I have a few takes on this buddy. It all depends on what route you really want to go. Here are your options.
1) Train and become serious in this and hopefully try and land some big fights later in your life.
2) Train more as a hobby and maybe fight a few amateur fights for fun and to say you "did it"
3) Do it for complete fun and to keep yourself in good shape
All three choices are great and none of them are the "wrong" choice to make. But I'm sure since you have little to no experience, you really haven't decided yet. So here is what I think.
First, go to an all purpose MMA school/gym and learn MMA in general. Practice, go through the motions, learn some basics and understand what's going on. Spar a little bit, and hopefully within 1-2 months, you've gone through some pretty intense sparring to get a good idea of what's going on.
After this, make your decision of how you want to approach fighting.
1) If you choose this route, I would really recommend you do some exclusive training in one style first. Many many fighters have said that it is definitely a good thing to have one style to fall back on. It's like your bread and butter. Every sport has one. In wrestling, a wrestler has their bread and butter takedown of choice. In football, a team has a bread and butter play that find the most success in, etc. Since you are taller, I would recommend Muay Thai or Kickboxing, but of course wrestling is a very good style too since it dictates where the fight goes. This is completely up to you.
2) If you choose this route (which is what I want to do in my mma future) it would probably be best to find an overall MMA place that has more emphasis on one style, but still teaches MMA as a whole. I think a great example is phil cardella's place in Austin. Here's the link:
http://www.gracieaustin.com/index.htm
It's obviously centered around BJJ, but they also offer Muay Thai classes. This will help you still develop a bread and butter but learn a bit of everything so that it is more fun.
3) This option is similar to 2 but since you're not extremely interested in fighting, you should do just whatever is fun. If you hated your striking sparring earlier, find some places to just roll and learn some fun moves. At the same time, if you hated rolling those first 2 or so months, find a place that emphasizes striking. And of course, if everything was fun, but you just didn't find the sport of fighting something you wanted to get into but still wanted to stay in shape, just stay and train and continue having fun.
Sorry that was so long, but it was just how I felt on the matter. I know these aren't your ONLY options but I felt like these are the main things you can choose from. Hope it helped!
What Martial Art should I start with?
Linear Mode
