Becomming an MMA Junkie? Here's How To Get Started

(Photo by Vince Bucci/Getty Images for Spike TV)

If you have ever been watching a UFC event or some other MMA bout and wondered what the announcers are talking about, this article may be helpful to you.

I know that I use to be clueless as they would mention the training background, coach, trainer, or training camp that a fighter comes from and wonder who those people were or how to find out information like this.

There are also those times where I find myself around other MMA fans and they start talking about who they think is going to win this bout or that bout and bring up detailed information about the fighters like they are amateur analysts. As I got more and more interested in this sport, I became increasingly interested in learning more about the fighters and the outer landscape and aspects to consider.

I've been wanting to write an article that compiles some of the information I've found over the years which has made me more knowledgeable about the sport and has helped me to speak with more confidence when in a crowd of MMA fans.

I suppose it's just like any other sport, as fans we want to learn facts and figures about our favorite athletes, teams, and other things that are happening.  NFL fans are notorious for knowing who is injured and their team ranking.

I began to get involved in the sport of Mixed Martial Arts in early 2006 and became addicted to it after attending my first live event at The Mandalay Bay where I watched Anderson Silva obtain his Middleweight Title belt by defeating the long-standing champion Rich Franklin at UFC 64. As time went on, I started picking up tips and hints from various websites and became more and more versed in the global landscape which is now the fastest growing sport in the world.

Once of the first things I discovered was that I can setup email alerts connected to my Gmail account. I love my Gmail. The spam blocking is the best I've found and I never seem to come close to running out of space. I currently have 2473 emails and am only using 3 percent of my allocated storage. I setup an email alter “UFC” which I was able to dial in to give me a daily email with links to website postings from many different websites.

I know that something as basic is this will not come as news to many of you, but it was probably the most powerful tool I found to get me started. I use to set up alerts for some of my favorite fighters and quickly got to a point where I would receive over 50 emails a day about anything and everything that anyone was posting regarding these subjects. A perfect example of this was my filter of Randy Couture.

After he became the Heavyweight Champ by defeating Tim Silvia at UFC 68, I became obsessed with following him. I was extremely interested in the outcome of his contract negotiations as he aggressively tried to arrange a bout against Fedor. I wasn't along at the time in thinking that this would be the biggest thing to happen to the sport, but after a while I realized that there was more to life then spending two hours reading email every day.

One of the websites that I found along the way were mmamadness.com. This is a great site for learning about a fighters next bout. They're fighter records aren't completely accurate, but they always seem to have up-to-date information about the next bout for a particular fighter. This is great to know as I often wonder when is so and so going to fight again.

Another great website is mmajunkie.com. They're claim to fame in my eyes is their cutting edge predictions of upcoming fight cards for UFC. They will compile news and rumors about upcoming events and add those to their links as the final cards are put in place.

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