Issue 140
April 2016
It’s easy to fall in love with a new set of skills, but it’s vital to stay true to your roots and always refine your go-to moves.
Staying at the top of your game as a mixed martial artist is a never-ending process. Fighters must constantly evolve and learn new skills on a daily basis to keep up with, overtake and ultimately conquer their competition. But as well as developing fresh techniques, it’s essential to continue drilling the bread-and-butter moves that gave them the foundations for fighting.
“The number one difficulty I’ve encountered is people will go too deep into one area and sacrifice the fundamentals in another area,” says Ricky Lundell, coach to Jon Jones, Carlos Condit, Frank Mir and many more. “If you really want to be great at something, you need to do the fundamentals of each discipline every single day.
“We see it a lot in MMA. When people get to the highest point they tend to focus on one area more than they focus on the fundamentals of everything and that’s what they end up using.”
The most infamous example of a fighter forgetting their base came the first time Josh Koscheck met Georges St Pierre in a title eliminator match at UFC 74. Koscheck had fallen in love with his striking and arrogantly believed there was no way ‘Rush’ could outwrestle him – so much so that he neglected it in his training camp.
But takedowns in the second and third rounds swung the fight in GSP’s favor and the former NCAA Division I champion missed out on his title shot. He sacrificed his skill set in wrestling to develop his striking and it didn’t pay off.
Even if a particular set of skills has been part of your life from childhood, you must keep honing them. If not, there’s bound to be some depreciation and opponents will end up getting the jump on you.
Lundell explains: “Let’s say you go to jiu-jitsu and get a black belt on Monday. On Sunday, you weren’t a black belt. On Monday you became 1% better and became a black belt. And then you decide not to train on Tuesday. Then you drop back to 99%. Your belt is black but you’re a brown belt. Now you decide not to train for a year, I’d say you’re a white belt. If you kept working you could have got better.
“I’ve been around the whole world and you’d be shocked how many people still cannot understand that concept. These are guys that are in the UFC at the highest level and they can’t understand why their guys are falling off and not staying consistent.”
FORGETTING FUNDAMENTALS
When fighters abandoned their bread and butter
Jorge Gurgel
A prodigious BJJ talent who entered the UFC with nine wins – each of them by submission. But ‘JG’ was far too happy to slug it out on the feet in the Octagon instead of utilizing his slick grappling. That style earned him a nice bit of bonus cash, but led to more losses than wins in the end.
Takanori Gomi
In 2005, ‘The Fireball Kid’ was a ranked in the pound-for-pound top five. Although he started as a wrestler, he became one of the world’s most feared fighters because of his crushing KOs. But he fell in love with his power and became a one-dimensional striker, which allowed precision punchers like Kenny Florian and Nate Diaz to pick him apart on the feet.
Chael Sonnen
This wrestler might have been the biggest gangster from the mean streets of West Linn, Oregon, but Chael Sonnen was no K-1 striker. First, his attempt at a spinning elbow on Anderson Silva sent his chances of winning 185lb gold tumbling to the canvas, and then he tried to fight Jon Jones standing. ‘Bones’ put him on his butt and beat the hell out of him.
