Jody McCormick is the executive director of the Alabama Athletic Commission and serves on the Association of Boxing Commissions and Combative Sports rules and regulations committee, and the kinesiology department advisory board at Auburn University at Montgomery. He used to be on the ABC’s medical committee, and lamented the lack of scientific knowledge around mixed martial arts.
Any time that we wanted to do anything, it’s always just been stating the fears, said McCormick to Marc Raimondi for MMA Fighting. We’ve never really been able to give any factual numbers or data to anything that we’ve ever proposed.
That’s changing. McCormick is behind a new study at AUM to evaluate the power (and potential danger) of MMA strikes, at various angles and from various positions. The knowledge gained can be used to evaluate the Unified Rules of MMA. Of particular interest will be the study’s evaluation of the 12-6 elbow, which is banned in MMA due to the belief that it poses too great a danger.
As the sport is growing, we need to be able to keep up with it, said McCormick. The athletes are getting bigger, the athletes are getting stronger. So we need to have a good model of the numbers of force generated for several different strikes. This is going to be studying legal and illegal elbow strikes — to legal targets.
Critics of the 12-6 Elbow rule say the blow is no more powerful than legal strikes, and the prohibition is irrational. AUM professor Dr. Angela Russell will be leading the study.
It may also depend on what position the person is in when delivering the strike, said Dr. Russell. But it’s certainly possible. We don’t have enough data to draw a conclusion on that at this point, but it is possible that we may find that that one isn’t really statistically different than the others.
Data gathering using a control group of non-fighters is currently underway. Then licensed MMA fighters will be brought in. Any fighter wishing to participate can contract Dr. Russell at arussell7@aum.com. Bellator MMA donated gloves for the experiments.
“There’s certainly room — depending on what we find — where we could definitely look at other things in the sport and really build on this,” said Dr. Russell. “It’s definitely something that we would be interested in.
Dr. Russell and McCormick hope to present their most current findings at the ABC Conference in July. McCormick hopes this is just the beginning of a relationship between the ABC and AUM.
We’re not going to limit it to Auburn Montgomery, he said. We would love for there to be more research done throughout the United States in other credible higher-education institutions.
