MMA schools in Miami teach their students to combine various styles of martial arts including boxing, wrestling, judo, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and Muay Thai kickboxing. Modern MMA schools in Miami are the descendant of mixed martial arts traditions going back to the beginning of the 20th century, as well as ancestors as distant as the ancient Greek sport Pankration. Modern Miami MMA schools in their current form arose in the 1990s after the founding of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) was founded in 1993. After some MMA promoters put various safety regulations on organized UFC contests, the result was modern MMA. Modern Miami MMA schools reflect the changed face of MMA as a sport since then. Beginning as a sport which pitted experts from a variety of martial arts styles and disciplines against each other, the modern sport instead is about fighters combining a variety of techniques into their own blended forms of fighting better suited to competitive MMA.
While modern MMA schools in Miami didn’t appear until the 1990s with the founding of the UFC, many precursors to the modern sport of MMA existed in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. In London in 1899, Edward William Barton-Wright founded the fighting style of Bartitsu, a combination of jujutsu, boxing, savate, and French stick fighting. His Bartitsu Club employed several martial artists, including Japanese judo and jujutsu practitioners, and the club resembled an early form of modern MMA schools. In the 1960s, Bruce Lee started his own school which resembled modern MMA schools. Lee practiced his own individualized style of fighting, Jeet Kune Do, which emphasized utilizing the best parts of a number of different martial arts disciplines. Lee promoted the idea of learning as much as possible from a wide variety of disciplines, while keeping what worked and throwing out what didn’t. His philosophy was a huge influence on the modern practice of MMA.
Today, modern Miami MMA schools teach their students how to utilize techniques from a wide variety of different traditions. MMA schools in Miami teach fighters to incorporate a number of different martial arts styles into their own repertoires in order achieve effectiveness in the widest variety of positions and situations. Like Barton-Wright’s Bartitsu Club and Bruce Lee’s martial arts school before them, MMA schools train their students not only to fight well, and to use their martial arts techniques for competitive success, but how to train themselves for life. Like Bruce Lee, students of Miami MMA schools can learn how to analyze a variety of styles and learn from all of them. They can also learn the confidence and discipline which comes from achieving excellence in their art.