Archive for November, 2016

When everyone learns technique in MMA there are guidelines that everyone learns, keep your hands up and don’t cross your feet with striking. In wrestling keep your posture, heavy hips. In BJJ, keep your arms in tight and don’t be flat on your back. However there are always those that change the rules and make it work. Mohammed Ali for example against and heavyweight in boxing you would not recommend having your hands down and dancing around the ring, or lean against the ropes and let one of the hardest punches in history hit you for 6 rounds to tire them out, but he obviously made it work.

In MMA the person who comes to mind is Dominic Cruz, his footwork is wrong his head movement is not by the book. Then in fights with his constant movement and weird angles he makes it a nightmare for his opponents. He steps left drops his head to the left and up comes the right head kick. Then more ducking and weaving while crossing his feet and throwing perfectly timed counter punches from weird angles. Using weird angles for his striking is exactly why it is so effective.

Over the years I have sparred hundreds of people and have always done well against people who go by the numbers, as in hands up and throwing good clean combos. There are always people better but when they were beating me in a way I could understand what they were doing at least I always felt that there was a good chance of picking up their timing or when they repeat the same moves to give me an opening. However this is not the case when sparring against people who did things wrong but well. Sparring someone that has their front hand on their hip and throwing the jab from there and keeping good range. When the jab comes from the hip it comes at angles that I don’t practice, I work the jab coming from their chin. With these slight changes there are different tells and signals that tell the jab is coming and if you haven’t practised it over and over you don’t know what you are looking for, and you get hit.

So let’s say you are fighting someone like Dominic Cruz how do you train for a fight like that. Where do you find someone that can replicate his style, you can have people try but at the end of the day what he does in unique. If you fight GSP on the other hand you more or less know exactly what he is going to do to kick your ass and it is your job to stop it (not that anyone could). GSP will keep the fight where you don’t want it and he was the best at it. Dominic Cruz keeps you off balance and lots of different looks and angles. His constant movement is very impressive and the only fact you need to know that his style works is that he was out for three years with two big injuries, then came back to win the title. When he won the title he fought a guy that does everything right but doesn’t do anything unexpected and against a style that Cruz’s has, with all the unexpected moves, gave Cruz the advantage and the win.

In short it is easier to fight against people who do everything that you have trained for. When you are fighting someone with a different style like Dominic Cruz or against someone with physical attributes that are hard to replicate like an extremely tall fighter it makes it that much harder to train for and the preparation is going to be that much harder. At the professional level there is the money and you might be able to afford to bring someone in to your training camp. For the rest of us all you have are the people around you at your local fight gym. Therefore these people that do it wrong but do it well I find it frustrating as hell but respect what they can do by bending the rules and making it their own, as Cruz said “MMA is such a young sport that no one knows what is right or wrong yet”

Gareth Lewis
Head MMA Instructor
http://www.Lockdown.co.nz/