Patrick Head March 2013
People choose to train mixed
martial arts for a variety of reasons.
Some take the sport very seriously and want to participate in
competitions and perhaps even become professional fighters someday, whereas
others see the sport simply as a fun way to stay in shape. If you are in the latter category and are not
very serious about participating in the sport on a competitive level, you might
mistakenly assume that receiving quality instruction is not important in your
case and that all you really need is a teacher who knows just enough about the techniques
to make the sport fun and physically challenging.
The truth is, however, that picking
a gym with high quality instruction is crucial no matter what reason you have
for wanting to train, and this is mainly because lower quality instruction
often carries with it a much higher risk of injury. If you have ever seen mixed martial arts matches
on television, you know that the sport can be very violent and even dangerous
if it is not properly controlled. Although training mixed martial arts at a gym
may not be nearly as dangerous as participating in professional fighting, students
at MMA gyms still run a high risk of getting injured if their instructors do
not properly inform them on how to stay safe.
Quality MMA instructors can almost completely eliminate this risk of
injury by making sure that students understand how to perform moves slowly,
carefully, and with minimal force so that no one gets hurt, but less qualified
teachers may be comparatively negligent in this area.
Mixed martial arts is the most
extreme combat sport a person can train in, and it requires knowledge of a
multitude of different martial art disciplines.
Students who practice this sport are required to learn how to fight
effectively both from standing and on the ground through utilizing striking,
grappling, and takedown techniques. Low
quality gyms will often have one person teaching in all of these different disciplines
even though they are only experts in one of them, and this is definitely not an
ideal situation from a risk management perspective. For example, if an instructor is an expert
boxer but is teaching Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in spite of the fact that he is not
very well-versed in grappling techniques, he will be slower to notice when a
student is performing a move that is going to injure her partner, and he may also
neglect to teach students the important safety techniques that are associated
with this sport such as the proper way a person should land when an opponent
throws them to the ground.
Another reason that training at a
low quality gym is not as safe as training at a gym that prides itself in having
high-quality instruction is that lower quality gyms tend to attract a less
dedicated crowd. When this happens, the
gym obtains a number of members who saw violent UFC fights on television and
have decided that they want to try to inflict that kind of damage to others
themselves. These individuals are not
really interested in learning techniques, and their aggression and lack of respect
for the sport will likely result in injury to their training partners. A gym with quality instruction will quickly
teach these individuals that practicing mixed martial arts requires discipline
and respect and is not about just beating people up. Any dojo that is worth training at will not
allow people who refuse to respect their partners on the mat so that the safety
of their students will not be compromised.
To find high quality MMA instruction in the Nederland, Texas area,
please check out our website at www.unitedmmafight.com.
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