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November 27th, 2010 
admin You know how alot of ex-NFL players after they reach 50 can barely walk or maybe younger. It seems that the toll on the body of the NFL players can be devastating later on. Will MMA fighters experience the same thing? Could a person expect to have 30 MMA fights and be a healthy individual afterward? Is fighting MMA like playing russian roulete with your health?
There is no definite answer. It depends on what injuries you sustain. But overall the effect cannot be worse than boxing. In boxing you get hit in the head many many times. You get knocked down, you get up and get hit in the head even more.
In MMA there are many other ways to win the fight. You don’t get hit in the head nearly as much and there are no knockdowns. As soon as you’re knocked down, if you cannot defend yourself, the fight is over. So you’re not subjected to too much of a punishment.
Of course it doesn’t mean that you cannot have problems later on in life.
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Well I would be inclined to say yes. The sport is so new in the US it would be hard to find hard research on it. But considering what happens to participants of other rough FC sports like boxing and football, it could be very bad for your future health and longevity.
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There is no definite answer. It depends on what injuries you sustain. But overall the effect cannot be worse than boxing. In boxing you get hit in the head many many times. You get knocked down, you get up and get hit in the head even more.
In MMA there are many other ways to win the fight. You don’t get hit in the head nearly as much and there are no knockdowns. As soon as you’re knocked down, if you cannot defend yourself, the fight is over. So you’re not subjected to too much of a punishment.
Of course it doesn’t mean that you cannot have problems later on in life.
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We won’t know yet, as MMA is relatively new, and few participants have grown that old.
But, when they do, I expect so. Same thing happens in boxing, and you WILL strike and be struck in MMA in a similar, if not decidedly more harmful fashion.
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Any severe injury sustained can have long term effects it can happen in MMA
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I teach MA
Ever notice how anything enjoyable turns out to be bad for you in one way or another.
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Playing any full contact sport is like playing Russian roulette with your health, but I think MMA is pound-for-pound one of the less dangerous sports out there. The training and competition might be hard on the body, and guys like Noguiera look like hamburger after a while, but I don’t think they have a lot of serious health issues.
A lot of this can be attributed to a handful of facts:
1) MMA fighters wear smaller gloves than those worn in boxing. Because of the smaller surface area and weight, there is less shock dispersal onto a target area. This means that when a fighter gets punched in the face, he might get a broken nose, or a cut forehead, or even knocked out. Therefore, a hard punch is more likely to stop a fight than in boxing. In boxing, the heavier, bigger gloves disperse more shock, so boxers can pound on one another for an hour without being knocked out. This means that their brains are bouncing around in their heads every time they take a punch above their shoulders. This is why boxing has waaaaaaay more fatalities than MMA.
So, while he won’t be winning any beauty contests, it is unlikely that Nog will be walking around in their 60′s shaking like a leaf from Parkinson’s.
Second: there is no dishonor in quitting. While fighting, if the damage you are taking is too much, you can always tap out. There is no stigma against giving up. Because of this, fighters are able to remove themselves from a dangerous situation without having to worsen the damage already inflicted upon their body. If a boxer gives up in the middle of his match, he is booed and called a chump. If a football player feels that he has taken too much damage and requests to be put on the bench, he’ll be booed by the fans and ridiculed by his coaches and teammates for "being too soft." Because a stigma exists in these sports towards calling it quits, there are more injuries because people push themselves too hard.
This is just speculation though. MMA hasn’t been in the mainstream long enough for us to observe the effects the sport as had on them. Time will tell, but I think that MMA is one of the healthier sports that an athlete can do.
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Having an MMA what?
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Yes i think it could cause problems down the road, just look at boxing legends. Mohammed Ali is barely living, he has massive brain damage. So if your not careful, MMA could cause problems.
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MMA fighters won’t have the same problems that guys like Ditka have. Unless you get your knee torn to shreds from a kneebar or something, you’r not going to be like that. Jerome Bettis couldn’t get out of bed for an hour during his last season because of all the high impact he took over and over and over. Old NFL players can’t walk because of huge amounts of stress on their joints during games, which is something mixed martial artists don’t go through.
As for head injuries, that we’ll have to wait for. I don’t think they’ll be as affected as boxers or football players, but we won’t know for sure for another couple decades. The retired NFL players have all just started pushing hard for health benefits, because players from the 70′s are the ones feeling the tolls right now. In 20-30 years we could see a whole lot of former MMA fighters with medical problems, but we won’t really know until then. I don’t think any of them will be as bad as NFL players or boxers, but I could be wrong.
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hey my friends older brother’s back is screwed up from to much wrestling if he contnues he will have severe back injury in a couple years
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I’d have to say yes, but to less of a degree than boxing or football.
In boxing, it’s all about strikes, with pretty much any strike to the head beign the only thing that can win the match, so that’s where they focus. With MMA, a lot of fighters don’t do much striking at all, and might be perfectly content softening up a leg with their strikes to make you less mobile. Also, since even the strikers don’t train exclusively for striking, their punches aren’t going to be as strong as a boxer’s.
The reason football would be worse is the training. With MMA or Boxing, you can train all day on a punching bag and jump rope and consider it a good day’s work. Football requires too much coordination with your teammates, so practices basically have to be full-contact. As such, you get a lot more wear and tear on joints and the spine from practicing than you do in a fighting skill.
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