I love Mixed Martial Arts and it sounds like we will have a new reality show based around MMA to take time away from our own training (Caged). It is funny how someone thinks that all fighters have some sort of issue they are dealingwith or trying to work through Mixed Martial Arts. I would love to get in the cage just to test myself fortunately for me there are safer ways for me to test my skills.

We have open matches between our students and it is more tournament style and we just work ground game during that time so we arent striking (no punching or kicking). It is a great way to test yourself and still be healthy and injury free so you can return to the job tomorrow morning.This show sounds so familiar I think there is another show kinda like it OH DA , The Ultimate Fighter ( TUF ). It has been an incredible time training MMA and I would reccomend anyone wo has thought about it give it a try find a good school and learn Mixed Martial Arts.

Every town has a scene, a subculture, a place where young people go to escape. In Minden, La., a city of about 13,000 some 30 miles east of Shreveport, it’s mixed martial arts, a sport that attracts young men with hopes of punching and kicking and wrestling their way through their opponents, and hopefully their problems.

Their fights, and their struggles, are captured on “Caged,” which begins on Monday night on MTV and is the latest entry in that channel’s effort to document the lives of young people, often digging and seeking them out in places others don’t.

That was certainly the case with “Jersey Shore,” which since its debut in 2009 has become one of our new national soap operas, and which returned on Thursday for its fifth season. Initially seen as a bastardization of the young-people-of-leisure formula that MTV had honed with “Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County,” “The Hills” and “The City,” “Jersey Shore” was instead something new: a full-bore excavation of a youth subculture not often seen on television. It was entertainment and also anthropology. The breakout success of “Jersey Shore” initially created problems for MTV — how to further the show’s sudden popularity and how possibly to replicate it.

During years of ducking claims that it had abandoned its roots as a music-driven channel, MTV has nevertheless stayed a course committed to youth culture. And in recent years it has come to specialize in docusoaps, documentaries and pseudodocs about the lives of young people, specializing in overlooked or maligned subcultures. The young fighters of “Caged” are really an extension of the cast of “Jersey Shore,” and they are colleagues of the young, often shattered families on “16 and Pregnant” and “Teen Mom,” shows that are among the most wrenching on television.

Unlike “The Real World,” the original MTV reality series that over 20 years has largely devolved into a miasma of binge drinking, these shows aim to depict young people in their native environments. They’re invasive but often sympathetic.

In so doing MTV has latched on to some universal truths: young people are beautiful; they neatly inhabit familiar roles; and, having been raised on a lifetime’s worth of reality television, they understand how best to tell their own stories.

“I’m an average dude, I’m not super smart, I don’t have talents,” says Matt, the most natural fighter of those featured on “Caged.” Lean and sinewy and with a direct, semi-warm affect, he focuses on fighting as an escape from mediocrity and from a difficult home situation. His father abandoned the family, his mother drinks, and his sister is a stripper.

He’s fighting for redemption of a sort, as is Wes, who insists: “I love to punch people. I love to get hit.” He juxtaposes his hard upbringing with that of the pretty boy Daniel, who comes from the family that founded Minden and is blessed with money, local respect and good hair. “I’m from the sticks,” Wes says, part complaint and part boast. When he needs to lose weight quickly before a fight, he buys a sauna suit from Walmart and sits in a car in sunlight. He has a baby with Red, his on-and-off girlfriend, whom he either wants to marry or abandon altogether, depending on the day.

Women feel secondary on this show, a rarity on these programs; even on the testosterone-thick “Jersey Shore” Snooki is a worthy alpha. The most present woman on “Caged” is one who isn’t alive. Daniel is still grappling with the loss of his girlfriend, Hannah, a local pageant queen who died in a car accident in 2007 and whose death still scars the town. Even Wes, not one to linger on a feeling, openly struggles with it.

In its early episodes “Caged” emphasizes the fights, the brief bursts of machismo and fury inside the octagon that these men hope to dominate. But the show spends as much time on the personal lives of its protagonists, an acknowledgment that viewers will relate to the characters for how they behave and interact, not for what they do. The cage is just the milie.Continue Reading

I am sure MTV will put their own special sauce on the new show and it will be very entertaining. It will be a lot of work to build the show to the level of interest that TUF has built up and the big challenge will be that MTV is not the largest MMA fight promoter in the world and the best ever in the universe I might add. I hope you enjoy the new show and get your butt to a fine Mixed Martial Arts school in your area and train and get the awesome benefits.

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