About Mixed Martial Arts

At Champions Academy we teach Mixed Martial Arts consists of effective stand-up striking martial art, Muay Thai, utilizing punches, kicks, knees, and elbows, best techniques of the wrestling (Freestyle and Greco Roman wrestling) to keep the fight standing up, to take someone down, employ submissions and holds from Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.

Mixed martial arts (MMA) is the combat sport in which two competitors attempt to achieve dominance over one another by utilizing three general tactics: striking, finishing holds, and control. The rules allow the combatants to use a variety of martial arts techniques, including punches, kicks, joint-locks, chokes, takedowns and throws. Victory is normally gained through knock-out, submission (one fighter concedes victory to the other by tapping the mat or his opponent with his hand), or stoppage by the referee, the fight doctor or a competitor's cornerman. MMA is also alternately called NHB (for No Holds Barred), but this term has become much less widely used.

MMA is also used to describe any hybrid style of martial arts which incorporate techniques and theories from several different martial arts. This especially applies to MMA styles which incorporate a mixture of ground fighting, stand-up striking, and takedowns in their training. The main goal of this article is to provide information about MMA as a "realistic, few rules full contact fight sport" rather than to describe hybrid martial arts that are not typically used in minimal-rules sporting environments.

As a result of these sporting events, martial arts training and the understanding of the combat effectiveness of various strategies have changed dramatically over the last ten years. While the early years included the widest possible variety of styles (everything from Sumo to Karate), modern fighters often train in a mixture of only three styles: Amateur Wrestling (focusing on clinches and takedowns), Submission Wrestling (focusing on submissions and positioning on the ground), and Kickboxing (usually Muay Thai and Boxing) (focusing on striking). These three distinct styles coincide with the "phases of combat" theory, which suggests that fights can be broken into three distinct phases, each requiring completely different skill sets: stand-up fighting, clinch fighting, and ground fighting. According to the theory, a fighter's best strategy is to determine the phase in which he has the greatest advantage over his opponent and then to influence the fight to take place in that phase.

Well-known examples of MMA organizations are the Ultimate Fighting Championship and Pride Fighting Championships.