Can MMA evolve anymore???

At first it was BJJ that proved to reign supreme. If you didn't know the fundamentals of BJJ you were pretty much gaurenteed to lose a MMA fight.

Then came the wrestlers who learned the submissions of BJJ and how to avoid them. They created the Ground and Pound game and were able to control the fight by their superior wresting skills.

Then along came the kickboxers who learned to avoid and stuff the takedown of the wrestler/bjj guy. No longer were opponents clueless about the takedown and clinch.

Now MMA is just that, truly a hybrid sport. There isn't much chance for success unless you can do all three things well: strike, work in the clinch, and know groundwork. The scariest guys now are the wrestler/grapplers who have a very strong stand up game (in other words extremely well rounded fighters).

Do you see MMA having any real evolution in the future or will MMA basically be the same 25 years from now?

The hybrid-fighter or fighters with hybrid-fighteritis, will be the death
of MMA and the end of its evolution. As long as fighters train in the
extreme edges of combat, eg pure wrestling or pure capoeira, the
sport will evolve.

The so called hybrid-fighter is a jack-of-all-trades, master of none.

He knows a limited number of techniques that are part of the accepted
technical base of the sport. He can't really be creative and evolve the
sport since he has no new ideas from his MA training to draw from.

The sport degenrates, as it already is, into the same old half assed
kickboxing followed by clinch, takedown, guillotine, etc etc.

Now, a fighter who masters one discipline has mastered techniques
and concepts that have never been used in MMA and probably are
dismissed by MMA fans as impractical. But when he starts getting
comfortable in MMA, he naturally brings ideas from his old style into
the ring. He figures out how to use that Capoeira kick, that kung fu
sweep, or that judo throw in MMA. Now the sport evolves.

The technical base of the hybrid fighters is closed off while the
technical base of the specialists is always evolving.

"eg pure wrestling or pure capoeira"

capoeira?

I'm sure after Dr J came along everyone felt B Ball had reached it's Apex. Mark my words, MMA will be a totally different animal in 10-20 years. The "jack of all trades master of none" cliche' holds true now, but once these young kids grow up doing striking/grappling all the time, we'll have Masters of all trades. we're still in the beginning, the sky is the limit!

You people dismissing Capoeira have missed the whole point of my post
as well as failed to learn anything form the past 14 years.

the next evolution in mma is going to be the caliber of athlete attracted to mma. with bigger dollars and bigger exposure in mainstream media, athletes who may have pursued a successful career in wrestling or boxing will follow the dollars into mma. with that new level of athlete will bring some unorthodox but exciting twists to the sport, like rjj in boxing or mj in basketball.

I don't think the JOAT fighter is the future.

Elite athletes from Judo, Wrestling, BJJ will begin cross training earlier in anticipation of fighting in MMA after their amateur career is over.

Single base fighters with MMA awareness will dominate like they are now.

DarthBill,

If we stop producing experts in speciific martial arts, what I call
training at the extreme edges, then we lose knowledge. Volumes of
information will be lost with the loss of the specialist coach or master.

Under the hybrid model, there will be no masters-of-all, only guys
good enough to hold their own. Most importantly, there will be no
evolution.

Something similar has happened to boxing. The past few hundred
years, since the Marquis of Queensbury rules were adopted and attacks
limited, the sport of boxing has stopped expanding. The changes you
see are just improvements in efficiency of a narrow technical base.

People say boxing evolved but in relaity it has moved toward
stagnation. This is different than the way MMA changes, which is more
of an expansion of techniques and ideas.

My formula for a MMA fighter would be to have them train in one art
recognized as being effective, such as wrestling and also one art not
usually connected to MMA, such as a Chinese martial art. Let them
train like this to a high level for about the first 25 years of their life.

Then they will be ready for MMA training.

Rubber guard for JJ. More hip swing GnP, ala Fedor. More judo takedowns instead of just singles and doubles. And more jabs and leg kicks for striking.

Soon, you'll have athletes that started learning "mma" instead of individual parts of mma at a time.

Fighters using grappling to set up strikes and strikes to set up grappling is still at a pretty basic level of talent and has a lot of room to grow. People just haven't had long enough to train it, and don't train places where they can do those kind of transitions.

The Evolution of MMA has just begun.

DJHappa,

Valid points, however...

Not everyone wants to train in MMA. It's not as though High School wrestling will dissapear. Afternoon TKD classes will always be there. The Gracies will still have a thousand Dojos in every state. Etc, etc, etc.

There will always be masters in each discipline.

DJ Hapa, nice first post.

It's also true that the "Single base fighters with MMA awareness" are dominating now, but as fighters gain the MMA training experience time to match the time those Single base fighters invested in their art, I think that will change... but only temporarily.

The sport is now in, to put it in buddhist terms as far as levels, the stage of "tools and anti-tools."

The time limits and other rules imposed have made long strategies (chess matches) near impossible, so it has moved to short term strategies that involve less incremental/gradual cooking of a guy, feeling out, etc. What then decides the victor is either something crap from the rules (cuts from an elbow that don't mean anything in terms of the "fight" actually ending) or in surprise.

When you can't really strategize, surprise becomes the winning factor, so we see people developing new techniques that people haven't seen before (the "tools), from the gogoplata to the reverse triangle choke to the anaconda, etc. etc. And then the MMA crowd sees the new technique, learns it, and know to avoid it (the "anti-tools"), and it becomes a cat and mouse game.

Fact is, the sport in such a state is just WAITING for something new to come out and explode the sport in another direction, because it's caught in the cat and mouse one-up-manship endless tool and anti-tool surprise thing.

To sum, I think there are going to be a few big changes in the future, each one you could call a serious evolution.

In the end it's going to boil down to training and pure athleticsm.

"Do you see MMA having any real evolution in the future or will MMA
basically be the same 25 years from now?"

absolutely nothing will be the same 25 years from now

"The so called hybrid-fighter is a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. He knows a limited number of techniques that are part of the accepted technical base of the sport. He can't really be creative and evolve the sport since he has no new ideas from his MA training to draw from. The sport degenrates, as it already is, into the same old half assed kickboxing followed by clinch, takedown, guillotine, etc etc."

Man, it amazes me the amount of people on her that have no idea what level these fighters are at.

"Jack of all trades" "He knows a limited number of techniques" "He can't really be creative and evolve the sport" I've never heard so much shit in all my life.

Anyone who has watched MMA since the start of the UFC, seen the sport evolve, and thinks it the fighters have peaked now must be totally crazy.

New fighters bring new elements to the game. MMA will continue to evolve.... that is certain.

absolutely nothing will be the same 25 years from now

Has boxing really changed that much from 25 years ago?

DJ Hapa, great post, end of thread after that, IMO.

the next evolution will be well rounded fighters with in fight strategies that can change mid fight. That way guys like Randy and othersw who design great strategies against fighters specific fight style will be diminished.

People saying that the kids training at 5 and 6 are the future are partially incorrect. Sure some may continue to excel, but eventually others catch up and the better athletes continue to advance.

With the new popularity in the sport brings a larger talent pool. This is more important for advancement than training specific MMA at a young age.

I agree that the JOAT is not the future