Long Island Mixed Martial Arts ( MMA )

What is our program?

MMA is an acronym for Mixed Martial Arts. There are many different MMA organizations that provide formats for competition, UFC being the most popular. Aside from a few exceptions today’s mixed martial arts athletes train in 3 primary disciplines: wrestling, Jiu Jitsu and Kickboxing/Muay Thai.

This was not always the case, and this history is what gave rise to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu as such a popular and fast growing martial art. It was brought to the United States when the first UFC was held in Denver in 1993. The Ultimate Fighting Championship’s inaugural event was created to pit different martial art styles of fighting against each other and see who came out on top. In the early UFC's virtually every imaginable style was represented with champions of their respective martial art style, like Tae Kwon Do, Karate, Boxing , Kickboxing and wrestling to name a few. The submission fighting of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu expert Royce Gracie dominated. He won every fight he had in the first four UFC tournaments.

Fighters started realizing that they had to learn Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, regardless of whether they wanted to fight standing or on the ground. BJJ teaches more than just submissions but also how to stay safe in bad spots and how to escape from larger and stronger opponents. Wrestling also became very important because with wrestling you could choose where the fight took place, you could choose to take your opponent down or to defend the take down and stay standing. Muay Thai /Kickboxing has become the predominant striking styles as it is usually more effective in the cage. The early MMA fighters added these three styles to the arts they had already cultivated throughout their lives. Now though a generation shift happened as a new breed of fighter has emerged. This new generation started with the initial goal of fighting MMA and not competing in any one art made the choice to train in the disciplines they had observed being the most dominate as they grew up, giving us the sport we now call MMA.