Women Oriented Mixed Martial Arts
Mixed martial arts is a combat sport where competitors try to achieve dominance over each other by applying wide variety of martial arts techniques, including grappling and striking. Mixed martial art has been around since 1800s, but, it was mainly Bruce Lee who made it popular by creating a fighting style that combined everything from karate to western boxing to fencing. MMA training poses whole new challenges to the body as it is different from the conventional run on the treadmill workouts. MMA originated from ancient Greek Olympic sport pankration that combined grappling and striking.
For men, mixed martial arts is one of the most lucrative professional sport in the world, however, for women, the trend is still catching up. Referee is always present for female matches but men’s MMAs may run without a referee. Eye-gouging, biting, forearm strikes, elbow strikes, head butting, hair pulling, kicking, pressure point techniques, small joint manipulation, kneeing or kicking the head of downed opponent and striking the spine, throat or groin are some of the usual illegal techniques used by MMA fighters. Currently, women MMA is covered by International Sport Combat Federation, and this federation also establishes the weight categories and rules.
Though, people feel that women in this sport are not as prominent as men, there is however a growing awareness of women in the game due to popular female personalities and fighters such as Gina Carano and Megumi Fujji. Hook N Shoot is a female MMA competition held in USA since 2002, and promoter Jeff Osborne started this competition on 13th April, 2002 when 14 female fighters demonstrated great will and skill in the ring. Some of the other famous female MMA fighters include Tara LaRosa, Rosi Sexton, and Cristiane Cyborg Santos. As per a famous woman MMA fighter Katrine, MMA artists are some of the best conditioned athletes in the world, and this sport requires a lot of training, skill and conditioning to compete.
In 1993, Shinobu Kandori became first woman champion after defeating all her Japanese opponents, however these tournaments became popular after women from all over the world started taking part in the competitions. Female individual bouts and MMA tournaments are conducted in front of the audiences, and are also recorded for sale. DWW also promotes a combat style fighting in bikini, and in this MMA style fighting, hair pulling is allowed. BSA conducts outdoor fights on the snow or in the beach in order to diversify the scenery.
As MMS is a sport mainly dominated by men, women are usually intimidated when it comes to joining the training course. However, these days, more and more women are signing up to learn MMA, and it is a very positive step in their career. Sometimes the promoters of MMA face problems with local authorities as this form of combat is illegal is few regions because many people consider this show as dangerous and brutal gladiator battle. It is now quite unlikely that women MMA will be a banned sport.