What makes a great MMA athlete? What is it that makes one better than the other? Is it power? Is it speed? Is it a great ground game?

It’s the age old question that fighters and questions ask themselves all the time. Mixed Martial Arts, is a fairly new sport, and is evolving quickly. The definition is in its name, and it is the product of moulding and bringing together the techniques of various forms of fighting and self-defence into a fluid form.

It’s began as a combination of boxing, kick boxing, wrestling and Ju Jitsu et al. These four bases of fighting remain the at the core of any world class fighter. However, over the years we have seen MMA superstars emerge from other bases. Ronda Rousey for example comes from a Judo background,  George St Pierre grew up in Tae Kwon Do, however one could argue that he is considered one of the greatest of all time because of his ability to learn and master the art of wrestling, and more specifically American Wrestling.

What is abundantly clear in the modern day, is that a true MMA athlete must have a well rounded game, must be able to fight on the ground, in the clinch, and standing up. So, what are the major bases one must cover. We break it down in 3 parts.

  1. Stand Up Game
  2. Ground Game
  3. The Extras

 

Stand Up:

Stand up, is fighting while standing up on one’s leg (sorry for pointing out the obvious). Stand up fighting, is very exciting to watch.

To master the art of striking, an MMA athlete looks to two forms of fighing as the basis for their stand up. The most important being Kick Boxing or Muay Thai. Over the years, we have seen many great MMA fighters cross over into the sport from the traditional kick boxing format.

 

Probably the most crucial aspects in mixed martial arts fighting, and one that’s usually overlooked and taken for granted, is that of work. A few of the greatest fighters we’ve seen in boxing have all displayed great work and motion, Jack Dempsey, Sugar Ray Robinson, Sugar Ray Leonard, Prince Nassim and the incomparable Mohammed Ali all used amazing base work and movement abilities to evade and attack their competitors. Among the main difficulties that the early kickboxing picture was plagued with was that practitioners came from the karate professions. The traditional karate professions stressed flat footed stand your ground tactics with bad work and maneuverability.

Several early kickboxers, originating from karate backgrounds, accented their karate kicks with the exceptional striking techniques taken from boxing, but most were slow to adopt the extremely mobile boxing footwork. These practitioners that originated from a boxing background or who acknowledged that maneuverable work and strategic positioning were a necessary part of the boxers game plan included in their training and exhibited a notable benefit. Muay Thai practitioners not tainted by the traditional karate systems, have always shown an extremely fine feeling of work and position, such which they move in and out just out of variety to make the opposition miss and after that back in to variety to hit with power and accuracy.

The practitioners which relied heavily on standup were very inefficient at preventing the takedowns of the grapplers, permitting themselves to be place in positions that limited their motion and eventually to be taken down. Which was until Maurice Smith showed that with a good work and ring generalship the grapplers might be stopped with a predominantly striking game. From there the development continued and the predominant strikers appeared again. The mixed martial arts practitioners that mainly relied on their takedown game now under the particular pressure of having to adjust their takedown methods to keep up with evasive maneuvering and striking adapted ways of the standup specialists.

 

 

Boxing:

While throwing punches is undoubtedly important in combat sports, MMA has adapted boxing or more accurately transformed it to suit the cage.

Taking in a conventional approach of boxing in an MMA fight is at the fighters peril. This is due to fact that fighter is open to a take down and kicks in an MMA fight. As such, the leg stance is much wider in an MMA fighters arsenal as opposed to a conventional boxer. Rather than a side on stance a boxer might take, and MMA fighter faces forward and is not attemepting to minimise his body size by facing his opponent side ways.

 

One would think that transitioning from Boxing to MMA, would be a natural progression for those wishing to make that progression. However, such transtions have been limited on  a whole , and none come to mind that have had any significant success.

Simply this comes down to the fact that Boxers don’t kick, knee or elbow, in fact out of all the stand ups conventional boxing is the least important. In recent times, we have seen talented fighters emerge form tradiotional martial arts, ike Karate or Taw Kwan Do. Such, examples are Anthony “Showtime” Pettis,  Stephen Wonderboy Thomphson and Lyoda Machida however their are many more.

However, as MMA develops and the science behind develops the