5 martial arts forms that are best for MMA

The very core of UFC was based on a test to see which martial arts were supreme. The initial idea was a no holds barred contest comprising of different fighters from different backgrounds competing to honour their martial art.

In the early going, there was a lot of intrigue and a lot of controversy. However, with Royce Gracie's dominance, it became clear that at the time, Jiu-jitsu was the handiest tool to have. Little did they know that in the process, they would be creating a new sport altogether.

While the early days mainly saw specialists rather than multi-talented fighters, that slowly started changing and the evolution of the sport saw more well-rounded fighters come into the picture.

Today, it's believed that wrestling and jiu-jitsu are the two strongest backgrounds to have for an MMA fighter (some of the most dominant fighters today are wrestlers). However, we've also seen heavy use of Muay Thai, Boxing, Kickboxing and even more traditional martial arts like Karate being used.

However, there's a whole lot of martial arts that are out there that don't possess the same popularity as the above-mentioned specialities. In this list, we'll be talking about different martial arts that can start being utilised more in MMA to see the evolution of the sport.

It's also important to note that some of these forms of martial arts contain moves and techniques illegal by today's MMA standards. We'd like to state that they should be tweaked to go with the rules.

#5 Vovinam

Vovinam is a rather unheard of Vietnamese martial art. Vovinam involves the use of hands, knees, elbows and legs as the main weapons in hand-to-hand combat.

It uses the fundamentals of "hard and soft" to adjust to each situation. There are a whole variety of techniques, including 21 leg grappling techniques, swinging back fists, brutal kicks, elbow and knee techniques, use of traditional wrestling, etc.

It's quite a well-rounded sport that follows a strict discipline.