Where do you believe mma started

waterfordkick

I'm just interested on peoples views on where mixed martial arts started and who started the first mixed martial arts.
I put this in the sd and ma section to hear everyone's views

Ug Lee

waterfordkick wrote: »

I'm just interested on peoples views on where mixed martial arts started and who started the first mixed martial arts.
I put this in the sd and ma section to hear everyone's views

I think MMA as we know it today came about as a direct consequence of UFC1. Sure there were Vale Tudo competitions in Brazil before that but it was not worldwide and at any place and time before that there were always no hold barred competitions.

Boxing and wrestling used to be taught as one discipline and before that swordsmanship was taught with wrestling so the term MMA is a little subjective.

Yep, the Greeks did their thing but was it the start of MMA as we know it today. I would say not.

Furious-Dave

Ug Lee wrote: »

I think MMA as we know it today came about as a direct consequence of UFC1. Sure there were Vale Tudo competitions in Brazil before that but it was not worldwide and at any place and time before that there were always no hold barred competitions.

Boxing and wrestling used to be taught as one discipline and before that swordsmanship was taught with wrestling so the term MMA is a little subjective.

Yep, the Greeks did their thing but was it the start of MMA as we know it today. I would say not.

UFC is definitely the main influence on modern MMA, however, there has been long traditions of "free fighting" in Europe, Asia and of course South America. For example, Daido Juku was formed in 1981 with the intention of combining Knock-down Karate and Judo. In my opinion MMA as we see it today is just the natural result of the evolution of free-fighting, with it becoming a legitimate sport because of the UFC.

waterfordkick

I like the answers lads. When i googled mma all i really got was modern mma. Would never have known of the Greeks would have mixed it up.
in my mind I would have put Bruce Lee in there too. He studied a lot of various martial arts and too from each one and mixed it up !

arybvtcw0eolkf

OP I've copied this thread over to the MMA forum, should make a good discussion on both forum's.

rovert

Maeda teaching Carlos Gracie Jiu-Jitsu was probably the earliest and most easily point-to-able beginning point for what would become modern MMA.

zenboy

the first organisation to fight mma rules was shooto japan in 1989,erik paulson was lightheavy champ at one stage.Pancrase began just before the first ufc but was with open hand strikes and later changed to closed fist.

joepenguin

Imo mma just means a mix of martial arts. If someone teaches a mix of tai chi and aikido, technically speaking that is just as much mma as someone teaching muay thai and bjj.

Karate itself is a form of mma mixing striking with japanese ju jutsu techniques.

But as we know it today mma = ufc. Its seen as the pinnacle of mma and it just goes to show how good of a job they are doing to be seen as such. Unlike other sports where multiple organisations have equal hold on the sport.

j walsh

MMA started with Enter the Dragon where Bruce took his man down caught him in an armbar near the start of the movie.
Combining stand up with submissions he brought it to main stream TV.

zenboy

joe penguin,id have to disagree with that on a couple of points.mma refers to the use of both grappling and striking in a full contact fight,you could teach any combination of arts you like but if you dont spar under those rules its not mma.Aikido and tai chi arent full contact martial arts and mostly dont feature sparring so theyd be a fairly poor combination.

danatas

MMA is just a brand. It has nothing to do with mixing different arts, it is just a competition rules, which makes legal both wrestling and strikes. Talking about ancient MMA is nonsense. Pankration and most of chinese styles had both wrestling and striking, but they are not MMA.

Furious-Dave

MMA is the name of a modern combat sport. And you are right, if the training of an "all-round" system isn't geared towards preparing for competition in that sport then that system simply isn't MMA. However, the mixing of different arts is everything that MMA is about. Ufc for example pretty much started out as style vs style. Eventually though, most fighters realised that they needed to cross-train in other styles to remain effective in the sport.
And with saying that, technically Pankration is MMA. Wikipedia defines it as "a martial arts sport introduced to the Greek Olympic Games in 648 BC and founded as a blend of boxing and wrestling". That's exactly what MMA is.

joepenguin

zenboy wrote: »

joe penguin,id have to disagree with that on a couple of points.mma refers to the use of both grappling and striking in a full contact fight,you could teach any combination of arts you like but if you dont spar under those rules its not mma.Aikido and tai chi arent full contact martial arts and mostly dont feature sparring so theyd be a fairly poor combination.

When I think of mma i think of cage fighting and all the usual styles we see in it.
However I dont think the term mma is strictly reserved for this (Realistically it kind of is)

I used aikido and tai chi for the exact reasons you mention just to make the point that if someone studies both for 10 years, decides to hold martial art classes in a community centre and calls it mma, technically you cant call him on that because he is teaching a mix of 2 martial arts and hasnt mentioned the ring, the cage or anything like that.


