Monday, November 14, 2011

The Overhand Right

The experts gave Junior Dos Santos only a puncher's chance. So he took it, with a powerful overhand right, thrown with his whole body behind it, that landed behind Cain Velasquez's ear and knocked him out. And now Dos Santos is the heavyweight champion of the world. (As I predicted.)

It's interesting that it was the overhand right that won the fight. According to Loren Christensen and Mark Mireles, martial artists, police officers, and authors of Total Defense, by far the most common attack in real life is the overhand right. When two guys on the street fight, the first punch thrown is overwhelmingly likely to be an overhand right.

And here you've got mixed martial arts, the culmination of thousands of years of combat sports, where we've finally learned what works in real fightimg, the distilled, effective core of wrestling, boxing, muay thai, karate, kickboxing, judo, and jiu-jitsu, and what worked on Saturday night, between the two biggest, baddest, best-trained men on the planet was the same thing that works for random guys on the street. The overhand right.

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