I’ve recently been looking for a new mixed martial arts gym. The problem I’m having is finding a gym that has a Muay Thai program that teaches Muay Thai for mma. So far I haven’t had much luck. Every class that I tried out teaches a more traditional Muay Thai. Traditional Muay Thai relies on kicks to the body and most of the training is geared towards working on body kicks. When I was lucky enough to travel to Thailand to train at Fairtex I’d say that 85% of what they worked on and 99% of the instruction I was given was on body kicks.
The problem I have with this is that body kicks are pretty much useless in MMA. You might as well lay down and tell the guy to get in your guard because that is what will happen any way if you try a body kick in a MMA fight, you’re going to get taken down to the ground. Leg kicks on the other hand are something that every fighter needs to know how to do if they want to be successful. If you watch any MMA fight I’d say that 90% of the kicks thrown are leg kicks %8 head kicks and maybe…maybe 2% body kicks. So when I’m training to be a MMA fighter and working on my kicks I want to train 90% of the time on leg kicks. Most Muay Thai classes that I’ve taken rarely work on leg kicks. Almost every class I’ve taken has worked on body kicks for at least part of the class.
How are you going to learn to become a legit mixed martial artists if you are wasting your time on techniques that don’t work in a MMA fight. It seems like everyone who wants to open an MMA gym just thinks that they need to have a BJJ class a Muay Thai class and maybe a wrestling class, but very few of these schools teach these techniques in relation to MMA. Each one of these disciplines has techniques that don’t really work in MMA but at the majority of MMA schools you’re going to learn them. Hopefully once the sport has progressed a little more and the pretenders who jumped on the band wagon have faded away schools will start to teach people what they need to know to be a MMA fighter and only what they need to know.
For the second year in a row the UFC which puts on mixed martial arts fights is the king of the pay per view. Some people thought it was a fad, or that’s at least what a lot of ignorant boxing fans were wishing it would be, but fads don’t last this long. I think that it is pretty evident that the sport of mixed martial arts is here to stay. Just take a look at the top ten Pay Per Views of 2008 you will see that the UFC has 7 of the top ten shows for the year. With fights like Penn vs GSP and Mir vs Lesnar coming in 2009 they are almost guaranteed to increase their pay per view numbers.
Here’s a list of the top 10 PPV for 2008:
1. Boxing: Oscar De La Hoya vs. Manny Pacquiao
2. UFC: Brock Lesnar vs. Randy Couture
3. Wrestling: WrestleMania,
4. UFC: Georges St. Pierre vs. Jon Fitch/Lesnar vs. Heath Herring
5. UFC: Lesnar vs. Frank Mir
6. UFC: Quinton Jackson vs. Forrest Griffin
7. UFC: St. Pierre vs. Matt Serra
8. Boxing: Felix Trinidad vs. Roy Jones Jr.
9. UFC: Chuck Liddell vs. Rashad Evans
10. UFC: B.J. Penn vs. Sean Sherk/Tito Ortiz vs. Lyoto Machida
So if the UFC is making all of this money compared to boxing and selling more PPV and selling out the seats for their fights why in the world do their fighters make so much less then boxers do. Let’s compare the top boxing and top UFC Pay Per View of the year. The UFC’s top PPV of the year was Lesnar vs. Couture, for that fight Lesnar took home $450,000 and Randy Couture earned $250,000. Not a bad nights work but when you compare it to what just one boxer can make on a single night the difference is shocking. For the top boxing PPV of the year De La Hoya vs. Manny Pacquiao, De La Hoya took home over $20 million dollars.
Yes that’s right a boxer can make up to 40 times the amount that a mixed martial arts fighter can. Well the boxing match must have sold a lot more PPV than the UFC did, right? The De La Hoya fight did 1.25 million PPV’s while the Lesnar fight sold 1.01 million PPV. So yeah the boxing one sold more PPV but nowhere even close to 40 times the amount. What the UFC is doing to its fighters is a travesty, they are making millions off the sweat and blood of its fighters while they are making chump change compared to what boxer can make with a less popular sport.
Your probably wondering how the UFC can do this, well it’s easy. They are the only game in town right now. Most people don’t even know the term mixed martial arts. Most people call it UFC fighting or just ultimate fighting. Right now they are pretty much the only promotion that is selling big time PPV’s. So they can pretty much pay whatever they want. There is a reason the government made monopolies illegal. They are bad for the workers and they are bad for the consumers.
We need more competition so that fighters will have to be paid what they are worth if a promotion wants to sign them. So I’m calling out to all my Austin MMA fans to start supporting other promotions such as affliction. We need them and more important the fighters need them. If your fighting right now for a local Austin MMA organization and have dreams of one day making it big in this sport you better hope that the UFC has some competition if you want a chance at a fair contract.
So you want to become a Central Texas MMA fighter. Let me guess you were watching the UFC last night and you thought to yourself I think I can do this it doesn’t look that difficult; or maybe you’ve been in a lot of street fights and you usually come up on top and your pretty sure you can do it in the ring with the same kind of results. Well before you get started you need to know one very important thing. It takes a lot of hard work to become a successful Texas MMA fighter and it’s not going to come overnight. It takes years of dedication if you want to be a true mixed martial arts fighter.
In order to be successful in this sport you will need to become proficient in three separate and forms of combat. These are Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, wrestling, and Muay Thai. Why these three you ask, well the answer is because they work. All that other garbage like karate and kung fu is pretty much worthless in a fight unless you’re going against someone who doesn’t know how to fight. Trust me every type of fighting has been tried in this sport and every one of them have been discarded because they didn’t work except the three mentioned above. If you don’t believe me go ahead and go get your black belt in karate and then go get yourself a MMA fight. After you get your but kicked you can come back and read the rest of this article.
