Audisee® eBooks with Audio combine professional narration and sentence highlighting for an engaging read aloud experience! What if a boxer and a wrestler fought? Who would win? What if a fighter skilled in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu tangled with a foe trained in traditional judo? These were questions that fans of combat sports asked for years, but how to settle it? The answer: mixed martial arts. In this action-packed book, you'll meet the superstars and record holders of mixed martial arts, get behind-the-scenes details about some of its most dramatic moments, and find out what the future holds for this radical hybrid sport.

Brings readers the history and information surrounding the contemporary world of MMA.

A comprehensive and detailed history of the UFC and the men who participate in ultimate fighting showdowns.

Mixed martial arts (MMA) is an emergent sport where competitors in a ring or cage utilize strikes (punches, kicks, elbows and knees) as well as submission techniques to defeat opponents. This book explores the carnal experience of fighting through a sensory ethnography of MMA, and how it transgresses the cultural scripts of masculinity in popular culture. Based on four years of participant observation in a local MMA club and in-depth interviews with amateur and professional MMA fighters, Spencer documents fighters' training regimes and the meanings they attach to participation in the sport. Drawing from the philosophical phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Luc Nancy, this book develops bodies-centered ontological and epistemological grounding for this study. Guided by such a position, it places bodies at the center of analysis of MMA and elucidates the embodied experience of pain and injury, and the sense and rhythms of fighting.

Ultimate Fighting Championship and the present and future of women's sports Mixed martial arts stars like Amanda Nunes, Zhang Weili, and Ronda Rousey have made female athletes top draws in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). Jennifer McClearen charts how the promotion incorporates women into its far-flung media ventures and investigates the complexities surrounding female inclusion. On the one hand, the undeniable popularity of cards headlined by women add much-needed diversity to the sporting landscape. On the other, the UFC leverages an illusion of promoting difference—whether gender, racial, ethnic, or sexual—to grow its empire with an inexpensive and expendable pool of female fighters. McClearen illuminates how the UFC's half-hearted efforts at representation generate profit and cultural cachet while covering up the fact it exploits women of color, lesbians, gender non-conforming women, and others. Thought provoking and timely, Fighting Visibility tells the story of how a sports entertainment phenomenon made difference a part of its brand—and the ways women paid the price for success.

What is Shootfighting? It's a brutal hybrid sport that combines real wrestling moves with Eastern martial arts such as judo, karate and Muay Thai kickboxing. Among old-time wrestlers, the word "shoot" referred to the real thing - no scripts, no fake holds, no mercy. So Bart Vale coined the name Shootfighting to describe the new fighting system he learned from Japanese martial artists Masami Soranaka and Yoshiaki Fujiwara. The International Shootfighting Association (ISFA) created by Vale, Soranaka and Fujiwara has affiliated gyms and martial arts schools around the world. In this book, Shootfighting champion Vale takes you through the history of the sport, the training methods that will get you in peak shape, and the kicking, punching, takedown and submission-hold techniques that will give you the winning edge in all aspects of unarmed combat.

With the very first UFC, the new sport of mixed martial arts (MMA) was launched-although it wasn't even called that yet-and fighting would never again be the same. Now, for the first time, the true story of how the Ultimate Fighting Championship came into existence is told by the man who started it all. In this vivid and fast-moving, first-person account, Davie explains how his idea to crown the World's Best Fighter painstakingly evolved into the UFC, which now stands as a billion-dollar sports franchise.