What Is Mixed Martial Arts?

Have you ever watched a mixed martial arts fight? There are lots of mixed martial arts (MMA) fights on TV, but in some countries, most of them are on Pay-Per-View (PPV). MMA is a very violent and aggressive sport in which almost anything goes. Most of the bouts in America are organized by the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

MMA began about 2,000 years ago when it was a sport in the early Olympic Games. It passed out of the games for some unknown reason, but it discovered a resurgence in Europe in the late Nineteenth Century.

Again, it passed out, but returned with the Kings of the Square Ring in which Muhammad Ali took part in about 1980.

Again, MMA, which it was not called then, waned. In those earlier matches, the idea was to find out which was the best martial art, so they would put a boxer against a wrestler or a boxer against an aficionado of karate. In the early 1990’s, the emphasis shifted to finding out who was the best fighter, not which was the best discipline.

Fighters were allowed to use any methods they knew. ‘Vale Todo’ (‘Everything Goes’) from Brazil was important in this expansion. In fact, many if not most of the contemporary MMA fighters have trained in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. The Gracie family from Brazil was (and still is) central to MMA.

In the Nineties, there were no rules really and everything went. Surprisingly, this seemed to hamper MMA’s increase in popularity, because as more rules were added to (marginally) limit the brutality, so MMA has boomed.

MMA is still very belligerent and violent and broken limbs are not uncommon. Luckily, the death rate in the ring is far below that of some other martial arts like boxing, in which fighters focus more on the head than the body.

In contemporary Mixed martial arts, a fighter is allowed to use his or her body as a weapon according to any discipline they have studied. Most top fighters have learned three of four and are still learning more.

The most popular starting point seems to be Brazilian jiu jitsu, followed by boxing, wrestling, Thai boxing, karate, judo and aikido.

Since there are so many martial arts disciplines, it means that no two fighters are likely to have the same style. This has the possibility to make MMA more interesting than say, boxing, because MMA includes boxing, but boxing is only boxing.

Wrestling damaged the image of TV bouts with its silly, choreographed dances known as fights. It did not fool many people and it was more of a joke than a real sport. MMA is categorically not the same.

It is not scripted, although a branch of scripted MMA might form, who knows? The sport is still in its early days, despite having such ancient origins. Perhaps it will even be a sport in the Olympic Games again.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on a range of topics, but is now concerned with Mixed Martial Arts Training Gyms. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at Mixed Martial Arts Quotes