Sorry, I hadn’t noticed.
The shuto which is a chop has a short ‘shu’ and shooto has a long ‘shuu’: it’s a different set of kanji. That’s why the romanization is ‘shoo’.
Shooto refers to two MMA tournament ‘styles’, venues or formats or what have you… kind of like san shou or san da.
The ‘shoot’ comes from a leg shoot in wrestling etc and became Japanized, had kanji assigned to it and then came back to be romanized!
There is shoot-boxing and shoot-wrestling, and to be honest I don’t know which is which, but I think I do shoot-boxing on account of Ryan starting out in Thai boxing (well after wing chun, but given his opinions on that we’d better not go into it!) and having in a large part a stand-up game first.
It was started by some geezer whose name I can’t remember (Mamoru?) and there has been a video of one of his extremely brutal training sessions posted on here a couple of times with him ruthlessly beating people until they bleed with sticks etc. I think he started in kyokushin karate but again, I don’t know.
Needless to say, the training techs have been modernized a bit since then!
The rules are basically the same as Pride/UFC except mostly they have no elbows (unless they have a Thai-shooto hybrid match which happens sometimes).
A lot of shooto fighters are hard-workers who can’t break into K1 or Pride for various organizational and promotion reasons. The money in Shooto is a fraction of Pride/UFC/K1 and most of the fighters are in smaller divisions: top names get about 4000 dollars for a win.
If you go onto Sherdog and check up Ryan Bow for example, you’ll get into a whole great list of fighters in shooto. Some of them are definitely A-list in MMA: Takanori Gomi, Joachim Hansen etc to name but a couple who have gone on to bigger and better things.
In my class we train boxing and muay thai for the first half (an hour and a half) and wrestling and jujutsu for the other half, and mix it up in sparring. I go primarily because I want to test my kungfu and I don’t have the time or money to go into pro fighting. Largely the kungfu works OK with MMA gloves, but not if we’re wearing boxing gloves! I do always naturally want to follow up with the elbows however! And it is nice to do a bit of thai kicking and sharpen up my combos a la boxing… the dynamics of the boxing hook has given me great insight into the WC hook from biu gee.