Danatas Id consider mma to be a combat sport and ufc a brand. Although i see what you are saying it is a selling point.

pearsquasher

I come from a classical Japanese Ryuha background via the 9 schools of the Bujinkan. These are all distinct schools of martial arts origionating from feudal medieval Japan. They all share some common features with each other. They ALL contain locks, throws, punches, kicks and weapons in a cohesive holistic system. Locks include stirkes, throws include kicks, chokes include weapons etc. There's no seperation of these things... Essentially you could say.. they're all "unmixed" to begin with.

Then judo and bjj, coming from jujutsu, and modern karate coming from classcial karate, as well as many oher things came about and with popular media culture added, everyone suddenly thinks that martial arts are divided into "striking" OR "throwing" OR "submission". These labels prove very handy in rule-based competitive martial arts which rises in popularity as the perceived need for feudal combat skills deminishes and sports popularise. So you have a this sport that just uses partcular strikes, or that one that just tries to take balance without strikes... all with weight divisions, rules, time constraints etc.

Then martial sportists realises that if you now strip away the rules then you need to add strikes to your throwing art, locks to your kicking art.. etc..... The result isn't a return to the classical schools that already had these things complimenting each other - like most classical jujutsu schools (after all they weren't sports)- but rather a more jigsaw-like blending of discrete competitive diciplines e.g. MMA. It seems to me to be a sport of discrete skillsets trained seperately whose only underlying holistic methodolgy is the one defined by its goals of cage-fighting competitiveness.

danatas

Well there is a difference - to mix or to divide. When wrestling and boxing were introduced to Olimpics??? Pankration was lately divided to two parts - wrestling and boxing, not vise versa.

Niall Keane

zenboy:

Aikido and tai chi arent full contact martial arts and mostly dont feature sparring so theyd be a fairly poor combination

Really? Thanks, good to hear from an expert.

http://www.freewebs.com/sanshou/videoclips.htm

http://themastersclub.tv/?page_id=69

danatas:

MMA is just a brand. It has nothing to do with mixing different arts, it is just a competition rules, which makes legal both wrestling and strikes. Talking about ancient MMA is nonsense. Pankration and most of chinese styles had both wrestling and striking, but they are not MMA.

+1

Ug Lee

Niall Keane wrote: »

zenboy:


Really? Thanks, good to hear from an expert.

http://www.freewebs.com/sanshou/videoclips.htm

http://themastersclub.tv/?page_id=69

danatas:



+1

I had a look at some of the videos and the sparring doesn't look like Tai Chi is being used. It looks like you could just learn how to punch, kick, grapple and takedown without having to learn Tai Chi forms or push hands and it seems that there is no justification for the amount of time spent learning forms, etc. But maybe I am wrong and just don't know what to look for?

cowzerp

joepenguin wrote: »

I used aikido and tai chi for the exact reasons you mention just to make the point that if someone studies both for 10 years, decides to hold martial art classes in a community centre and calls it mma, technically you cant call him on that because he is teaching a mix of 2 martial arts and hasnt mentioned the ring, the cage or anything like that.

Joe, MMA as we know it is 1 sport utilising the most effective techniques, throwing Tai chi and akido together is mixing martial arts but not Mixed Martial Arts.

The most similar in modern times would be JKD which was meant to take the best of different systems to make a complete fighting style, i believe if Bruce was alive today, JKD would be MMA but to keep with lineage it cant grow and adapt as it was meant to.

Pankraton would be the closest thing to MMA from old times as it was mixing Boxing and Wrestling,

joepenguin

cowzerp wrote: »

Joe, MMA as we know it is 1 sport utilising the most effective techniques, throwing Tai chi and akido together is mixing martial arts but not Mixed Martial Arts.

The most similar in modern times would be JKD which was meant to take the best of different systems to make a complete fighting style, i believe if Bruce was alive today, JKD would be MMA but to keep with lineage it cant grow and adapt as it was meant to.

Pankraton would be the closest thing to MMA from old times as it was mixing Boxing and Wrestling,

I agree with the idea that most of us refer to cage fighting when talking of mma. But wouldnt the term mixed martial arts be a bit odd if it was confined tp certain arts?

Take Michida for example who has brought tradtional karate to the cage. If he practiced his style and added the bjj and taught professionally as opposed to fight professionally. Would he still be considered a mixed martial artist? More than likely people would say by and large trad karate isnt full contact and therfore not considered mma.

Many arts outsude the mma loop are there because of their training methods, not their style or content of that style.

I disagree that mma is a sport that utilises the most effective techniques. They have taken out many of the most effective techniques and with good reason. They are the most effective within those rules, but combat athletes are the standard they are due to their training methods, will to win, competition etc.

Mma as we know it is a combat sport. Maybe cage fighting could be labelled as sport mma?

People are starting to look at mma as a "style" now, and it must consist of this and that. I believe that mma by nature should be open to all styles. Maybe this leaves room for cowboys but im sure they are there anyway.

