Muay Thai

There’s a chance you’ve heard of Vale Tudo (if you’ve watched MMA long enough you’ve probably heard it referenced somewhere). You might know that MMA developed from Vale Tudo, but do you know much about the Brazilian fighting style itself?

Mixed Martial Arts is one of the biggest sports on the planet at current – ONE Championship averaged 29 million viewers per event in 2019 (according to their CEO Chatri Sidyodtong) the UFC was involved in the largest sports acquisition in history when it sold to WME-IMG for four billion dollars and the sport has generated superstar athletes like Conor McGregor who have surpassed the sport and became household names. Not bad for a sport that was widely banned and compared to human cockfighting in the not too distant past. But how did this global phenomenon come to be the sport it is today?

The term kickboxing can have a pretty broad application. Technically it refers to any stand up martial art that allows kicking and punching and so covers a pretty broad spectrum of styles. The narrower focus of the name would be styles that identify as kickboxing, which still includes a lot of sports, but for the sake of this article we’ll be focusing on the history of Japanese Kickboxing, and its spread to Europe, and North American Kickboxing which has similar roots but developed separately. Alongside Muay Thai, which we’ve covered separately, much of modern kickboxing has come from these styles.