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Originally Posted by rocksupreme  I certainly hope the answer is "never."
My main criticism against saying "MMA is the best for fighting," is that MMA is not one defined thing. Being a mix, different schools teach different elements. Since MMA is so popular now, everybody claims to teach it, but a lot of instructors are simply not qualified to do so (and simply teach basics that they learned from watching videos, etc.).
We also need to remember that most MMA schools focus on sport fighting, which is different from self defense in that terrain, numbers of opponents, and types of attacks are limited. |
Good MMA schools bring in a separate boxing, grappling, maui tai coach as well as at least 1 competent MMA guy.
All you have to do is find the school that people are actually fighting out of.
In Boston we have Sityodtong where Kenny Florian and about 1 dozen other UFC people train or have trained at. Plus another school - Red Line Fight Sports with equal qualifications.
MMA is better than you think. It's because most training time is focused on real fighting - defense, footwork, hitting MOVING people - it's still better than even krav in a real situation. Even with more than 1 person. Maybe with the rarest exception of one getting kidnapped and forced into an arena knife
fight or something.
Otherwise if someone pulls a weapon you are not supposed to try to disarm them!
I'm familiar with all this stuff. In some of my boxing/grappling classes I have worked with krav maga people and other styles who have come in to mma classes to learn (they usually suck at sparring), have screwed around with having multiple people attack us (pretending like they don't know how to grapple) and all that. I think the skillset transfers just fine to different situations. I'm not just talking out of my butt here. I started out with straight boxing lessons 2x week, about 7 years ago at the Boston Golds Gym with a golden gloves guy - Dave Thomas and went from there.