XMA
Can Mike Chaturantabut’s Revolutionary New System Make You a Better Martial Artist?
Part 1

We at Black Belt have been following Mike Chaturantabut’s career almost from the get-go. Apparently, so have plenty of other people. Like the judges on the North American Sport Karate Association circuit, who scored him at the top of seven year-end rankings between 1987 and 1996. And our readers, who voted him into the Black Belt Hall of Fame in 1997 as Co-Competitor of the Year. And the Discovery Channel, which aired a documentary on his brainchild, XMA, in 2003. We figured it was high time we shed some light on Mike Chat, as he likes to be called, and his revolutionary system known as Xtreme Martial Arts.

Black Belt: What exactly is XMA? Is it a martial art or merely a flashier way of performing the traditional arts?
Mike Chaturantabut: XMA is a fusion of different martial arts with acrobatics, gymnastics, performance [elements] and Hollywood theatrics. It’s everything you see on TV and in film. It’s everything you see on the tournament circuits. It’s everything you see in the traditional sense, just taken to the extreme.

BB: What do you mean by “extreme”?
Chat: Most people think Xtreme Martial Arts means [the moves] Jackie Chan and Jet Li do—the Hong Kong-style action. And that’s what it is on the high end. You see the tricks, the flips, the acrobatics and the wire work.
[But to get there,] we build upon the traditional martial arts. We’re not changing traditional techniques. We’re not changing the mechanics of the movements, essentially. The fundamentals always stay the same. All we do is add energy, intensity and power. For example, we do double, triple and quadruple punches vs. a single forefist punch. We do multiple kicks vs. one solid kick. As opposed to just doing a hook kick or crescent kick, we do a jump-360, a 540 roundhouse or a 720 hook kick.

BB: How does that approach relate to tradition?
Chat: When you look closely at the core of XMA, every extreme movement, every extreme position, every extreme basic technique—including the mind-set and attitude—is traditional. We just take it a step further. When people think of Xtreme Martial Arts, they’re normally [influenced] by the fact that Hollywood makes it look like flips and acrobatics that are only for very athletic people. But that’s not necessarily the case. We focus on life-skills development, positive mental benefits and goal setting, and we develop them to the extreme.

BB: How was XMA created?
Chat: It has been evolving since the beginning of open-style forms. When Master Jhoon Rhee came to the United States [in 1956], he was the first to do a form to music and choreograph it. He called it “martial ballet.” Since then, people have been incorporating different movements from different styles. They mixed karate, taekwondo, kung fu and wushu in their forms. And then people started getting real flashy. In recent years, it’s gone to a level above and beyond what anyone ever expected.

BB: Where do all the moves in XMA—from the martial arts techniques to the aerial maneuvers—come from?
Chat: I’ve studied with many Olympic athletes, from gymnasts to taekwondo fighters. Herb Perez, who won a gold medal in taekwondo in 1992, was a huge inspiration. So was the world-class acrobatics training done by wushu athletes in China. Looking at what they do, it’s very simple to pattern and structure a training program for people in Xtreme Martial Arts. It’s based on the extensive research and testing that governments around the world have done with athletics, but now it’s being applied to martial arts.

BB: It would seem that XMA is more than just a set of techniques that have been spiced up with jumps, spins and acrobatics.
Chat: Definitely. It’s an entire system, so to speak. If you were to ask what’s at the core of XMA, I would have to say it starts with the mind-set and the attitude.

BB: What’s wrapped around that core and why was it selected for inclusion in XMA?
Chat: Nine out of every 10 students that come in the door of a traditional school do so because they saw the martial arts on TV, in a film, in print or in a video game. [They say,] “We want the self-esteem, the confidence-building, the self-defense,” but typically they walk in because they saw it somewhere, and what they’ve seen is not necessarily the traditional martial arts.

Our attitude is, it’s not enough to just train in a martial art. Everyone cross-trains when it comes to different sports, and so should martial artists. Instead of just doing punches and kicks, we run and do plyometric drills. We do fast-twitch muscle-fiber development. We also work on presentation as well as performance: Can you stand there, plant your feet on the ground and address an audience while holding your head up high and actually communicating? XMA covers all that.

BB: How long does it take for students to get to competition level in XMA?
Chat: Everything in the program can be used for competition. The time it takes [to get to that level] depends on the individual. We have started with traditional martial artists who were not necessarily the most gifted athletes and taken them from nothing to first place on the NASKA circuit. Our team members have been able to [win] after two or three years—whereas their competitors may have prepared for 10 years.

There are many examples out there of people doing it in a very short time, and some people are taking a little longer. But two or three years is a quarter of the time it took me, Jon Valera, Carmichael Simon and David Douglas. All the competitors from 10 years ago—we were developing the moves and the system, and it took forever. What it took us four years to develop, we can now teach in two months.

