Vietnamese Martial Arts Between Two Rings: The Counter Steps Into the Village Court

There was a moment on the night of May 21, 2026, at the Bac Ninh Sports Hall, during the 31st SEA Games, when I sat in the seventh row of seats, holding a small notebook and a stub of pencil worn at the tip. On the ring, a Vietnamese boxer had just been penalized for a clinch. The referee raised his hand. The stands erupted. And amid that roar, all I managed to write down was a single line: "Round 2, 47th second, rear-hand distance 0.3 meters."

I have worked as a sports documentary screenwriter for fourteen years. I come from a family where my grandfather taught traditional martial arts in the village communal court, while my father loved boxing so much he pasted a Muhammad Ali poster onto the kitchen wall. Those two men, those two martial traditions, grew up alongside me in a small Hanoi house. And on that night in Bac Ninh, I suddenly realized I had been standing between two rings without ever being taught how to stand properly in either.

A 0.2-second discrepancy taught me how to trust my own eyes. I first wrote that line in 2026, after I misreported a track athlete's statistic and an entire online community called me out. Since then, I never trust a ready-made data table before counting for myself. But it was only when I entered the world of Vietnamese martial arts — where the professional ring and the traditional village court coexist — that I understood some things are even harder to count than a hundredth of a second.

This article is the result of nearly three years of traveling between boxing gyms in Ho Chi Minh City, vovinam dojos in the Mekong Delta, private MMA gyms sprouting like mushrooms after the pandemic, and village courts in Bac Ninh and Nam Dinh, where elderly masters still teach students to hold a stance at five in the morning. I am not writing to glorify anyone. I am writing to recount what an entire martial tradition is gradually forgetting.

Context: Two streams that have never met

To understand Vietnamese martial arts, one must first understand that it is not one stream, but two. The first is traditional martial arts — from vovinam, Binh Dinh family schools, and Shaolin to hundreds of small schools passed down within clans, village courts, and local federations. The second is professional combat sport — boxing, Muay Thai, kickboxing, pencak silat, and most recently MMA — sports that arrived in Vietnam late and grew on television, sponsorship, and a generation of viewers more familiar with screens than with communal courts.

These two streams divide spectators, budgets, and most importantly, how each defines what a good fighter is. In the traditional stream, a student is judged by forms, by the endurance of the legs, by courtesy before and after a bout. In the professional stream, a fighter is judged by landed strikes, win rates, rankings, and sponsorship contracts.

The 31st SEA Games, hosted by Vietnam in 2026, was a special milestone, because for the first time in many editions, combat sports were placed at the center of national media coverage. Boxing, Muay, kickboxing, vovinam, wushu, and pencak silat all appeared on a single front. But what very few people discussed was this: behind each medal lies a training mechanism that is almost entirely different.

I remember visiting a national boxing team training session at a national sports training center in April 2026, less than a month before the Games. Training began at four in the morning. No music. No spectators. Only the sound of jump ropes striking the concrete floor and a coach counting in a hoarse voice. A female fighter I will call H. — her real name withheld for personal reasons — completed twelve consecutive rounds, three minutes each, one-minute breaks. After the twelfth, she sat on the floor, breathing like someone who had just crawled out of water.

And in a village court less than forty kilometers away, a sixty-four-year-old master who had taught vovinam for more than thirty years was having his students hold a stance in silence. No clock. No metronome. Only breath and the patience of age.

Those two images, those two training sessions, were less than an hour's drive apart. And for many years, it seemed no one had bothered to place them side by side and ask: why do we have two martial traditions, neither of which will learn from the other?

Core analysis: The numbers outside the scorecard

When I began documenting a Vietnamese martial arts documentary project, I brought an old habit from my track-and-field years: count everything myself. But very quickly, I realized the world of martial arts has a completely different data system from that of athletics. On the track, everyone runs the same distance and time is a universal measure. On the ring, the measure is subdivided into countless definitions that each place understands differently.

The core difference lies here: professional combat sport can be measured by data, while traditional martial arts are measured by the time of transmission — and these two measures cannot be converted into one another.

Let me take one example I counted myself. In a men's 60kg boxing bout at the 31st SEA Games, I recorded every punch of both fighters across three rounds. The Vietnamese fighter threw 412 punches, landed 148, for a precision rate of about 35.9 percent. The opponent threw 386, landed 131, about 33.9 percent. By this table, the Vietnamese fighter led in both volume and accuracy. But the opponent won.

Why? Because some things the scorecard never records. I counted one more detail: in round three, when both were tired, the Vietnamese fighter's output dropped from an average of 4.6 punches per ten seconds to 3.1. The opponent dropped only from 4.3 to 3.8. That decline, combined with judges rewarding decisive late-round exchanges, created the difference. This is what I call "the number outside the scorecard" — data that appears in no official statistic but decides a bout.

My job is to find the piece the whole stadium has forgotten. And in Vietnamese martial arts, the forgotten pieces are so numerous that I had to use a two-hundred-page notebook just to record the exchanges no gym bothers to track.

