A lot of judoka have done it already. Not many are elite MMA fighters though - while Ronda Rousey is awesome, she is benefiting from a weak women's division, and has only really fought one top class fighter - I'd like to see her against Cyborg, Coenen before deciding how good she really is. For the men, wrestling is without doubt the best base for MMA, but judo does help - the trips are very useful in the clinch. It's hard to make the case for one discipline though, as the best fighters almost without exception fuse different disciplines together - the only one-dimensional UFC champ at the moment is Junior Dos Santos, and that's because he's amazing at the thing he does specialise in. I could never see 'just a judo' guy becoming a champ though.
As for taekwondo....while it is cool, unfortunately you do not have the space in MMA to unleash its full potential - kickboxing is much more effective due to the speed and space required. Loads of top class MMA fighters actually have TKD backgrounds (Benson Henderson, Cung Le, Bas Rutten, Stephan Bonner, Dennis Siver), but you'll notice that they use it pretty sparingly.
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cubic at Jul. 12, 2012 - 09:09AM JST
A lot of judoka have done it already. Not many are elite MMA fighters though - while Ronda Rousey is awesome, she is benefiting from a weak women's division, and has only really fought one top class fighter - I'd like to see her against Cyborg, Coenen before deciding how good she really is. For the men, wrestling is without doubt the best base for MMA, but judo does help - the trips are very useful in the clinch. It's hard to make the case for one discipline though, as the best fighters almost without exception fuse different disciplines together - the only one-dimensional UFC champ at the moment is Junior Dos Santos, and that's because he's amazing at the thing he does specialise in. I could never see 'just a judo' guy becoming a champ though.
As for taekwondo....while it is cool, unfortunately you do not have the space in MMA to unleash its full potential - kickboxing is much more effective due to the speed and space required. Loads of top class MMA fighters actually have TKD backgrounds (Benson Henderson, Cung Le, Bas Rutten, Stephan Bonner, Dennis Siver), but you'll notice that they use it pretty sparingly.