Now that you know what you need to learn you have two options, you can go to three different schools and take out a loan to pay for all of them or you can go to a Texas MMA school that will have classes in all of these disciplines. Now your first day of Jiu Jitsu class your might roll with a guy that if you saw on the street you probably wouldn’t think twice about fighting this guy. Well this guy will probably steam roll you like you were a twelve year old girl. After this you might think about giving up before you even get started. Try and remember this though, that guy who just kicked you but, well the same thing happened to him when he just started out. In fact the same thing happened to all guys in this sport. I remember my fist day when it took this guy who I outweighed by a good 30 pounds all of 30 seconds to make me tap out. If you stick with it though trust me it will be worth it and it won’t take long before you’re the one stomping on some bigger guy who came in thinking he’s a bad ass and the next UFC champ.
Ok so you are watching a mixed martial arts or MMA fight and every time the fight goes to the ground the announcer starts talking about all these different positions and what position there in now and what they are trying to accomplish from that position. You probably heard a number of unfamiliar terms like half guard and full mount but had no idea what the announcer was talking about. If you want to learn what these terms mean you could either go to a local austin jiu jitsu school and spend a few months training to learn all of these positions or you could spend a few minutes reading this article to learn what they mean.
The most common jiujitsu position in MMA is called full guard. Being in some ones full guard means that you are on top with the bottom person having their legs wrapped around your waste. The guy on top is considered to be in the dominate position as far as fighting goes because they are in a much better position to throw punches then the guy on bottom. For jiu jitsu purposes though this position is considered neutral, because the guy on top has very little chance of getting a submission while the guy on bottom actually has a number of different ways that they can submit the guy on top.
Usually the guy on top will try and get in a better position so that they can submit the bottom guy. The next position is called half guard. This is when the top guy is able to get one leg over the bottom guy’s leg, leaving the bottom guy to wrap his leg around the top guys other leg. Basically it’s like full guard but instead of the legs being wrapped around the waist they are wrapped around just one of the top guy’s legs. The next position is called side mount or side control, this is when the guy on top is laying with his legs 90 degrees from the bottom guy’s legs or in a T position. This is the position that you would see in your normal high school wrestling match. Once in this position the top guy is in a much more dominate position and has many more ways of submitting the bottom guy while the bottom guy has very little chance of submitting the top guy from this position.
The most dominate position is called the full mount. This is when the guy on top is on his knees pretty much sitting on the bottom guy’s chest. This position is especially dominate in MMA because the top guy can punch the bottom guy in the face and the bottom guy can only try and protect himself and or improve his position. If the bottom guy does not get out of this position in an MMA fight the fight will be over quickly. The other common position is called taking someone’s back. This one’s pretty easy to figure out, it just means that one guy is behind the other one usually with his legs wrapped around the other guys waist.
Some of the other less common positions include the rubber guard and spider guard, but they are a little more complicated to explain and until you have a basic understanding of the other positions it probably won’t make much since to you. So if you ever decide to go to an austin jiu jitsu school you’ll at least have a basic understanding of the different positions that you will be learning.
When my wife walked into the room shortly after Brock Lesnar’s shocking upset of one of the greatest mixed martial arts fighters of all time Randy Couture she looked around the room at me and some of the other Texas Jiu Jitsu members. After everyone left she asked me if somebody had died. I said no but I was thinking “yeah the sport of mixed martial arts just did.” I don’t know if that’s true or not but it has made me wonder if this will be good or bad for the sport.
The Bad:
Prior to Lesnar’s victory he had a total of 3 mixed martial arts fights, with two of them in the UFC. Out of those three fights he had lost one of them giving him an unimpressive record of 2-1. Most knowledgeable fans of the sport looked at Lesnar the same way we looked at the legendary Kimbo Slice giving Lesnar slightly more credit because of his impressive collegiate wrestling career. After Rick Mir’s 90 second victory over Lesnar most of the old school MMA fans figured that would be the last of him and he would go away.
Then he was given another shot and was able to pull out the victory by riding Heath Hearing for three rounds doing little to know damage and then showing absolutely no class by acting like he was riding a bull or something at the end of the fight. I’m guessing that was something from his fake wrestling days or something. Now my real problem with giving him the shot at the title has nothing to do with him or his past. It has to do with the fact that giving a guy with a 1-1 record a shot at the heavy weight title makes the sport of MMA look like a joke.
I mean imagine if some quarterback got injured right before he was supposed to play in the super bowl and then his team went out and got some guy from a local flag football team to be the quarterback. If that guy was able to lead his team to victory how would anybody ever take professional football seriously if anybody could do it. The fighters and fans of MMA have fought a long time to legitimize this sport that we love so much and try to show the skill and talent it takes to be a competitor in this sport. Having some guy with two fights to be able to become the heavy weight champion is something that is supposed to happen in the WWF not the UFC. It makes it look like anyone with a little talent can just come in and be competitive with out the years of experience needed for any other professional sport.
The Good:
The only good thing really is that it brings attention to the sport and probably will bring in some new fans that will help bring more popularity and more opportunity for MMA fighters who put everything on the line to put on a good show for us the fans. Now I think that Lesnar has responded extremely well to winning the title and has shown a lot of humility by saying that he won’t consider himself to be the true champion until he beats Mir. It’s possible that he could be great for this sport and maybe even get Dana White’s sorry ass to finally get the greatest mixed martial artist in the world Fedor Emelianenko to come and fight in the UFC so that the world can see who the best heavy weight fighter in the world really is. I guess anything is possible in this sport as us true fans know, but one thing I do know is that I’m not really that excited to see Lesnar vs. Mir II. I’m interested to see what some of the other Texas Jiu Jitsu members think so feel free to leave a comment and voice your opinion.
