Mixed Martial Arts: A Guide to the Styles

Every fighting style has an origin. This chart that I created maps a wide variety of martial arts across two axes: striking to grappling, West to East. Greek pankration sits opposite Japanese shootfighting. The dates run from South Asian malla yuddha around 3000 BCE to Dutch-influenced kickboxing in the 1980s.

I created this style guide around 2016-2017, because I wanted to convey the way in which martial arts crosses historical boundaries as well as cultural and national boundaries. Modern MMA pulls from so many different origins, although you might see a specialist in certain areas.  

Some notes on each style, with country and year of origin, follow below.

Available as a print here.

Striking Styles from the West

Boxing · Greece · 688 BCE. Added to the Olympic program as pyx, fought with leather thongs wrapped over the hands. The modern gloved sport descends from it by a long and interrupted line.

Prizefighting · England · 1500s CE. Bare-knuckle bouts for stakes, fought under loose rules that permitted throws and holds until the London Prize Ring Rules narrowed the game.

Savate · France · early 1800s CE. French kickboxing, developed in Paris and Marseille. Kicks are thrown with shoes on, which shaped the emphasis on precision over volume.

Capoeira · Brazil · 1500s CE. Created by enslaved Africans in colonial Brazil. Kicks, sweeps and evasion built around continuous movement and set to music.

Kickboxing · USA | Netherlands · 1980s CE. Full-contact striking codified in American rings and refined in Dutch gyms, where the low kick and boxing-heavy combinations became the house style.

Krav Maga · Israel · 1940s CE. Developed for the Israeli military as a self-defense system rather than a sport. Direct counterattacks, no ring, no rules to work within.

Jeet Kune Do · USA | Hong Kong · 1967 CE. Bruce Lee's approach to fighting without a fixed style: economy of motion, interception, and borrowing whatever works from boxing, fencing and wing chun.

Striking Styles from the East

Kung Fu · China · 500s CE. The broad Western term for hundreds of Chinese martial systems, traditionally traced to the Shaolin monastery in Henan Province.

San Shou · China · 1920s CE. Also called sanda. The full-contact competition format of Chinese martial arts, notable for its catch-and-throw defense against kicks.

Karate · Okinawa · 1800s CE. Developed in the Ryukyu Kingdom from indigenous te and Chinese influence, then carried to mainland Japan in the 1920s.

Kickboxing · Japan · 1960s CE. Japanese promoters adapted Muay Thai for domestic audiences, dropping elbows and clinch work and coining the name.

Taekkyeon · Korea · 600s CE. The oldest recorded Korean martial art. Fluid footwork, sweeps and high kicks; recognized by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage.

Tang Soo Do · Korea · 1940s CE. Post-occupation Korean striking art blending Okinawan karate structure with native kicking traditions.

Tae Kwon Do · Korea · 1955 CE. Formalized from several Korean schools into a single system and later an Olympic sport. Long-range kicking above all.

Muay Thai · Thailand · 1600s CE. The art of eight limbs: fists, elbows, knees and shins. Its clinch and low kick have shaped modern mixed martial arts more than any other striking style.

Hybrid and early mixed martial arts

Pankration · Greece · 648 BCE. Olympic event combining boxing and wrestling with almost no restrictions. The clearest ancient precedent for MMA.

Vale Tudo · Brazil · 1920s CE. "Anything goes." Brazilian no-holds-barred contests, often staged between rival gyms, that eventually produced the UFC.

Luta Livre · Brazil · 1927 CE. Submission grappling without the gi, developed in Rio as a direct rival to Brazilian jiu jitsu.

Pancrase · Japan · 1980s CE. Japanese promotion named for pankration, mixing catch wrestling with striking under early hybrid rules.

Shootfighting · Japan · 1985 CE. Grew out of Japanese professional wrestling's "shoot" style: real submissions and strikes, contested rather than staged.

Grappling Styles from the West

Upright Wrestling · Greece · 708 BCE. Olympic orthia pale, decided by throws from a standing position. Three falls won the match.

Greco-Roman · France · early 1800s CE. Nineteenth-century French invention given a classical name. Holds below the waist are forbidden, which puts the emphasis on upper-body throws.

Catch Wrestling · England · 1870 CE. Lancashire "catch-as-catch-can," where matches ended by pin or submission. Traveled with carnivals and became the technical root of professional wrestling.

Freestyle · UK | USA · late 1800s CE. Catch wrestling adapted for amateur competition, with leg attacks permitted. The Olympic standard.

Collegiate · USA · late 1800s CE. American folkstyle, scored to reward control and riding time rather than the throw alone.

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu · Brazil · 1909 CE. Judo brought to Brazil by Mitsuyo Maeda and reworked by the Gracie family toward ground fighting, guard work and submission.

Sambo · Soviet Union · 1930 CE. Soviet system built from judo, native wrestling styles and jujutsu. Leg locks are central where judo left them aside.

Grappling Styles from the East

Malla Yuddha · South Asia · 3000 BCE. South Asian combat wrestling described in the Sanskrit epics, ancestral to modern pehlwani and kushti.

Shuai Jiao · China · 2697 BCE. Chinese jacket wrestling, the oldest continuously practiced martial art in China. Throws executed from a standing grip.

Sumo · Japan · 20 BCE. Shinto ritual wrestling. Push your opponent out of the ring or down to the clay, usually in seconds.

Jujutsu · Japan · 1600s CE. Battlefield art of the samurai for fighting an armored opponent: joint locks, throws and strangles rather than strikes.

Judo · Japan · 1882 CE. Jigoro Kano's reform of jujutsu into a safe, teachable system built on efficiency and mutual benefit. The first Asian martial art to become an Olympic sport.

Aikido · Japan · 1920s CE. Morihei Ueshiba's art of redirection, blending the attacker's momentum into throws and pins rather than opposing it.

Hapkido · Korea · 1940s CE. Korean art combining jujutsu joint locks with native kicking, built for close-quarters self-defense.