Brazillian Jujitsu is great for groundwork and is very effective in experienced hands, but is often criticized for a lack of kicks and strikes. It’s often recommended to add something else to your toolbox.

Muay Thai, or Thai Boxing, is Thailand’s national sport and much like Western Boxing, it has been refined into a very effective style (though unlike Western Boxing, it has kicks). I can’t speak to whether Thai or Western Boxing has the edge in punching. I’m inclined to think Western, though Thai has the advantage in that it also uses shins, elbows and knees, addition to fists. In nay case, an experienced Thai Boxer will also f**k you up.

For comprehensiveness, Sambo (Russian) is the one to choose. It’s a rather unique product of a Soviet research program that put a couple of decades, lots of money and talent into developing a military combative system, sending agents all over the world to learn and research martial arts. It was then developed into a sport style and became one of the four official wrestling styles of the Olympics.

Of course, there are other styles with good reputations, but those veer off into issues of instructor lineages, certification/licensing (whether the governing body/mother organization has given them permission to teach), the quality of individual teachers, the quality of individual schools, the state of instruction outside of a style’s home country (it may be robust in the country of origin, but all but a joke in others), issues of exaggeration/fraud, and so on. It gets really murky and one has to do research and really look around.

At the end of the day, the guys who really know the leverage stuff; collegiate wrestlers, judo experts, those Brazilian guys, are going to do well in MMA if they can learn enough punching and kicking skills to keep their opponents at a distance, and off balance until they can find an opening to take them down. But a good boxer will make it very, very hard for you to get inside.

David, so well put. The point of mixed martial arts is to be able to win in any situation, so many fighters try to do too much instead of being the very best at one thing. Stick with your strength! The sport demands that you know a little of everything or you can easily be defeated. I personally would not stand toe-to-toe with a boxer, and even in the first UFC fight ,it was revealed how quickly a boxer could be put on the ground and submitted.

A good, refined, combat-tested fighting style is not just a grab-bag of techniques, but a body of theories, principles, rules, exercises, approaches, and a whole mindset and living tradition or training and fighting, with each technique existing in context and connection with others and each serving a purpose toward the whole aim of the style. Taking boxing as a ready example, a boxer’s foot work, blocks, feints, and body movements are all preformed in the service of his strikes. His techniques are limited, but his tools are so refined, that he possesses probably one of the most effective fighting traditions in the world.

The MMA fighter has bone some BJJ or Judo to learn groundwork, along with boxing and Muay Thai to learn striking and a limited set of effective kicks. He’s probably done one or two other arts as well. But for many (though certainly not all) MMA fighters, they’ve never actually stayed put and become proficient in a single style, sacrificing depth for breadth.

The MMA fighter would respond that they’re taking the best techniques from each style, experimenting and blending, becoming more flexible and effective. The answer to this is: yes and no. MMA, having its roots in the Western experimentation with and cross-pollination of Asian martial arts at the beginning of the 20th century (though truly cohering with Bruce Lee and Jeet Kune Do), really knock the rot off the timbers of many of the fighting arts of Japan and China (though, certainly, not all), which had become ceremonial, religious, philosophical, and aesthetic, the living fighting tradition/culture of each having either having rotted away or become ossified, the kata (patterns) often being the only thing intact, with everything else fragmented or mutated. When MMA fighters criticize traditional martial arts, it is usually this process they are referring to.

But to the point to be made is that the pursuit of MMA is a revival of what those styles originally did themselves, constantly testing and refining. However, they did it more systematically, with eye toward developing a tangible theory of fighting and the requirements of the job. The irony is that MMA has and is developing into its own style, looking rather homogeneous between fighters, no matter the blend used. Of course, many smart MMA fighters root themselves in a foundational style and then interweave other techniques to expand their repertoire. That’s probably the best approach, overall.