UFC's Urijah Faber gets into full-contact skydiving – as a trainer (whew)

If Dana White has a hard time getting behind “Cowboy” Cerrone bull riding and water skiing, you better believe he’d have some issues with this one: full-contact skydiving.

And one of the UFC’s most popular fighters, Urijah Faber, has his hands in it – just not jumping out of planes to go after rear-naked chokes at 15,000 feet yet.

Instead, Faber is helping the sport’s athletes with the full-contact part, training some of them in the hand-to-hand portion while they grapple and spar inside a skydiving simulator in Perris, Calif.

“I caught wind of this a few years back,” Faber says in a video posted online by Full Contact Skydiving, which for all intents and purposes appears to be the UFC of the sport. “As a fan of the sport, to be involved now as kind of a mentor, someone who brings another element to the table, is just incredible. … There’s a lot of stuff with FCS and mixed martial arts that blend together well.”

In full-contact skydiving, two competitors essentially engage in an MMA fight while in a free fall after jumping out of a plane. For more than 10,000 feet, they fight until the final horn – when the rules say they have to pull their chutes by the time they hit 4,000 feet.

There are weight classes: Lightweight, middleweight and heavyweight. There’s a ref who trails after the two fighters in the air. There are rules, some of which are similar to MMA – except for that part about not being allowed to use your opponent’s parachute to choke him. Oh – and the one that says you can’t prevent your opponent from pulling his chute or tamper with it in any way.

And the eighth rule of full-contact skydive fight club is “Have fun and be yourself.” Seriously.

White and the UFC probably can relax. It doesn’t sound like Faber wants to start jumping out of planes any time soon. But he seems to have some of this budding new sport down.

“It’s just basic science,” he says. “Gravity, gravity, gravity.”

Check out the video above for a look at Faber working with Full Contact Skydiving athletes. Then weigh in in the poll below.