Why are Kung Fu fighters so bad in MMA?

Kent Fung, bummed around the martial arts world for a few decades. Seen a lot, learned a bit.
Answered May 16, 2014 Upvoted by Robert Larson Jr, self defense instructor and Garrick Saito, studied
Kenpo Karate (10 yrs)
There are a few reasons:

Many don't train intensely enough.

There aren't a lot of kung fu guys out there putting the same number of hours in on a daily basis; and even when
they do put in the hours, they don't do the things that are necessary for MMA success. Grueling things. Things
that, for most people, are painfully unpleasant. Things like lots of sparring. At least some hard-contact sparring.
Lots of hard (in kung fu parlance, "external") strength and conditioning.

Side rant: in the recent half century or so, there's been this lazy idea common in kung fu circles that "Oh, we
have internal training so we don't need to have muscles or cardiovascular endurance. Look at [legendary fighter
from 100-300 years ago who trains the same style as me!]" What they don't realize is that [legendary fighter]
became legendary because he put in very similar types and quantities of painful, grueling training that today's
MMA fighters do. As a Taijiquan fighter once remarked, "You don't think the Yangs [e.g., the family that
founded the very real combat method Yang-family Taijiquan] just stood there doing nice slow forms in the park
to learn how to fight, do you? That's just what they showed the public. Then they went home, closed the doors
so nobody could see, and did the really hard stuff!"

In any case, I think it's obvious that if most kung fu guys don't train hard enough, long enough, or intensely
enough, they're going to fail at MMA. As they say, "Conditioning is the best technique," and "fatigue makes
cowards of us all." Need I say more on this?

Kung fu wasn't designed for the rules that govern MMA.

Here I'm not talking about stupid "lethal technique" excuses, as in "Oh, if only I could have used by eye gouges
and crotch kicks and my throat grabs, he would have been a goner!" (No, idiot, he wouldn't. You got your ass
handed to you, and no amount of finger jabbing or soccer-style testicle punting was going to change that. And
for the love of god, please don't start with the "I didn't want to use my iron palm/delayed death touch/dim mak
on him" bullshit.)

I am, however, talking about actual differences between combative clashes and sport fighting. As Isaac has
noted, one of the most obvious differences is that MMA rules make it safe for -- and thus give an advantage to -
- grapplers of all sorts. These include: guaranteed one on one clashes; nice clean, flat, soft surfaces; guaranteed
no weapons (most particularly, no small, hidden blades); and plenty of time. In the UFC, a fighter is prohibited
from kicking or stomping a downed opponent, which again makes things more favorable for grapplers

In contrast, kung fu was developed for situations where you: had to worry about your opponent's buddies
jumping in (whether they were there from the start or came by later); might be fighting on surfaces or in areas
that are unconducive to ground grappling; had to consider that your opponent might have a small, sharp blade
hidden on his person that he would happily and stealthily slide into various soft bits on your body if you were
stupid enough to enter grappling range with him; and needed to always, always try to finish a clash one way or
another as fast as possible (so you could leave before either the authorities or your opponents' buddies arrived,
or because you were fighting on a battlefield.)

Let me digress and note that you really, really didn't want to be around when the authorities arrived back in
ancient China. There was no due process then, no such thing as human rights (yes, I know, these things are
lacking in China now, too), and once you were detained, you might never come out alive. As an example of
how that influence the development of kung fu, let's note that many believe wing chun kung fu was developed
specifically to avoid such a circumstance. Many historians now believe wing chun techniques were developed
for assassins trying to overthrow the Qing dynasty. Not to kill -- the assassins used weapons for that -- but in
case they were discovered before they could get away. Troops would clearly be highly interested in taking you
alive, so they could question you in all sorts of unpleasant ways: that meant trying to grab and detain you.
Wing chun was developed for that worst case scenario where the assassin was 1) discovered; 2) lost all his
weapons; and 3) nevertheless had better fight his way out.

But it's not just the grappling advantage that I'm talking about. It's the referee. If you get into serious trouble,
you know absolutely he's going to stop the fight. Sure, you'll lose the fight, but it's just a contest. Obviously, in
the era that traditional martial arts were developed, losing the fight had far more serious consequences. So the
calculus of your offense and defense changes when you're fighting in a ring, with a referee there to protect you.

In general, the more aggressive an attack, the more vulnerable you'll be if it doesn't work. Old-school kung fu
was developed with the reasonable expectation that your opponent would know this. He wouldn't ever try
something very aggressive, like, say, charging in head first, head down, trying to take you down, because your
opponent knew that if he missed, he'd probably end up dead. You wouldn't ever risk, say, swinging a Thai
roundhouse kick and breaking your leg when your opponent checks it just so, because, again: you'd wind up
dead if that happened. As a result, old school kung fu simply isn't prepared to deal with a lot of the things that
can be used in MMA, and are often used quite successfully.

And finally, a combination of factors:

Kung fu often has a long learning curve, and many kung fu practitioners who might be successful don't
want to engage in combat sports.

Let's start with what I mean by a learning curve. If you go to a boxing or kickboxing gym, and you train hard
every day, you're going to very quickly develop skills that can directly be used in a fight (whether real or sport).
I can't imagine a guy who's spent say, three to six months seriously training in one of these disciplines who
couldn't use what he learned in the ring right away. So fighting ability increases at quite a steep rate right from
the start.

Kung fu isn't like that. There's a lot more foundational work involved. Some styles, for instance, have you
training stance-holding for six months before you get to learn anything else. Six months. Now, such training is
necessary (no, it's not the teacher just being a dick, or "testing your patience/sincerity/character.") Stancework
provides real benefits, attributes that are essential to everything that will follow, and they cannot be developed
in any other way that I know of. But obviously, a guy who's been training kung fu for six months (by which I
mean stance training) who steps into the ring is totally going to get his ass kicked. The learning curve is so
gradual in the beginning that it can take a decade or more of serious training to get to the point where real
fighting skills are conferred. To go again with wing chun, some variants of wing chun kung fu were developed
to give revolutionaries some stripped-down, basic capabilities in a much shorter time than traditional, more
orthodox, older styles. You know how long they estimated? Three years. Three years was the "let's take a
bunch of short cuts and really rush things" time frame, and it was actually really fast -- if you compare that to
time frames of 10 to 15 years for other Chinese styles.

Now let's translate that into modern times: if you start training at 20 (and I know a lot of guys who started
training later), by the time you're seriously skilled, you're in your mid or late 30s. Odds are, you don't need to
fight MMA for money -- in the past 15 years while you were training, you've found a safer (and frankly, more
rewarding) career. And you don't want to, because 1) you have things like a career, maybe a family, that would
be put at risk and 2) you've since lost any need to prove yourself to other people that you might have had as a
young man.

So to summarize, why do kung fu guys tend to do badly in MMA competition?

Some guys don't train enough and they train incorrectly, so they never get very good. Guys who train correctly
and develop real skills only arrive at that stage during a point in their lives where they are unlikely to want or
need to fight MMA. And, even those who have real kung fu skills are going to be fighting at a disadvantage
when they step into the ring (or the cage or the Octagon or whatever).