Head movement, by most, is thought to be the wobbling around of one's head while in fighting range, making it harder for the opponent to "lock on" to one's head and throw punches at it. Hitting a moving target is always harder, but it is not difficult to hit someone who wobbles their head around at distance and then stands straight upright when they attack.
This is what I am always moaning about in MMA in particular, but it's also happening more in boxing nowadays as the focus on spamming combination punches from a squared up stance overtakes the importance of hitting and not getting hit.
When moving forward with a jab, especially if one only hopes to land the jab, without following up - as it is important to be able to do early in a bout, it is sensible form to dip slightly to the side of the non-jabbing hand. This can be done with a slight slipping movement, or by stepping forward into an almost sideways stance and bending at the waist.
Here is a sketch from J. C. Thomas' great book, How to be an Ass Whipping Boxer, which depicts a slip combined with a jab.
It is important to move one's head when moving straight in with a jab, because against anyone who is not a complete novice, an attempted counter is practically assured.
While thinking of ideas for a full length, print book, I spent some time studying the many films on youtube of so called "pikey fights" or bare knuckle encounters between Irish travelling folks. While I'm sure a great many of you find the idea of fighting bare knuckle, on concrete, over ridiculous family rivalries abhorrent (I know I do) it is certainly a fascinating and alien cultural facet - the need to come to blows over things that seem like non-issues to outsiders. This clip also amply demonstrates the lack of offensive head movement.
Take a look at the exchanges of jabs in this film. It should be said that these men had been fighting for almost half an hour during this section of the video, but the sound fundamentals were never there to begin with. Watch as they both move in to jab, and land simultaneously almost every time.
The support for my book continues to overwhelm me, and I am currently in search of a publisher for a revised print copy. The support for my blog and my work at BloodyElbow is equally brilliant, and I once again extend my massive thanks to everyone who keeps up with my work.
I am sorry to announce that I will be taking a brief semi-hiatus over the coming weeks, due to some important deadlines. I say semi-hiatus because I am sure that I will pop on to the site to link some interesting fights that I've ended up watching as a form of procrastination, but I will be attempting to resist the urge to write new articles for a few weeks.
I hope you all keep coming back to check up on me and my work, as I said I'll probably put up some small posts fairly regularly, and to the existing pages on techniques and concepts. If you have purchased Advanced Striking please know that I would love to hear any feedback anyone can give me if you find time. Also, as I have no means of advertising, I always appreciate word of mouth to your colleagues, friends and training partners.
I just wanted to thank all of you for your amazing support with my book so far. I have sold more copies in the last 3 days than I thought I could in total! What's more, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and constructive, and those giving it vary from fans of the sport, to striking hobbyists, to professional coaches!
If you haven't picked it up yet and would like to, don't worry, it's still on the introductory price of just £10 until the end of the month, so you can wait until pay day. At the end of the month I will also have it available on Ibooks and Amazon.com for the Kindle.
After that we have the possibility of an app for the iphone in the works and a couple more books in the planning stages. Aside from my Guide to Angles in Striking, we are also looking at the possibility of writing a pair of books on Karate, one on competitive kumite, and another on adapting karate techniques and strategies to combat sports as Lyoto Machida, Stephen Thompson and Andy Hug all have done. And all that without even mentioning the prospect of volume 2 of Advanced Striking! ;)
Over the course of writing this blog and pieces at HeadKickLegend.com I have received several emails from individuals in need of a little guidance with their striking game. While I try to reply to all of these emails, I often find some questions come up several times, and that it would be useful for me to answer them out in the open. Other times questions are quite unique but are so outside of the box that many readers of this blog could benefit from them, and they certainly made me think!
And so, I commence my first "Agony Aunt" style post, which I hope to make a fairly regular feature on this blog, and will compile under a menu in the bar at the top of the page eventually. The question I will be answering today comes from Ashley and reads:
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At the moment when I'm sparring I'm scared of getting countered, this severely limits my offense. Is this probably just a technique flaw with keeping my hands up and jaw down?
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The first thing to say is that there is absolutely no problem with being timid about attacking when beginning to spar. It shows intelligence and that you understand the existence of counter punches. Often, when someone so conscious of counter punches gets caught with one while attacking, he finds that it was nowhere near as bad as he expected.
