikes. No column records heart rate. No line measures reaction delay after each collision. More than four thousand kilometres away, in a gym in Tokyo, I once saw a twelve-column spreadsheet for exactly the same kind of session — weight before and after, strikes landed, rest intervals between rounds, even room temperature. The same punch. Two ways of recording it. And quite possibly, two different futures. Every sports story begins with a forgotten number — but in Vietnam, that number is often never written down at all. For years, Vietnamese martial arts have lived on memory. Coaches pass on their craft through direct observation, correcting each movement by eye and by hand, keeping records in notebooks gone yellow with age. That approach has produced fighters capable of standing on the top step of the regional podium — where courage, endurance and the ability to absorb punishment sometimes matter more than any metric. But when they step onto the continental and world stage, the gap that appears is not in spirit, but in something few people see: an information system. Vovinam, the martial art founded by Nguyễn Lộc in 2026 in Hà Nội, now exists in dozens of countries and stages its own world championships. That is a rare achievement for a Vietnamese traditional martial art on the international map. But alongside that spread, the system for recording results and analysing opponents still rests largely on the personal experience of individual masters rather than a shared database. The result is that each school understands the art in its own way, each tournament evaluates it differently, and no one can answer the simplest question: over the past ten years, which techniques have brought Vietnamese fighters the most wins, and at what moment do they lose most often? In Japan, where I work, an amateur fighter has had a continuous record since the age of fifteen: weight by month, bouts by year, injuries by location. When they enter a national tournament, the coaching staff knows exactly which side the opponent favours, whether he prefers to close the distance or keep it, and in which round he fades. In Vietnam, most of that information still lives inside a few heads, and disappears with them. On the regional stage, the story is usually told through courage. A Vietnamese fighter wins through spirit, through endurance, through the way he rises after every knockdown. Those stories are beautiful, and they are true. But they also conceal a more uncomfortable truth: courage can win a single bout, but it cannot replace years of systematic preparation. When continental opponents bring the same courage, plus data and a denser competition calendar, the gap can no longer be closed by willpower alone. Combat sports are a discipline of forgotten numbers. A fighter may win seven of ten bouts, but if six of those come in the first round, the real question is not how much he wins, but what he has left when the fight goes long. Third-round win rate, average rest intervals between exchanges, reaction delay after taking a heavy shot — these are the metrics that retell a fight in a way a scorecard never can. I once spent weeks rewatching footage of a young fighter, and what caught my attention was not the beautiful winning exchanges but a very small habit: after each time he was pushed back, he retreated an extra half-step on his right foot before regaining balance. Just half a step. But across twelve rounds, that half-step added up into a distance an opponent could read, and exploit. This is the kind of information a good coach can sense but cannot prove. And when it cannot be proved, it cannot be corrected systematically, nor passed on to the next generation. In Japan, each such discovery is recorded, cross-referenced, and becomes part of the curriculum. In Vietnam, it usually ends as a spoken reminder, then fades with time. When everyone looks at the victory, I look for where they hide the weakness. In martial arts, the weakness is rarely in the weakest punch. It lies in the rest between rounds, in the way a fighter breathes when cornered, in his expression when the referee steps in. Those signals only become data when someone is patient enough to sit down and write them as numbers. Weight is another example. In combat sports with weight classes, cutting weight the wrong way is the silent cause of no small number of defeats. A fighter who drops weight too fast can step onto the mat with slower reflexes and a clear drop in stamina in the final round. If the coaching staff tracks weight week by week, they will see the body drifting off course long before the opening bell rings. If they only weigh in on fight day, they see the result, not the process. I remember an evening in Tokyo, when the whole production team sat rewatching a fight. On screen were blazing exchanges, and everyone cheered at every landed shot. I kept my eyes on the moment a few seconds earlier — the fighter lowering his shoulder, shifting his centre of gravity, drawing a long breath. Those signals repeated like a habit, and once you notice them, you can predict the next strike. The data is not in the punch. It is in what happens before the punch. This is precisely the space Vietnamese martial arts are leaving empty. Not because Vietnamese people lack the ability to observe — on the contrary, Vietnamese coaches often see what machines cannot. The problem is that those observations are not systematised. They stay in one person's head, sometimes becoming oral instinct, but never shared property. A martial art that wants to go far must turn one generation's instinct into data for the next. I have been fortunate to stand on both sides of that wall — training in Vietnam, observing in Japan — so I understand that the difference is not in talent. Vietnam does not lack good fighters. What it lacks are notebooks kept diligently, analysis sessions not cut short for lack of funding, and a belief that even a small number deserves to be written down. Yet if I only said Vietnam needs more data, I fear I would be saying half a sentence. Data does not create fighters by itself. A twelve-column spreadsheet beside a sparse competition calendar is just expensive decoration. The root problem of Vietnamese martial arts lies in there being too few high-calibre bouts — too few chances to clash with opponents of equal level, often enough and regularly enough, for any metric to become meaningful. Measuring a man who fights only three times a year is like measuring the breathing of a man standing still. In Japan, data draws its power from being tied to a dense competition system and a clear career pathway. Copying the spreadsheet while ignoring that framework solves nothing. The real problem lies in structure, not in software. Names like Nguyễn Trần Duy Nhất and Trương Đình Hoàng have helped Vietnamese martial arts become better known, but they are exceptions built on individual effort, not products of a system. Martial arts are one of the rare common languages that Vietnamese and Japanese people both speak fluently, even with different accents. What is worth doing is not imitating another's spreadsheet, but learning to listen to ourselves — recording what we do well, what we hide, and the silences between rounds too. The story lies in the person inside the silence. If we begin to write it down, the next generation of fighters will not have to start again from zero.