Mixed martial art (MMA) competition has come a long way from the early UFCs, where Karateka faced off against streetfighters, and Jiujitsu practitioners battled Kung Fu stylists. In those early days competitors typically had uni-dimensional games, based on striking or takedowns or groundfighting. Competitors who were skilled in more than one area of fighting were far and few between.
Nowadays MMA competitors do far more cross-training, and it is no longer unusual to have separate boxing, wrestling and Jiu-jitsu coaches. Do you need to be an expert at every phase of combat to be successful in MMA? Not at all! You DO, however, need to be familiar with each phase of combat, and have a few phases, or sub-categories, in which you are a specialist.
For the sake of argument we can divide MMA combat into 3 phases: 1) Striking, 2) Standing Grappling and 3) Groundfighting. Each of these phases is composed of a large number of sub-categories. For the sake of discussion, I will divide each major phase into some simple and sometimes arbitrary categories.
Standing Striking1 – Punching 2 – Kicki |