Good points, Jake.
TSDGuy wrote:
If in your TMA, you don't regularly practice
1)Surviving a fast and furious barrage of punches to the head
2)Dealing with sweeps, leg kicks, and throws
3)Defending against shoots and take downs
4)Dealing with body and head kicks
5)Surving on the ground once you're there
6)Eliminating someone as fast as possible with knees, kicks, elbows, etc.
It seems to me that you are stereotyping TMA. Just a wee bit of the strawman, no?
For lack of a better label, I consider what we do to be TMA. But some would argue with that. Hell, Ray tells me all the time that what I do isn't Uechi.
Let's take your points one at a time.
1)Surviving a fast and furious barrage of punches to the head
I have an exercise we do where I have the student stand with back to the wall. The student must not let that back pop off the wall. Then a partner stand in front of him and does nonstop techniques. The head most definitely is fair game. In fact, it's supposed to be a primary target. Where did I pick that exercise up from? Shelly Dunn. He's a traditional Uechika who also happens to have worked as a bouncer.
***
Here's the best picture I could come up with on the web of Uechi Ryu's Seisan jump posture. That's none other than Kanei Uechi himself doing it.
This is an inside fighting style modification of a crane style posture.
The biggest difference is that the Uechika has a hand-to-head positioning of the upper hand. And there's a good reason for that.
As hard as I tried, I could not find a great shot of the boxing application for the upper gate. However my boxing instructor called it "answering the telephone." It was done with or without a bobbing motion. The second he showed me that motion in my boxing class, I knew exactly where the fundamental element of human movement was in my Uechi kata. It took absolutely zero time to learn it.
For my renshi certification, I submitted a series of 12 flow drills I choreographed to the Uechi Ryu board. They were partner exercise interpretations of Uechi's 13 hojo undo. One of them (furi tsuki) has this "answer the telephone" response to repeated hook punches to the head. It's a happy place that a Uechika can find inside the eye of the hurricane of a flailing opponent.
I got my renshi, BTW...
2)Dealing with sweeps, leg kicks, and throws
Dealing with sweeps? Hell, the Uechi kata are full of them. I learned quite a few from none other than Bob Campbell.
The Seisan jump is also thought to be a response to a double leg sweep found in Chinese martial arts, a.k.a. "iron broom."
We kick each other in the legs all the bloody time in Uechi Ryu. We do it for grins in our training. We call it
ashi kitae (leg conditioning). We test for it. This includes kicks inside and outside the leg on the upper and lower leg as well as blows to the shins.
Throws exist all the way through Uechi kata. The only rate-limiting factor for most Uechi Ryu practitioners is the lack of a good mat. But in my dojo, we start from the very first test with ukemi (rolling and falling) requirements and testing. This is the foundation for later work on throws.
We have a bunch of them I teach...
Various Uechi Yakusoku Kumite have throws in them. I have a few dojo-specific ones I teach. Many I stole from my Shorei Kai Goju teacher. They are quite Uechi-like. (He's the guy that started in judo, BTW...)
3)Defending against shoots and take downs
This is in Seisan bunkai. Execution of this is a requirement for every Uechi Ryu black belt test. It isn't a classic sprawl, but then we'd prefer our response (redirect the head and smash with knee) over the protracted ground battle when it comes to street fighting with multiple opponents. It keeps you on your feet and in control of your center.
A shoot, FWIW, is hidden in Uechi's Sanseiryu kata. It comes right after three reverse thrusts. You get the person thinking
head, head, head, and the
BAM! you drop down low. Actually doing the classic shoot is hidden, but well within the context of this pattern of human movement. I've seen Joey Pomfret (Uechika and BJJ practitioner) do it all the time. His opponents never know if they're going to get hit high or low. That's probably why he's suckered so many of them into KOs with a roundhouse kick to the head. When looking at it in slowmo, it appears his hapless partner forgets to protect the head. I know better. Joey's got them thinking low, and them
BAM! 
And FWIW... I teach my people Uechi postures and patterns from on their backs to on their knees to on their feet. And I teach them the ukemi movements to tie it all together with smooth transitions.
It's all there for the knowledgeable instructor to put together. OR... We could pick some hapless boob and say "THIS is what Traditional Uechi Ryu is supposed to be like!!"
What-ever...
4)Dealing with body and head kicks
Our body conditioning is called
karada kitae. We do it with both hand blows and kicks.
As for kicks to the head... See what I wrote above about how Joey Pomfret got most of his KOs.
Ever heard of Jim Witherel? He's one of our Uechi rokudans who also trained with Bill "Superfoot" Wallace. He teaches stretching and kicking at camps. Jim can sleep in a lateral splits.
I have a Uechi student (Bruce Hirabayashi) who also could sleep in a lateral splits and at one time could squat over 400 lbs.
I submitted Thirty Eight Special to my Renshi evaluation committee. It is a kicking form (kata, choreography...) with 38 kicks found in martial arts. The goal of my work was to teach Uechika to kick so Uechika could learn to defend against kickers. We lived in Jhoon Rhee territory after all...
5)Surving on the ground once you're there
See what I wrote about my ukemi and ground work. But FWIW... I teach my people not to spend a lot of time on the ground. We learn to apply Uechi techniques at all levels, but we prefer to get back up on our feet - fighting as we make the transition from floor to standing. It works better on the street.
6)Eliminating someone as fast as possible with knees, kicks, elbows, etc.
Sounds like classic Uechi Ryu to me... But you forgot the head butting.
The biggest problem with all the knee and elbow techniques in our kata is that we can't find good karate kumite venues to practice them. But now and then we get a Uechika who shows us he knows what he's doing in the MMA arena.
- Bill
Yes, he was a bit over the top.
