That is correct. Mixed martial arts. It's exactly what it sounds like. A mixing of various combat disciplines. The most popular organization in the US is the UFC or Ultimate Fighting Championship.
Up til now, most fighters have long been trained in one discipline or another, and have had basic training in the other core disciplines to become familiar with them. For example, you may have a classically trained boxer that learns wrestling so that he can box on his feet like always, but now he's more dangerous because he can take an opponent down, get on top of them using various wrestling techniques, and then proceed to use boxing skills to get his opponent to submit, known as ground and pound (get them on the ground and pound them out).
Other popular fighting styles besides boxing and american wrestling include Jiu Jitsu (various choke holds and limb manipulation holds), kickboxing, karate, greco-roman wrestling, dirty boxing, muay thai, judo, etc...
It's a VERY exciting sport to watch as history has shown that there is no ONE dominant fighting style. Yet, what we've now seen is that this sport has been around long enough that the newest up and comers are not trained heavily in one style while dabbling in another, they're trained to blend the most popular and useful styles from day one which is leading to an evolution of the sport.
One thing I really like about this vs boxing is that boxing can, and frequently does, go 12 rounds at 3 minutes each. This leaves the "winner" and "loser" to be decided by the judges.
Most matches in the UFC are 3 rounds, 5 minutes each. Championship bouts are 5 rounds, 5 minutes each. I would say that a majority of the fights do NOT last the alloted time and in those cases, the winner is clear. With the few matches that do last the full time, you do occasionally end up in the same predicament as boxing in that the judges don't see eye to eye with each other, or the fans.
Anyway, I suppose that was a bit of a disseration on the sport and we're really here to talk about boas! I love these things!

jb




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Jonathan Brady
"Sarcasm is angers ugly cousin" -Dr. Buddy Rydell (Jack Nicholson) in "Anger Management".

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