Some of my experience with martial arts and combat sports.

MMA training shouldn't take place, in the same training area as traditional martial arts.

I started in a Kickboxing  and Taekwondo gym, really small one, the guys on kickboxing where mainly people who always were involved in street fights, they had a big group and bullied people on parties and stuff.
I left the place

Then there was a place where they had Wushu and right next to that gym, Kick Boxing/Muay Thai, and the Kick Boxing teacher and some of his students mocked the wushu guys, I was visiting both places at the time, and could see the big difference between the two.

In the Wushu, there were people who didn't fight, they trained in the fitness, forms and techniques, but never fought, and some other, did that but fought in Sanda and were focused more on combat. The environment was more quiet, everybody helped each other. Some did Tai Chi forms, they helped you stretch, and warm up, and train your techniques.

In the kickboxing gym, it was all about fighting and kicking ass. It wasn't nearly as friendly, they did a lot of fitness and the training was very intense, and there was a lot of people there, A LOT. Some people came once and never came back, because they got hit a lot of times in sparring, and they were just starting.
I got beat down once, but I had been training for a little bit, so I took it as a learning experience.
However, on some occasions, I was fighting newbies, and the teachers told me to hit them harder, and spar hard with them, those guys never came back. And after that whenever I fought newbies, it was more focused towards learning from them, and them learning from me in a more friendly way.
It was a very tense environment. I always had to think twice before going to the place, but most of the people I knew there were kinda cool. Then I moved to another place in the city, and had to look for gyms closer to me

I started training in BJJ/MMA

An MMA teacher told me, that he doesn't agree with all the spirituality, and tradition associated with the martial arts, the forms, he doesn't do them because they don't work in the cage. The only tradition he does, is the bow when entering a gym, out of respect for the place of training, but he said, he doesn't like the rest of the martial arts stuff, he just wants to punch people in the face, that's what he likes to do, and that martial artist become artists, because the mat or the ring or whatever it is, is like a canvas, and that by moving around the mat and by the way you move around the mat when fighting or shadow boxing, you are "painting", and that's what makes a martial artist. Which just shows the lack of understanding of these guys about what real martial arts really mean.
Some guys who started training at the same time as me, went there, because they got into a fight in school with some of the guys from that gym. Then I got tired of it and left.


I went to a traditional dojo/dojang for a while, it had karate and taekwondo and they used to have MMA in  there; based on what some of the masters there told me, usually the MMA guys take the traditional stuff as a joke and act in an arrogant way, pretending to be better. They disrespect the traditional martial arts, which results in a competitive environment, until the MMA guys left and found their on gym. Because they just don't mix well with the environment.

MMA training shouldn't take place, in the same training area as traditional martial arts.

Then even though it waan't a bad place to train, the level of training was bad. Because I had seen how the Koreans train in Taekwondo, and what we did there, was just complete BS.

So I started training on my own with courses and DVDs and stuff.

After that, since I've always been into the martial arts from China, I found Sifu Freddie Lee's channel on Youtube, and everything changed after that, my whole mentality of the martial arts, and the MMA/UFC.

I still love TKD though.

Just recently I found another Taekwondo gym which takes training far more seriously, so I'm gonna be visiting the place soon.