With the advancement of curriculum reform in colleges and universities, the teaching of wushu faces the problems of time and space limitation, solidified teaching mode and lack of resources. Meanwhile, as a traditional cultural treasure of the Chinese nation, wushu is of great significance to cultivate college students’ moral character, willpower and self-protection ability. In this study, the characteristics of UFC mixed martial arts technical movements were deeply explored through data analysis techniques, which provided scientific references for college students’ martial arts teaching. The study adopts the improved ST-GCN model fused with the spatio-temporal attention mechanism to recognize and analyze the wushu movements, extracts the skeleton joint points through the OpenPose posture estimation technique, and conducts an in-depth analysis of the changes in the center of gravity displacements of the wushu movements based on the Huanglongquan Puffing Wind Palm. The results show that: the accuracy of the improved I-ST-GCN model in recognizing the four movements of punching, side kicking, leg lifting, and squatting reaches 92.03%, which is better than that of the original ST-GCN model of 88.31%; the center of gravity change of Huanglongquan Piao Feng Palm is most significant in the third phase (force generation phase) among the three movement phases, with the value of the change of the center of gravity in the X-axis of 0.814 m; and the fusion of spatio-temporal attention of the Improved ST-GCN model reaches 90.44% in recognition accuracy, which is 6.3 percentage points higher than the traditional model. Based on the results of the study, this paper proposes implementation paths such as optimizing the teaching environment of martial arts, innovating teaching methods, constructing a teaching improvement mechanism and establishing an interactive learning community. The study shows that the data analysis technology can effectively mine the characteristics of wushu technical movements, provide new ideas for wushu teaching in colleges and universities through scientific analysis, and promote the deep integration of wushu education and modern technology.