On the other hand, someone who simply learns to wade in and overwhelm and opponent with his attack will eventually meet a sparring partner or opponent with the savvy to catch him clean as he comes in, and then he will be in a world of trouble. It is absolutely important that you be scared of the counter punch and work around it with science, rather than trying to Wanderlei Silva or Chris Leben your way through it.
Dealing with the counter seems overwhelming - between slips, sidesteps, parries and blocks, Edwin Haislet estimated that there are over 700 variations of counterpunch to be exploited, and even more to be made up. It is rarely so complex though. Most normal fighters will favor one counter almost exclusively, and even the most feared counterpunchers such as James Toney still only use one or two initial counters, then follow them with combinations.
The way to best deal with counterpunches is to look at your opponent and prioritize. An orthodox fighter against another orthodox fighter will struggle to land right handed power counters until he has already his opponent. They are slower and have to cover far more distance, in which you can see them. Unless your opponent is very sharp, you will be able to at least duck a right hand counter.
Left handed counters are far more common. If an opponent is in a traditional half facing stance, his jab will be the best counter to your attacks. In which case a trick which might help is to extend your rear hand to cover his lead hand as you jab. This was a staple of Joe Louis, who was not a particularly fleet footed fighter and so had to cover all the opponent's options when he moved in to fire his combinations.
This covering of the lead hand as you enter completely nullifies the opponent's most effective counter, and his favored lead. It effectively eliminates both his offense, and his counter offense and puts the ball in your court. Here is a still from a fight I linked to yesterday, where the crafty Roy Jones Jr (having switched to southpaw against his southpaw opponent) neutralizes the opponent's jab while searching for an opportunity to lead with one of his hooks, jabs or uppercuts. Of course, a degree of reaction time is needed, but few men are fast enough to swing their lead hand outside of your extended arm and land a hook, and such an action is easy to see coming, and to block.
Fighting is often as simple as "bite down on your gumshield, tuck your chin, and go in", but by taking a step back and studying it as a science rather than a contest, you can use tricks such as this to eliminate your opponent's quickest counters and leave him struggling to land slower, less practiced ones.
If you have a question for Jack Slack's Troubleshooting, please mail it to JackSlackMMA@Gmail.com
Been a while since I linked a fight. I was watching some Roy Jones fights in preparation for the book, then found my way to this one. This fight alone convinced me that there is likely to be another Roy Jones section in volume 2 of "Advanced Striking: Tactics of Kickboxing, Boxing and MMA Masters".
Watch as Roy, against the southpaw Richard Hall, uses side steps, lunge punches and cross parries to dismantle his opponent. The side step to right straight at 8:33, complete with knockdown and chest beating, is a thing of beauty.
Bas Rutten has become one of the best known personalities in MMA for his humorous and insightful color commentary, coaching and his anchor role on the popular mixed martial arts TV show, InsideMMA. Before he became a recognizable pundit, however, Rutten was the three times King of Pancrase, and the UFC heavyweight champion - becoming arguably the most successful striker in MMA up to that point. Beginning in Kyokushin Karate, then moving to Muay Thai, Rutten went undefeated in his first fourteen professional fights before being approached by Masakatsu Funaki and Minoru Suzuki to join their newly formed Pancrase organization. Pancrase, touting "hybrid wrestling" rules, sought to bolster their roster with a credible kickboxer among the many grapplers in the organization.
Unfortunately for Bas Rutten, the rules of Pancrase heavily favored grapplers; knees to the head were forbidden without knee pads, knockdowns resulted in a referee's count, and ground and striking on the ground was heavily frowned upon. Further to this, no gloves were worn and hand attacks to the head were only permitted with the palms - effectively shortening the range of straight punches, the traditional weapon of a striker against grappler. Having no sprawl to speak of, Rutten quickly learned to fight from his back, and utilize a savage guillotine to submit opponents while they attempted to take him down. Further to this he developed several tactics to limit the number of exchanges and damage his opponents as much as possible in doing so. Rutten's use of his trademark "Liver Shot" has been discussed many times before and will be dealt with in the second installment of this series, but what has received little attention is Bas Rutten's handy work along the ropes.
