Overview

Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) is a combative sport that, as the name implies, combines many different martial arts. Competitors in MMA use a combination of Martial Arts to become proficient in both striking and grappling. The most well known organizations that feature MMA are Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and PRIDE Fighting Championships (PRIDE).

-MMA competition is also often referred to as:

No Holds Barred (NHB)

Vale Tudo (anything goes)

Cage Fighting

Ultimate Fighting

Striking typically refers to the use of hands, feet, knees, and elbows to inflict damage upon an opponent while standing. The two most popular striking arts in Mixed Martial Arts are Boxing and Muay Thai. Unlike boxing, which only involves the hands, Muay Thai effectively integrates the hands, feet, knees, and elbows in its techniques.

Grappling

Grappling is often to refered to as ground fighting. Grappling training usually consist of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and wrestling. In grappling arts, such as Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, the goal is to submit your opponent using various joint locks or chokes and most of these submissions are directly applicable to MMA. Wrestling on the other hand has no such submissions and since there is no victory for pinning your opponent in MMA wrestling is usually used to obtain a dominant position to strike the opponent while they are on the ground, a tactic known as ground-and-pound an opponent.

Rules

The specifics of rules vary from organization to organization but there are few rules that are common amongst most MMA organizations:

Headbutts, eye gouging, and biting are all prohibited.     

No striking the groin

No attacks against the trachea

No attacks against the back of the head and spinal area

No small joint manipulation

No hair pulling or fish-hooking

There are various weight classes to ensure a fair fight. Matches are broken up into a number of time limited rounds. A competitor can win the match by knock out (KO) , submission( verbal or by tapping three times), or by judges decision. There are also various events that can cause a victory by TKO such as referee or doctor stoppage.

History

The sport of MMA can be traced back to the original Olympic games held in ancient Greece. In Greek pankration the competitors engaged in hand-to-hand combat that combined both striking and grappling skills. Like in modern MMA, in Greek pankration the goal was to was submit or incapacitate the opponent.

The most recent beginning of modern MMA however, can be traced back to the Vale Tudo competitions held in Brazil starting in the 1920's. It was in these competitions that the Gracie family and their version of Jiu-Jitsu ( Gracie or Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu) began to garner fame. These bouts often had a style vs. style competent to them, where the practitioners of various martial arts would compete to prove which martial art was superior to the others.

In 1993, Vale Tudo type competition was brought to the U.S. in part by the Gracie family. The competition was run under the name of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and had the goal of proving which martial art was superior to all others. It was in this competition that a rather frail looking Royce Gracie, a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner, was able to dominate all other competitors and capture the championship. Royce Grace was able to win despite being greatly out sized by many of his opponents as well as by using a fighting style that was completely different from most American's knew of. It was a very sobering experience for many when they witnessed the much more powerful and larger strikers becoming seemingly helpless once Royce Gracie took them to the ground. His use of grappling to dominate much larger opponents would change the landscape of the UFC forever. It also helped many practitioners of the more striking centric martial arts to realize they must effectively learn how to grapple as well as strike to truly be competent fighters and thus ushered in the modern age of MMA.

Modern MMA

Today MMA is a sport exploding with popularity. Numerous MMA organizations now exist and it is a billion dollar a year industry. This increase in popularity can be attributed to a few things:

Greatly increased T.V. exposure

Spike's The Ultimate Fighter

Rule changes, making it more acceptable

A large following on the internet which help to spread the sport