A Silent Night in a Vietnamese Arena: When Drills Sand Down a Young Fighter's Instinct

I was sitting in the seventh row, close enough to hear a fighter's breathing on the mat, far enough to see the whole shape of a fight. That night it was an MMA event held in Vietnam. The cage sat inside a ring of spectators, lights pointed straight down at the canvas, two young fighters walking out to pounding music and the roar of thousands.

Then the first round passed in a strange silence.

Nobody threw anything reckless. Nobody dared to be wrong. Two young men stood one arm's length apart, stared each other down, and repeated the same combination: jab — lead step — back out. Three minutes. Then three more. The crowd began to whistle, and I understood I was watching something that was not martial arts. It was a drill demonstration.

In the summer of 2026, I said something that made the whole commentariat laugh in my face. Now they call me for tips. That feeling came back here — except this time I wasn't laughing.

A martial arts scene growing very fast

Over the past decade, competitive martial arts in Vietnam have changed beyond recognition. Domestic MMA promotions have sprung up, private gyms have proliferated in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, and a professional class of fighters has begun to have contracts, sponsors, managers, and proper schedules.

Professionalisation brings money. It brings safety, and a clear pathway for kids who once had to fight on ad hoc pitches. That is a good thing, and I don't want anyone to misread me on that.

But it carries a consequence few are willing to name: young fighters are now taught to avoid mistakes, not to create difference.

Based on my experience following fights in both Vietnam and South Korea — where I live and make a podcast — this process is nothing new. In South Korea the professionalisation wave arrived about a decade earlier, and the lesson there is clear: when the drill beats instinct, the sport loses the thing people pay to watch.

The core point: instinct sanded smooth

Look at how a training session is divided.

In many mainstream gyms, most of the time budget goes to basic technique: jab, footwork, defence, hand-and-foot combinations in preset sequences. Live sparring sessions — where a fighter must improvise against an opponent who hasn't read the drill book — are usually pushed to the weekend, when everyone is already tired.

The inevitable result is a generation of fighters with tidy technical foundations but no creative reflexes. They punch right, block right, move right. And they never do anything surprising. In martial arts, surprise is the currency.

I remember a Vietnamese fighter who once made a name for himself on the regional stage. He won that night, but he won by clinging to a plan drawn up in advance. When his opponent changed rhythm, he froze for exactly three seconds — enough to be read. Those three seconds were not a fitness failure. They were the failure of a training culture that teaches fighters to answer ready-made questions instead of asking their own.

A coach's assistant once told me something I never forgot: "Here we teach fighters not to lose, not to win." The two sound similar but are completely different. Not losing is a defensive goal. Winning is an attacking one. And most centres are choosing the safe route.

Instinct cannot be taught from a curriculum. It only forms when you are allowed to be wrong, allowed to lose points in training, allowed to try a move your coach never drew on the board.

And here is the paradox: the more professional the scene becomes, the more fighters reach competitive standard, but the fewer fighters make an audience hold its breath. People don't buy tickets to watch two men execute the drill correctly. They buy tickets to watch one man break it.

The contrarian angle: I might be wrong

I have to argue against myself here.

Professional martial arts is not a playground for beauty. A fighter's safety matters more than a spectator's feelings. A young fighter knocked out too early in a career can lose the whole future, and training him tightly in his early years is responsible behaviour, not mediocrity.

Moreover, martial arts history shows that styles do not always need instinct to be compelling. Some great champions won with a single move, monotonous to the point of boredom, and brutally effective. People still queued to watch them.

So maybe the problem isn't drills. The problem is that we teach drills to everyone, instead of teaching them to those who need drills and letting those with instinct run free.

What I'm betting on

Next season I'll be tracking one specific, testable thing.

I believe fighters who come out of small gyms — where coaches allow more free sparring, where there is less curriculum and more error — will produce a higher knockout rate than fighters from large training centres with standardised processes.

People who said I got lucky in Tokyo? They forget I placed the bet before the opening whistle. Same thing here.

I thought I was born to cause arguments. Turns out I was born to say what others keep in their throats.