Shooto
修斗The Japanese forerunner of modern MMA, founded in 1985 by Satoru Sayama. It was assembled from wrestling, sambo, Thai boxing and submissions, with a professional league.
Quick Facts
JapanCharacter & Origin
Training
Who It Suits
Organisation & Competition
What the style is built from
Editorial rating on a 0–3 scale, based on how much room each area gets in ordinary training.
Catalogs & Databases for Shooto
About Shooto
Shooto was founded in 1985 by Satoru Sayama, better known in Japan as the wrestling star Tiger Mask. He left the world of scripted results with the idea that a competition could be built where victory was real, and he assembled it from wrestling, sambo, Thai boxing and submissions. The timing matters. Shooto had a finished competitive rulebook, weight classes, gloves, rounds and scoring by the second half of the 1980s — before the first UFC event was held in America. A number of rules that MMA now takes for granted were first tested here. The system was designed from the outset as a school with progression: amateur competition, official examinations, and only then a professional licence. That sets it apart from most promotions, which merely stage fights — Shooto is an organisation and a syllabus at the same time. Over the years Shooto produced a generation of Japanese and foreign fighters. Rumina Sato, Hayato Sakurai, Caol Uno, Takanori Gomi and Anderson Silva all passed through it; Silva took the middleweight title in 2001 before moving overseas. For the history of MMA, Shooto is the missing link between traditional Japanese wrestling and the modern mixed contest.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.