There is one phenomenon I followed for months: the emergence of private MMA gyms in major cities. In Ho Chi Minh City alone, from 2026 to 2026, the number of licensed MMA gyms roughly tripled, according to my own survey of private clubs. But more notable is this: many of these new students previously trained in traditional martial arts, taekwondo, or judo — sports common in schools. They switched to MMA for three reasons I heard repeatedly: they wanted real competition, they wanted recognition in a clear form, and they wanted community.

Those three reasons sound obvious, but they reveal this: Vietnamese traditional martial arts, despite centuries of history, is losing the competition for a sense of belonging. Young people do not abandon traditional martial arts because they hate it. They leave because they feel they belong nowhere within the system.

I attended a training session at a small MMA club in an alley in Binh Thanh District. The gym was about forty square meters, hot, and reeked of sweat. But there I saw something I rarely saw in large traditional dojos: a natural mixing of students from different backgrounds. Some trained Muay, some boxing, some had trained vovinam. They did not argue about which art was stronger. They just trained.

And this reminded me of a line I once wrote: Between a 144Hz screen and a 200m track, I see the same rhythm. In martial arts too — between a boxing jab and a vovinam form, there is a shared rhythm that can be found if one cares to look closely.

A concrete data point: The medal and its price

To analyze fairly, I must present concrete figures. At the 31st SEA Games, Vietnam's delegation won a considerable number of medals across combat sports. Based on my compilation of the organizing committee's official information, combat sports contributed an important share of the host nation's gold medals. But if we look only at medals, we overlook a larger question: did those medals translate into a lasting foundation?

I put this question to three different coaches, in three different disciplines. Their answers almost coincided, though none had heard the others: after the Games, the teams largely disbanded. Athletes returned to their localities. Some continued training; some retired. There was no transition system linking Games glory to a professional fighting career.

This is the biggest blind spot of Vietnam's sports model in every discipline, but in martial arts it is most visible. Professional boxing needs an annual event system, paid bouts, and a ranking credible enough for fighters to make a living. In Vietnam, though some professional boxing events have been organized in recent years, the gap between the amateur elite and the professional level remains too wide. A medalist at a Games can, just months later, return to an ordinary job.

I remember sitting down with a former boxer who once won a regional Games medal. He recounted: after retiring from elite competition, he opened a small coffee shop. His old gloves hung on the wall. Customers sometimes asked, "Are you a fighter?" He nodded. Then nothing. The story stopped there.

The body is a blackboard a coach never finishes reading. I wrote that about athletics, but in martial arts it is even truer, because in martial arts, that body is also misread. A vovinam coach reads his student's body through stance, knee depth, hip stability. A boxing coach reads that same body through rear-leg thrust, hand-retraction speed, slipping ability in an instant. Two teachers, two readings, one body. And the student — the one being read — is never asked how he wants to be read.

The counter's problem

Over the years of this project, I realized an irony: I, the one who always praised manual counting, had to admit that some things in martial arts cannot be counted with the same unit. A punch is counted in landed strikes. But the endurance of a person holding a stance for twenty silent minutes — counted how? In seconds? In breaths? In how many times the knees buckle and rise again?

I tried counting. At a traditional training session in Nam Dinh, I pressed a stopwatch and recorded how many seconds a student held an average stance. Results ranged from forty seconds to more than ten minutes, depending on fatigue and how the master adjusted the session. That number is meaningless without context. This is the lesson I always remind myself of: a number stripped of its context is a dead number.

And this is where I must speak of the biggest failure of my project. In 2026, I pitched a short documentary series comparing, through data, the effectiveness of traditional and professional martial arts. I believed I could do what no one had: turn traditional martial arts into a measurable problem. The project failed at the pre-production stage. The reason was simple: the experts I interviewed told me they did not want to be compared that way, because such comparison is meaningless in martial terms. They did not object out of pride. They objected because they understood better than I that some values cannot be reduced to a common unit.

An empty summer, a dead series — yet I still found an echo. That collapse taught me what fourteen years in the profession had not: sometimes the truth-seeker must accept that the truth is not in the final number, but in understanding why that number could not exist in the first place.

The market's sleight of hand

There is another dimension I cannot ignore when discussing professional martial arts: money. The transfer market has no goals, but it always has a spectacular sleight of hand. In martial arts, that trick is not in club-to-club transfers as in football, but in how events are staged, how they are advertised, and how a star's image is built before the person has real achievements.

I followed several boxing and MMA events held in Vietnam in recent years. Some fight nights were hyped with hundreds of thousands of online views, but when I counted the actual spectators in the arena, the number was far smaller. This is the gap between "influence" and "real presence" — a gap I consider characteristic of Vietnamese sport in the social-media era.

