Advanced Striking 2.0 -

Dustin Poirier

Mixed martial arts has always had a strange relationship with other striking sports because carrying the skills over is not as simple as trying six months of “sprawl training.” More than that, the wrestling in mixed martial arts is not two men bent over at the waist—palming each other’s foreheads and looking to make a quick shot in at the opponent’s hips. In MMA you must box your way into position to shoot, and strike with the awareness of the opponent’s ability to shoot in just the same.

The wrestling and striking aspects are inseparable and this in turn has led to too much of the defensive work in MMA being simple linear retreats. You can try to decide between downblocking or sprawling or digging an underhook in answer to a takedown attempt, and covering up or slipping or leaning away if you suspect a strike is your opponent’s real intention, or you back out of range and know that whatever the opponent does you have done the correct thing in order to stop it. If there is one right answer for every problem, it is no wonder that fighters cling to it so tightly that the rest of their defensive skills atrophy or never develop in the first place.

It was in this landscape that Dustin Poirier found success with shifting blows. If the opponent is going to give ground when you strike, the obvious solution is that you need to cover distance at least as quickly as they can. For the first twenty-five fights of his career, Poirier’s striking philosophy was to charge his opponent down. Starting southpaw, Poirier almost always shifted into orthodox to hit the opponent with a big right hand. Whether the opponent was standing orthodox or southpaw, it didn’t matter.

Fig. 1

Figure 1 shows the footwork of Poirier’s shift. Stepping in with his right foot, Poirier throws a left straight (b). Poirier’s opponent usually retreats from this left hand, and Poirier steps through to an orthodox position to catch up to them (c). The step into orthodox is always accompanied by an overhand right.

Figure 2 shows an example from Poirier’s early UFC bout against Jonathan Brookins. When Poirier throws his left straight (2) his head (x) is far forward of his centre of gravity (y). This kind of “leading with the face” necessitates shifting: even if Poirier decided to bail out of the attack after throwing his left hand, his left foot would still have to come up at least level to his right to catch his weight. In this instance, Brookins makes the wise decision to try and circle out to his left, yet Poirier is still able to step through and catch Brookins with the right hand (3).

Fig. 2

The Shoulder Check

The purpose of the left hand was never to hit the opponent even if they did not give ground. On the few occasions Poirier met an opponent who didn’t run from him, he might use the left hand to push off their face or body and physically force them back, or simply crash into them with his shoulder afterwards. Opponents who slipped Poirier’s left hand—and thereby stayed in the pocket with him—were uprooted from their stance by his shoulder check and forced backwards onto his right hand. Poirier hurt Diego Brandao and Yancy Medeiros badly by barging straight into them and connecting a crisp punch as they stumbled backwards to catch themselves.

Figure 3 shows an example from Poirier’s fight against Diego Brandao. Rather than retreating from Poirier’s left straight, Brandao slips inside of it (2). Poirier—head well ahead of his hips—falls in behind the punch and uses his left shoulder and forearm to crash into Brandao (3), driving him backwards and up out of his stance. As Brandao stumbles back, Poirier hits him with the right hand (4).

Fig. 3

Shifting is less common in boxing and kickboxing and is usually undertaken with a specific goal in the moment. The purpose might be to get on the opposite stance and get to an angle, or it might be to chase the opponent down or catch him leaning back. The point of the shift might only be to surprise the opponent because it is so sparingly used in other striking sports, but it is always undertaken with the understanding that it has a special purpose. For Poirier though, the shift became everything because it kept working so well in the landscape of MMA striking.

It took the substantial boxing skills of Joe Duffy to demonstrate why shifting is a tool and not a style in itself. Duffy tore Poirier’s striking apart in first two rounds of their fight. Where Poirier’s shift seemed to work whether the opponent gave ground or tried to stay in close, Duffy demonstrated that it was possible to do both of those things without eating the wound up power shot Poirier pitched at the end of the shift.

One of Duffy’s tidiest counters can be seen in Figure 4. Poirier’s left straight is supposed to make Duffy give ground but instead he slips to the elbow side, like Brandao did. Instead of lingering there or trying to come up and hit the head, