Vietnamese Martial Arts: Two Scorecards, One Tunnel

Vietnamese Martial Arts: Two Scorecards, One Tunnel

7:15 on a Saturday morning, I stood in the corner of a training yard on Nguyen Chi Thanh Street, Da Nang. On the left, twelve students in white uniforms practised forms to the beat of a drum; the coach corrected every knuckle, every hip angle, every breath. On the right, behind a net, two young fighters sparred; gloves met dry and heavy, sweat spraying onto the wooden floor. Both groups said they were training in "Vietnamese martial arts." Neither was wrong. But if I walked over and asked one single question — how do you win — I would get two answers sitting in two frames of reference that cannot be converted into each other. One side measures by difficulty and quality of performance. The other measures by the result on a 10-point scorecard. I wrote that detail down and underlined it, because it explains more than any medal on the wall.

What I have observed over years of covering martial arts for the Vietnamese market is that people tend to lump three very different things under one word: "vo." The first is traditional martial arts and performance disciplines such as forms, paired routines and weapons — scored on technical difficulty and quality of execution. The second is modern combat sports such as boxing, Muay Thai, kickboxing and MMA — run on wins and losses, rounds and the 10-point system. The third is sanda, sitting in between, allowing punches, kicks and throws, scored by situation. These three logics need three different talent pipelines, three different training plans and three different pay structures.

Vietnam has all three. Vovinam has grown into a system present in many countries, with its own congresses and a clear ranking structure. Binh Dinh traditional martial arts and many other schools have kept their technical depth and resilient communities. On the combat side, Vietnamese boxing has produced faces who stepped onto the international stage, most notably Truong Dinh Hoang in professional title fights. Muay Thai has Nguyen Tran Duy Nhat, a former world champion and a familiar name to domestic audiences. Professional MMA now has a domestic arena organised under international formats.

But having all three is not the same as having all three thrive. The problem lies in the fact that a finite resource — time, coaches, money and audience attention — must be shared among three systems with different definitions of success. When three yardsticks are mixed into one record sheet, nobody knows exactly where they stand.

Separate them. In performance disciplines, a student's value lies in the difficulty and cleanliness of the movement; a beautiful form can score high without winning a single sparring bout. In combat sports, value lies in the result; a fighter can win with a single strike in thirty seconds and that is entirely valid. The best person in each of these two systems may never need, and never will need, the other's skills. When a federation places a forms medal next to a professional championship belt, it is comparing two units of measurement that are not of the same nature.

Numbers do not lie, we just have not asked them the right way. In my tracking notebook, I keep two separate sets of data: performance data (technical score, difficulty, deductions) and combat data (bouts, win rate, finish rate, minutes fought). When I tried to merge them into a single index, the result became meaningless: a forms medallist could rank above a fighter who had taken dozens of professional bouts, simply because the difficulty coefficient was higher. That index is not wrong arithmetically. It is wrong in meaning.

What is worth noting is that sanda — the hybrid discipline — is showing the clearest path. Because sanda both allows contact and scores by situation, it creates an intermediate scale: a traditional student can step into sanda without losing the whole foundation, and from sanda can transition to kickboxing or MMA. This is the technical bridge Vietnamese martial arts is missing. What is missing is not practitioners, but a connecting ladder.

Look at the organisational infrastructure and the gap becomes clearer. A young fighter who wants to make a living needs three things: a dense enough competition calendar, a clear enough contract and strong enough opponents. In many disciplines, all three are thin. Domestic events tend to run in intermittent batches, while a professional needs to compete regularly to maintain form and income. When the calendar is sparse, fighters must take second jobs, and training time is cut. That spiral feeds itself.

Based on my experience following bouts, what repeats after every weigh-in is not the fear of losing, but the worry about where, when and for how much they will fight after this one. Before asking who wins, ask who keeps discipline — and discipline only holds when there is a calendar to hold on to.

One more thing I always record: how the public treats fighters returning from injury. People often demand they "prove themselves" in the very first bout back. That demand sounds encouraging, but it pushes fighters back onto the mat sooner than their bodies allow and raises the risk of re-injury. In my notebook, I mark return bouts and track actual minutes fought against expectations. A fighter coming back after six months out rarely reaches the previous intensity in a single bout.

There is a common misunderstanding from the outside: many believe traditional martial arts are the barrier slowing Vietnam's professionalisation, that dropping forms would solve everything. I do not think so. Traditional martial arts are not a burden; they are the technical warehouse and the largest talent pool. The problem is whether a connecting ladder exists between that warehouse and the professional arena. Cutting forms does not produce professional fighters; it only removes half the foundation. The counterintuitive point here is: what needs cutting is not forms, but the habit of measuring everything with one ruler.

A second misunderstanding: that Vietnamese fighters lack physical quality. Watching strength sessions and sparring, I see the opposite — the base of many young fighters is entirely sufficient for three high-intensity rounds. What is missing is accumulated competitive experience, and experience only comes from bouts. A fighter with five bouts a year matures more slowly than one with twelve, even if they train identically.

Vietnamese audiences love martial arts, but that love is directed at short moments — a knockout, a flashy exchange — rather than an entire process. People remember the knockout. I remember what leads to the knockout: twelve weeks of training, a diet, a patient coach and a calendar that allows accumulation.

The bout ends, but the data does not. Every season is a chapter, and I am only the bookmark. What I am waiting for in the next phase is not another medal, but a denser competition calendar and a clear connecting ladder between systems. When an eighteen-year-old student can see the path from their own training hall to the professional arena — step by step, bout by bout, dong by dong — only then can we speak of a mature martial arts scene. For now, the task is to record accurately what is happening, rather than measure it with the wrong ruler.