What Is Mixed Martial Arts? Have you ever watched a mixed martial arts bout? There are lots of mixed martial arts (MMA) bouts on television, but in some countries, most of them are on Pay-Per-View (PPV). MMA is a very brutal and hard-hitting sport in which almost anything goes. Most of the bouts in America are organized by the Ultimate Fighting Championship. MMA started about 2,000 years ago when it was a sport in the early Olympic Games. It died out of the games for some unknown explanation, but it found a resurgence in Europe in the late Nineteenth Century. Again, it died out, but came back with the Kings of the Square Ring in which Muhammad Ali took part in about 1980. Again, MMA, which it was not known as 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 a student 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 permitted to use any methods they knew. 'Vale Todo' ('Everything Goes') from Brazil was vital in this expansion. In fact, lots of if not most of the modern 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 to speak of and everything went. Astonishingly, this appeared to hamper MMA's increase in popularity, because as more rules were added to (marginally) limit the viciousness, so MMA has boomed. MMA is still very aggressive 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 concentrate 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 martial art they have learned. Most top fighters have studied three of four and are still learning more. The most popular starting point appears to be Brazilian jiu jitsu, followed by boxing, wrestling, Thai boxing, karate, judo and aikido. Because 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 just boxing. Wrestling injured the image of television bouts with its silly, choreographed dances known as bouts. 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 choreographed, although a branch of scripted MMA may form, who knows? The sport is still in its experimental days, despite having such ancient beginnings. Maybe it will even become a sport in the Olympic Games again.
. Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on a variety of topics, but is now involved with Mixed Martial Arts Training Gyms. If you would like to know more, please go to our web site at Mixed Martial Arts Quotes