Furious-Dave

joepenguin wrote: »

People are starting to look at mma as a "style" now, and it must consist of this and that. I believe that mma by nature should be open to all styles. Maybe this leaves room for cowboys but im sure they are there anyway.

This isn't true. There are many "styles" of MMA, based on what each gym uses as the source for the 3 ranges. If you visit a few gyms around Dublin for example you will see a different "style" of MMA in each.
MMA is open to all styles. What happens though is that people soon realise that the existing combat sports, Muay Thai, Boxing, Judo, BJJ etc are already partly geared for MMA competition. What I mean by this is styles like Shotokan, Kenpo, many Kung Fu styles etc will have to develop whole new sparring systems, that will end up looking like "generic Kickboxing" anyway. And thats not to mention wrestling/grappling.

Niall Keane

Ug Lee:

I had a look at some of the videos and the sparring doesn't look like Tai Chi is being used. It looks like you could just learn how to punch, kick, grapple and takedown without having to learn Tai Chi forms or push hands and it seems that there is no justification for the amount of time spent learning forms, etc. But maybe I am wrong and just don't know what to look for?

You’re falling into the classic mistake of function following form rather than form following function. I have never practiced another martial art, so it stands that the techniques that I use in sanshou are tai chi Chuan techniques. But then again my tai chi Chuan has been passed down through fighters, not families. Yang Lu Chan - champion of Beijing, Wang Lan Ting who hid in a monastery after killing 6 Manchu’s in a sabre altercation, Ching Yi and Qi Min Quan, who lived in troubled times, Cheng Tin Hung 1957 Chinese Boxing champion of Taiwan and Hong Kong, Dan Docherty 1980 South East Asian open weight champion, Paul Mitchel 2005 IMAF Shuai Jaoi world champion. It never ceases to amaze how so called tai chi masters of styles whose last fighter lived in the 19th century can pass comment on what we do, and assert that it is not tai chi!! I'm not directing this at you as I don't know you, but rather the many charlatan "sifus" I've come across, these guys are the reason both tai chi and kung fu are always fighting an upward battle to prove their relevance!
Put it this way, should car mechanics lose their skills over time, and start selling a service to “cure” your car over a phone call, are they still mechanics?
Should a real mechanic then exist, is he not a real mechanic because he doesn’t practice such voodoo?

Anyway, the form is a method of expressing an arsenal of techniques that relate to each other, if one is resisted then usually a neighbouring technique can counter the counter so to speak, so it is a way of past masters teaching us their strategy. It can be practiced large to contemplate the direction and shape of power issued, or small to consider how best to guard when issuing a strike etc...
If you watch the videos again carefully, you will identify the techniques, but also note how opposites are applied, pressure applied above, a reaction induced, then the opponent swept / seized from below. This type of strategic technique has to become a natural method, and this is what tui shou drills teach, they are not meant to be taken literally.
Take four directions, both hand are simultaneously used to divert a single attack in the drill. this is to teach the relevance of the first and second gates, the wrist and elbows to beginners. So they train two hands simultaneously. we are expected to progress, the fighters song states "in peng lu ji and an one must be considerate." So we can learn to bridge more effectively, and eventually learn how "one hand controls many".
This is not the place to hope to explain the basis of the art and the relevance of its training methods, but hopefully I have pointed at the door?

zenboy

niall keane,
I was under the impression that sanshou was just a sporting ruleset for any style to test themselves under,didnt think it had anything to do with tai chi.I stand corrected.I have to say it looks nothing like any kung fu ive ever seen but sparring makes all styles look the same anyway.

Niall Keane

Sanshou means scattering hands, or unbound hands, i.e. free fighting. Tai Chi Chuan or "Shi San Shi" (thirteen dynamics) has 5 elements to it:
1. Form
2. Tui Shou (drills and free wrestling)
3. Nei Gung (exercises to train efficient body mechanics, iron shirt type skills etc.)
4. Weapons
5. Sanshou (empty hand self defence techniques)

Sanshou is also the name of a competition rule set, which was designed for all styles to be able to compete. It looks like a cross between MMA and Thai. i.e. kickboxing with throws, but no ground work.

I have to say it looks nothing like any kung fu ive ever seen but sparring makes all styles look the same anyway.

I have a video of Cheng Tin Hung and his students practicing in a Hong Kong park around 1960. What my students find remarkable, they only got to see this some years ago, was the similarity of the training methods and drills, with the exception of certain quirks that every person develops they were identical. Up until I saw that video I had only my sifu's description on how his sifu trained, now here was a video of the same drills, self defence technique training, conditioning etc. preformed half a century ago. The intensity of the training was the same as for my students. But both he and I have produced international champions.

So then maybe you should ask yourself, have you actually seen real kung fu?