Cage Fighting

Mixed Martial Art or simply MMA, like many refer to it, is one of the fastest growing sports in the world and, according to cbsnews.com, the fastest growing sport in America. It’s growing so fast that it has surpassed boxing in popularity. With these credentials I went on my search of why so many people are fascinated with MMA.

Mixed Martial Arts consist of many different styles of fighting put together, combining grappling and and striking techniques, such as, muay Thai, kickboxing, wrestling, Brazilian and traditional jiu-jitsu, judo, Kung fu, karate, and many other styles. This sport has been around since ancient times with the name of Pankration, but in modern era, 1900s to present, it has been part of different cultures all over the world. It was made famous in a global scale by movies mainly produced by Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris and ultimately this sport was put on the map, at least in the Americas, by a very talented fighter named Royce Gracie in UFC Championship Tournaments.

To analyze and understand this sport in a better way I decided to go and meet up with a guy named Thiago Alves. For those of you that don’t know who he is; Alves is one of the best fighters in the business and has fought the best of the best all over the world. So I spent a couple of hours with him to see what his daily life consisted of and this is what I found out:

TRAINING:

Thiago Alves (right) practicing his muay thai skills

Alves does about 2000 crunches, over 300 pushups, 4 miles of running, and about 8 hours of what he calls training, but other people, such as me, refer to this as torture. Coaches over at his training facility, American Top Team, explain to me that it is vital for Alves to not only win a fight, but to come out of the fight without serious injuries. So I said to one of the coaches “What kind of injuries are we talking about?” And they showed me this picture:

Alves (right) being hit by George St. Pierre (left) during a fight.

And… uh… yeah!

FIGHTING:

In the UFC, which is a league in the sport, non-title fights are set to 3 rounds consisting of 5 minutes each round. In title fight, rounds are still 5 minutes each, but they are set to 5 rounds instead of 3. Because I insisted in being a hard-headed towards this sport, one of the coaches explained to me that although there has been controversy around the sport and its safety, it is less harmful than any other contact. This is because MMA fighters train for this sort of punishment in a daily basis, so they are used to it for the most part. A regular human being would be in serious pain if he/she gets hit like MMA fighters do. So I asked him why not boxing? And he responded that boxing, believe it or not, is more dangerous than MMA fights under the UFC regulations for many reasons. One of the reasons is because of the time fighting. Rarely does a fight last its full time (15 or 25 minutes), most of them end early and this is a good thing (by the way, boxing fights are set to 12 rounds of 3 minute each resulting in 36 minutes of fighting, more than double most MMA fights). Another advantage that MMA has over Boxing is that there are many ways to lose a fight apart from the danger of a “knock out,” which is caused by the hard striking of the head so that the brain crashes against the skull walls and eventually shutting down for seconds and maybe minutes. In MMA, a fighter could get submitted into giving up by applying non-dangerous techniques, such as, joint locks, pain generating twisting of joints and stopping blood flow to the brain, which as bad as it sounds seldom happens because the ref usually stops the fight before it gets to that point. This piece of information was shocking to me.

Thiago Alves after winning a fight.

Understanding MMA was a bit difficult to me because it involves so much dedication and suffering, but after experiencing the discipline, hard work, and sportsmanship put into this sport by the fighters and their crew, I became a fan.

Here is a video of Alves highlights (WARNING: IT'S GRAPHIC)

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