Today’s Gladiator: Mixed Martial Arts and the Danger of Hybrid Combat Sport
Today’s Gladiator: Mixed Martial Arts and the Danger of Hybrid Combat Sport
-Dave McNamara
The Gladiator & The Spectator
Western society has always seemed to be fascinated by the Gladiator. Hearkening from Ancient Rome where Gladiators fought to the death in a huge amphitheater, society seems to have a great desire to see two men superior in combat and physical skill face each other to prove who’s the fiercest competitor and fighter.
The Creation of Hybrid Contact Sport
You see this in most forms of combat sport. In the late ‘70s, a new trend of mixed combat sport became popular in America: kickboxing. Kickboxing was a hybrid of karate and boxing, specifically, and a few other martial arts. Kickboxing derived in part from “Full-Contact Karate” from Japan in the ‘60s, but in America, the two names were interchangeable. Kickboxing became an organized sport in the US in 1974 with the formation of the Professional Karate Association (PKA).
How Karate is different from “Full-Contact”
The victor in karate tournaments is determined by a point system. A point is scored if your opponent lands any kind of punch or kick in a certain “safe” zone of the body. The contact is often not dangerous, and the tournament - though with combat - is more about skill and outthinking your opponent than demolishing them. In fact, so much as a tap would technically count as a point.
“Full-Contact Karate,” however, wanted more combat: more contact. Combining the often brutal skill of boxing punches, along with kicks from the martial arts, American kickboxing was borne.
The Next Hybrid Sport
Now, hybrid sports have morphed again, and this time it’s much more popular, and much more gladiatorial: Mixed Martial Arts (MMA).
MMA is marketed as a “no-holds-barred” combat. They even put a tall “cage” around the ring, a historical hearkening to the original Gladiators: many of whom were slaves.
MMA can be thrilling to watch, and it’s certainly a sport requiring skill and outsmarting your opponent. You find their weakness and attempt to take advantage of this.
But it certainly is brutal. According to Tom Kelso on the website breakingmuscle.com, “greater forces are being exerted from one athlete to another, and these forces must be absorbed somewhere.” That absorption, of course, is your opponent’s body.
With the medical danger of football much in the news, is MMA, likewise, a sport safe enough to call it a sport?
Medical Research Weighs In on MMA’s Dangers
According to an investigation in the Journal of Neurosurgery, there has been little testing of rotational acceleration or rotational velocity, and no current rotational head injury scoring system. Rotational acceleration, rotational velocity, and combined linear-rotation impacts are the main forces leading to head and neck injuries.
Researchers in Ohio (Cleveland Clinic, Case Western Reserve University, and SEA Ltd), then, and West Virginia (United Hospital Center Neurosurgery & Spine Center) decided to simulate head and neck injuries during “hook” punches - punches thrown from the side of the body to the opponent, often at the head - and tested whether head and hand padding lessened these risks.
They discovered that all impact conditions involving padding reduced the linear, but not the rotational, impact forces delivered by the "hook punch." The best overall reduction in impact force was when boxing gloves and headgear were used. However, they did determine there was an increased theoretical risk of brain injury with both boxing and mixed martial arts regardless of padding.
This seems to be an important discovery. Athletes continue to increase strength, endurance, and force as science and medicine increase addressing these areas. The fact that with MMA, certain punches carry so much force, and padding makes no difference in terms of danger, is worth pause.
A gladiator’s life is indeed alive and popular in America. But with advances in conditioning, training, and strength enhancements, the questions remain:
For how long will they live?
References
- Cartwright, Mark. ‘The Gladiator’. November 6, 2012. Accessed August 20, 2016. http://www.ancient.eu/gladiato... New York Times. ‘Pro Karate Makes Debut’. (The New York Times), May 1, 1981. http://www.nytimes.com/1981/05/01/sports/pro-karate-makes-debut.html.
- Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 2016. s.v ‘Kickboxing’. Accessed August 25, 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....Kelso, Tom. ‘Science
- Looks at Head and Neck Injury Risk in MMA and Boxing’. Accessed August 16, 2016. http://breakingmuscle.com/mma/science-looks-at-head-and-neck-injury-risk-in-mma-and-boxing.
