Does sport martial arts actually work in a real situation?
The parts that involve a resisting human, yes. That is the whole point. What changes outside is the rules, the surface and the stakes.
Mostly yes, and here is the reason: sport training is the only kind where somebody is genuinely trying to stop you.
That is what separates it from the stuff that looks great in a demo. If you have never had a live person fight your grip, resist your takedown or hit you back, you do not know whether your technique works. You know it works on a cooperative partner. A boxer, a wrestler or a no-gi grappler has been proved wrong a thousand times and fixed it, and that is worth more than any technique nobody has tested.
What does not carry over is the frame around it. No referee, no weight class, no warm-up, no mats. Asphalt, curbs, a table, shoes, a jacket, somebody’s friend standing behind you, no bell to end the round. So some habits get adjusted. The ground is a place you visit and leave, not a place you settle into. Turning your back is fine in a gym and a bad idea in a parking lot.
I train both sides of it. Six fighters to The Ultimate Fighter and the UFC, Tony Ferguson among them, and a lot of people who will never compete and only want to get home. Same engine. Different rules to drill under.
The clearest thing that carries over is the clinch. Grabbed, both of you still standing, neither able to throw a proper punch. Every real fight passes through that range in the first few seconds and almost nobody trains it unless they do combat sports. What the clinch is explains why it matters more than it looks.
On the grappling side the split is sharper than people expect. Some of jiu-jitsu is gold for this and some of it is a sport game that will get you hurt on concrete. How much of jiu-jitsu is useful for self-defense sorts one from the other without flattering either. And what no-gi is if you want the grappling side explained first.
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