I do not say this to criticize organizers. I say it to point out that a professional martial art cannot be built on virtual views. It must be built on real fights, real spectators, real prize money. In Thailand, stadiums are packed every evening with fights anyone can watch, with small side bets. In the Philippines, professional boxing is tied to fierce national pride thanks to a legendary fighter. Vietnam has no comparable structure, nor any national story strong enough to anchor martial arts to it.

This is the point I consider most important and most contested: a nation's professional martial art does not grow from medals, but from the spectator's curiosity, fed steadily every week. Medals create peaks, not foundations. Only regular fights, with clear information and compelling figures, create habits among spectators — and those habits are what sustain a martial art.

The underdog and the counter

I have a bias I do not hide: I always side with those considered weak. In football, I once counted Iceland's every exchange and found an entire world in it. In Vietnamese martial arts, the weak one is not a specific fighter. The weak one is an entire traditional system quietly shrinking each year, while a young professional system is over-celebrated.

I counted Iceland's every exchange and suddenly saw a whole world. I repeat that line because it reminds me that the value of something lies not in whether it is big or small, but in whether it is seen correctly. Vietnamese traditional martial arts is not being seen correctly — not because anyone wants to diminish it, but because no one counts it seriously, records what it can truly do, or translates its language into a language this era is willing to read.

During a conversation with a vovinam master in the Mekong Delta, I asked him: if you had a data table about your students, what would you record? He smiled and said something I wrote down immediately: "I record how many times they come to train when it rains."

I did not understand at first. It took months to grasp that in a traditional martial art, the measure of commitment is not achievement but presence on the hardest days. When it rains, the village court is slippery, and coming to train is a choice with no medal as reward. And that choice is what truly defines who belongs here.

Contrarian angle: Depth or diversity?

This is where I want to say something many in the industry will not enjoy hearing. There is a common belief that to develop Vietnamese martial arts, one must specialize thoroughly: pick a few key disciplines, concentrate money, concentrate good coaches, and compete internationally with those. It sounds reasonable. But from my experience watching bouts and training programs, that belief has a fatal flaw.

The flaw is this: specialization is only effective when the professional market is already large enough to sustain the specialists. In a place where the market is still small, specializing too early produces good fighters with no ring to fight in, no spectators to watch, and no income to continue. They become talents isolated within the Games system, alive only once every four years, two weeks each time.

By contrast, what I observed is that the most sustainable dojos and clubs teach diversity. They teach a common base — fitness, reflexes, foundational technique — then let students choose their own direction. A student can start in vovinam, move to Muay, then to MMA, without being seen as betraying his origins. This is the model I consider most viable for Vietnam, at least for the next decade.

But I want to go one step further, and this is the truly counterintuitive part: it is diversity, not specialization, that preserves traditional martial arts. The reason is simple. If we place traditional martial arts in direct confrontation with professional combat sport — which is stronger, which wins — traditional arts will lose in the eyes of the majority, because they were never designed to compete professionally. But if we place traditional martial arts as a source, a foundation, something that nourishes endurance and discipline for all other disciplines, its value is not only preserved but multiplied.

I witnessed this in one specific case. A young fighter I followed trained vovinam from childhood, then switched to boxing. Asked why he kept his calm in the late rounds, he said it was thanks to years of holding a stance. "Holding a stance taught me to endure when no one claps," he said. That line, I believe, is the answer to the entire debate on depth and diversity in Vietnamese martial arts.

Of course, I am not naive enough to think diversity answers everything. Some disciplines need high specialization to compete internationally, and I respect that. But I believe the balance between diversity and specialization is something Vietnamese martial arts has not truly attempted. We have two parallel systems, each running on its own logic, and both are wasting the other's potential.

And here I must admit something rarely heard from someone in my profession: I may be wrong. Perhaps specialization is the right path, and diversity is only a romantic illusion. But as I said at the start, I always like to leave a door of doubt open. Better to be wrong for having tried something new than to be right for having dared nothing.

What remains: Sport as a common language

As I write the final lines of this piece, I recall a morning at a village court in Bac Ninh. It was raining. The old master still stood under the eaves, a bamboo stick in hand, pointing at the stance of a boy shivering from cold. He said little. He just stood there, patient, as if time had come here to settle rather than pass.

A few hundred kilometers away, in an arena full of music and light, a young boxer was preparing to step onto the ring. He had a coach, an analyst, a team behind him. He had data. He had a plan.

Those two people, those two images, those two martial traditions, will never meet if both sides keep walking their own paths. And perhaps the greatest regret is not that they do not meet, but that both think the other has nothing worth learning.

Argument is the road I use to find what I have not yet thought. And the debate over Vietnamese martial arts, I believe, has never truly begun. It has been all comparison, all declarations, all rankings that measure nothing. What I want to leave before closing this notebook is not a conclusion, but a question I have yet to answer: if we could count everything a human body can do on a ring, could we also count what it learns in silence?

Perhaps, in the end, sport — martial arts or athletics, professional or traditional — is just a common language humans use to tell the story of their own bodies. And in that language, every dialect deserves to be heard. I have spent nearly three years trying to listen. I have not finished hearing.