She grew up in Riverside, California, and did not speak in full sentences until she was six years old. The cause was apraxia, a neurological condition affecting the motor planning required for speech. She has discussed it in interviews as something that shaped how she learned to assert herself, in competition and elsewhere. She began judo training as a child under her mother's instruction and was competing internationally as a teenager, eventually qualifying for the 2004 Athens Olympics before winning bronze in Beijing four years later. The transition to MMA came after her judo career, and the armbar she had refined over years of judo competition became the finishing move that ended the majority of her UFC fights. Dana White had stated publicly for years that women would never compete in the UFC. He signed her in 2012. She became the first UFC women's bantamweight champion and held the title through a run of defenses that made her the most prominent combat sports figure in the world for a period in the mid-2010s.

She married fellow MMA fighter Travis Browne in 2017 and they have children together. She has written candidly about the losses to Holly Holm and Amanda Nunes that ended her UFC reign, and about the mental health consequences of those defeats and the public scrutiny that followed. She transitioned into professional wrestling and acting before stepping back from both. The Beijing bronze, the UFC title, the mother who was a world champion before her: the record runs deeper than the highlight reel.