Bas Rutten was not a gifted boxer. A great puncher, certainly, but he lacked the versatile jab and footwork of the world's other premier strikers. It was Rutten's spleen burstingly strong punching salvos at close range which won him standing exchanges, particularly in Pancrase - where the insistence on palm strikes limited his range anyway. One can watch a highlight of Bas Rutten and will see a great many seemingly wild rushes of the opponent against the ropes. It is certainly true that Rutten's style was aggressive and swarming, but it did not lack science. Despite his inferior boxing game, and a reach disadvantage, Rutten was able to get the better of both Guy Mezger and Maurice Smith - much more accomplished pure kickboxers - on the feet in his Pancrase matches. Rutten landed telling power shots on both men which better known names in the kickboxing world were not able to, simply through his unique strategy of bullying men on to the ropes.
A quick glance through this excellent highlight will allow you to notice just how much of Bas' offense was done against the ropes. Due to his opponent's compromised stance:
They could not get power in to their strikes, meaning that Rutten was never troubled by his lack of head movement.
His opponent had no base to stand up to the force of Rutten's own strikes without being thrown to and fro.
Rutten could often apply his excellent Thai Plumm clinch against opponents who were off balanced by his powerful strikes. Bas Rutten did much to popularize this clinch as one of the most dangerous areas in modern MMA.
Rutten's success on the feet against men who were desperate to take him down and against elite strikers, using many of the same methods, stemmed from his effective kicking game. It is no secret that Bas Rutten's roundhouse kicks were some of the hardest in MMA, certainly the hardest in Pancrase - and he used this to intimidate his adversaries routinely. The disadvantage of using roundhouse kicks is that they can often be caught, even if successful, and a winded opponent can take the kicker down and lay there until he feels healthy again (this is exactly what happened in the second half of Rutten's fight with Randleman). Rutten knew this, and often used the front kick to wind his opponents, dictate where the match took place, and to place them at the mercy of his whirling palm strike dervish.
Rutten's front kick was not like that of Anderson Silva or Lyoto Machida - a snap front kick - but rather an extremely powerful push kick. By slamming this in to his opponents chest, he was able to throw them against the ropes. This not only bounced the opponent, professional wrestling style, off of the ropes to meet Bas' lunging straight, but collapsed their stance, nullifying their ability to throw powerful punches against him. Rutten had also had success in Muay Thai with this same strategy and it remained one of his go to offensives throughout his career. The teep on to the ropes, followed by a flurry of punches, and then in to clinch work. At the beginning of this clip, against the best kickboxer America has ever produced, Maurice Smith, Rutten fakes a low kick and throws a front kick which forces Smith along the ropes. Rutten proceeds to land the most meaningful strikes of the match and forces the K-1 veteran and kickboxing world champion to take him down.
Much of Rutten's finest work was done in toe to toe flurries with the opponent's back to the ropes. This translated to his match with Tsuyoshi Kohsaka as well. After spending much of the fight on his back against the judoka, Rutten began to pile on the pressure in the final minute of the fight, before stopped Kohsaka with a familiar salvo againt the cage. The use of gloves had allowed Bas to show better boxing out in the open, but it was collapsing his opponent's stance against the cage which still let him do the most damage. Watch from 0:52 for Rutten to start forcing the exhausted Japanese fighter's back to the cage.
My site is like my room at home and my notebooks; containing some useful stuff but a bit of a mess to navigate. Today I have endeavored to tidy it up a bit. My blog posts can still be simply navigated through the buttons on the right, and my more important pieces have been maintained under the tabs "Techniques" and "Concepts".
You will notice that I have removed the other tabs from my menu bar, though "Contact Jack" still remains. I love hearing from fans, people with questions, guys who agree or disagree, and of course any publications seeking some insight!
A final tab has been added, in anticipation of my upcoming ebook. The "Books" tab is, quite obviously, where I will be selling my first book until it has earned enough to reinvest in reformatting the book to Kindle and Itunes. As my readers here have always been so encouraging and helpful to me over the short time I have been writing, I intend to make the ebook cheaper to purchase directly through Fights Gone By than through Amazon or Itunes.
We're not far off of the big launch now, can't give an official date yet, but within a fortnight everything should be ready to release the first edition. Once again I want to express my thanks to everyone who has read my pieces over the past couple of months, and can assure you that I will continue to put out articles here, at Head Kick Legend and at Bloody Elbow even if the book is an unexpectedly massive success!