BB: If you’re not into competition, what is XMA good for?
Chat: Through the training, you can achieve goals by building your self-confidence. If you’re continuously pushing and striving, if you’re continually motivated and determined to do things, then it’s just a matter of having it structured and laid out for you. Without a road map, you can’t get anywhere. Without directions, it’s very hard to find a place. We lay out very specific directions and a very specific road map for how to get from Point A to Point B when it comes to martial arts training and working on time-management for academics and extracurricular activities.

BB: Are there some martial artists for whom XMA is more appropriate and some for whom it’s totally inappropriate?
Chat: It’s universal. I wouldn’t say that it’s a better system for anyone because it depends on what the goals are. You might have a traditional system where people have no interest in doing any acrobatic moves or aerial kicks. But we don’t just teach you how to do the moves. We teach the instructors how to teach—how to control the energy in the room, how to maintain communication between the students, the parents and the instructor on the floor, how to advertise. Once they learn it, instructors who can’t physically do the moves can effectively coach it—like in gymnastics.

There might be a school that does taekwondo. A lot of the acrobatic kicks we do are taekwondo-based, and they might be perfect for the school. But the instructor might say, “We like your flying side kicks and triple kicks, and we want to do the forms and weapons, but we don’t want to do any of the flips or inverted moves.” And that’s OK because the flips and inverted moves at the high end make up only one small segment of the program.

BB: What age group does XMA most appeal to?
Chat: The main demographic we’re hitting is 8- to 15-year-olds. Typically, the kids have already started some sort of athletic program or martial art and are starting to mature. They’re seeing that there are other sports out there that are more cool and there’s clothing to go with it. And the attitude, music and lifestyles that people are living—it’s not [part of the traditional] martial arts right now. It’s part of skateboarding, snowboarding, in-line skating and climbing. Martial arts schools are losing students in that age group, so across the board I’d have to say the primary focus is the teen market.

BB: As those teens begin to enter tournaments, what does that portend for the average martial artist who’s forced to compete against a flashy XMA routine in his creative-musical-forms division?
Chat: There are many different aspects to XMA. We’ve worked with the top tournament circuits in the world—the North American Sport Karate Association, the International Sport Karate Association and the World Sport Karate Federation—to implement a new system where people receive a technical score and an artistic score to separate the martial arts value in a routine from the theatrical aspect. Then we went further and revised the rules for extreme divisions.

Now, your question becomes null and void because in the creative division, you can no longer do flips, acrobatics or inverted moves. Now there are extreme divisions for forms and weapons, and if you want to flip or go inverted or go crazy with combinations, that’s fine. But you’re no longer going to compete against those who want to do good, solid, martial arts forms.

In addition to that, we’ve implemented extreme-tricks challenges. To educate the public on what they’re seeing in these forms—the guys move so fast it’s hard to pinpoint what they’re doing—we’ve got a tricks challenge that asks each competitor to do required elements. [They are] the four most basic martial arts tricks that everyone then modifies or turns into combinations to take it up in difficulty.

BB: What are those four required elements?
Chat: The 540, the 720, the butterfly twist and the flash kick. I was shocked that no one had ever done this before—no one had ever attempted to structure it like this. But now you have the major tournament circuits in the country doing it, and on top of that it serves as an education for not just competitors, but judges as well because they can see what the individual techniques should look like.

The competitors are required to start in a martial arts stance, perform the maneuver and land in a solid martial arts stance. There are a lot of competitors that can do the moves, but they can’t “stick” them. In gymnastics, you can do a quadruple full-twisting whatever, but if you don’t stick the ending, it’s no good. In martial arts, they usually don’t look at it like that, but now they’re starting to analyze forms in a different way.

BB: So XMA isn’t just about looking good when you perform. It’s a more scientific way of teaching people to perform.
Chat: Absolutely. We start with warm-ups, we go to basics and then we go into our forms. Everything we do revolves around our forms; it’s what we drill and train in during every class. Then we go to kicks; we isolate the kicking techniques, and we work on multiple kicks and combinations. Then it’s plyometric drills; we work on taking those kicks into the air by isolating just the jumping maneuver. Next, we go into presentation and performance: standing, looking, turning, announcing yourself to the judges and getting used to being out there on your own.
The whole idea is that the life skills are most important. From there, once you have confidence, you can do anything. But it’s not a quick process. So the whole idea is to focus on confidence first; everything else comes second.    

About the interviewer: Robert W. Young is the executive editor of Black Belt. For more information about Mike Chat and XMA, visit www.xmarevolution.com.