MMA Combat Critique

  The inarguable biggest star in the history of the UFC and mixed martial arts as a whole, Conor McGregor’s career serves as a great illustration of how quickly things can change in a fighter’s career, for better and for worse. Getting his start outside of the UFC in regional promotions across Ireland, he eventually made his way to the U.K based promotion Cage Warriors, where he became a two-weight division champion, a trend that would eventually follow him to the UFC. He made his debut in the UFC in 2013 with a first-round finish against Marcus Brimage, which set him up to go on a five-fight winning streak after. Personality wise, he was incredibly confident, yet still somewhat humble and clearly focused completely on becoming the best. This led to him becoming incredibly popular, eventually leading to his first championship opportunity, where he knocked out one of the greatest fighters in the history of mixed martial arts Jose Aldo, in 13 seconds with a single punch. His popular...

For this list I want to go over who I believe are the best champions currently reigning in the UFC and rank them. Because there are more than 5 weight classes, not every champion will make this list, only the 5 I believe are the best. I am defining best based on skill displayed, and dominance over high level competition. 5. Ilia Topuria At only 27 years old and holding a record of 16 wins with no losses, Ilia Topuria is looking like he could become one of the greatest champions the sport has ever seen. His past two wins were over Max Holloway and Alexander Volkanovski, two of the greatest fighters the 145-pound weight class has ever seen. Topuira only ranks five on this list because despite his dominance and past two wins, he has not faced nearly the same level of competition before winning the belt, and he only has a single title defense. 4. Merab Dvalishvili In my opinion, Merab is the least skilled hand to hand striker on this list. He is also not the best wrestler on this list. Ho...

How Does Weight Cutting And Hydration Work In MMA | Evolve Daily After reading this blog post, I decided to link it as I feel it is another very important topic to touch on, being a blog that is dedicated to analysis and promotion of the sport to new audiences. Weight cutting may be something you have heard about, especially if it has gone wrong or resulted in a fight being canceled. I think this blog post by  Evolve Daily  does a great job of giving a general overview of weight cutting, specifically the methods used by athletes to cut weight. They also outline some of the dangers that can come from weight cuts, such as Kidney problems, Metabolism damage and potential brain health concerns. In my opinion, weight cutting is going to be a part of the sport whether we want it to be or not, but it should be minimized to be as healthy as possible, even though it is never truly healthy in any form. Some promotions like ONE championship have introduced a hydration test that must be...

When starting out training, one question that I had as a beginner was what gloves should be used when, and when I eventually made a purchase of my own gloves, what type should I get for my first pair. To help me answer this question better, I talked to my coach and a few of the more experienced people at my gym to get a better grip on the right path forward. For starters, the first thing that I was told by everyone I interviewed was that for a first pair of gloves, a standard pair of 16-ounce boxing/sparring gloves is perfect. This is because they are applicable in most training situations. For sparring you almost always want to be using 16-ounce gloves to protect your hands, as well as your training partners from unnecessary damage. These gloves are also just fine for drilling and hitting mitts and pads when training. Another question that I specifically asked my coach is what brands of gloves I should look into using. My coach told me that it really depends on preference, as many o...

If you are a new fan, it can be confusing sometimes where you can actually find events to watch and when they are airing. This post hopefully will clear up some of those confusions. This will only be in reference to the United States, as internationally there are many different broadcast partners and ways to watch. To start with, the UFC is the largest and most accessible promotion to watch, as with their current ESPN relationship, all of their events are watchable live with an ESPN+ subscription, with an added charge for pay per view main cards at 79.99. They also occasionally will air non-pay per view cards on regular ESPN channels. The times these events air live varies, as the UFC has events all over the world and many of them are held in the time zone of the area. The entire archive of past UFC events is available on their Fight pass subscription service. Another known promotion ONE championship typically has their pay per view events on Fridays and are broadcasted on Amazon Prim...

To start, what is mixed martial arts? If you are new to the sport, you may have some knowledge of what mixed martial arts actually is, but you also may have some misconceptions regarding how it actually works. At a basic level, mixed martial arts is a full contact combination of multiple combat sports. Boxing, kickboxing, wrestling, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, judo, sambo are just a few of the sports that have a place in modern mixed martial arts. Dating back hundreds of years there were competitions pitting athletes from different combat sports up against each other to see which sport would reign supreme. What we would consider mixed martial arts today originated in 1993 with the first Ultimate Fighting Championship tournament, and since then the sport has become officially legalized and popular worldwide with thousands of promotions putting on events. Because mixed martial arts as an established sport is only about 31 years old, the ruleset is still changing and in fact is not unified acro...