Ronda Rousey is the first UFC Women’s Bantamweight Champion. She has carved her name into MMA history with her signature armbar technique. Her background as an Olympic judoka allowed her to perfect this painful maneuver, trapping her opponent’s arm between her legs and applying pressure to the elbow.
Before her rise in the UFC, Rousey was the Strikeforce Bantamweight Champion. In 2012, she vividly described the experience of breaking someone’s arm.
Rousey said: “It kind of grosses me out. I tell everybody, it kind of feels like tearing apart a turkey with a crotch. It really does. It’s gross. When you’re trying to get a turkey thing off and you feel all the cartilage and the tendons and the bones coming off, when you’re pulling it, it really is that exact feeling. It’s gross. But that’s the way it is. They’d try to do the exact same thing to me. I’ve felt it being done to my own arms.”
Rousey’s first eight professional MMA victories came via armbar. In 2011, she dislocated Julia Budd’s elbow at Strikeforce Challengers.
She recalled: “I totally felt it go out. The referee said I couldn’t talk to her. So, I was like, ‘Alright, that’s totally out.’ I flipped her over and I was like, ‘Ew!’ I didn’t want to take my arm and point at it but I was like, ‘Uh, somebody stop this please.'”
In March 2012, Rousey claimed the Strikeforce 135-pound title by dislocating Miesha Tate’s elbow. A year later, she defended her bantamweight title against Liz Carmouche at UFC 157 in the first women’s fight in UFC history. She ended up securing victory with an armbar at 4:49 in Round 1.
Rousey faced criticism for her reliance on the armbar, but she defended her technique.
She stated: “When people say that I’m a one trick pony and only have the one armbar, they don’t realize that I have so many setups to that armbar that I don’t even know them all – I’ll make them up on the fly.”
“When you’re watching boxing and you see somebody knock someone out with a right hand every time, they’re not like, ‘Oh, they’re a one trick pony.’ No, they have a billion different setups for that right hand. And just because it ended with a right hand on the face, it doesn’t mean it’s the same thing every time.”
“And just because so many people are unfamiliar with grappling and they just see the armbar ending the same, they assume the setup’s the same, but if you look back at all those fights, I’ve jumped into that armbar from many different positions. It ends the same way, but the setups are always different. So they can prepare for a certain setup, but I’m always gonna think of more.”
In total, Rousey secured nine victories via armbar in the UFC, with the last against Cat Zingano at UFC 184 in February 2015. Her transition to WWE saw her continue to use the armbar as her finishing move.
Since losing to her longtime friend Shayna Baszler at SummerSlam 2023, the former UFC queen has not wrestled inside a WWE ring.
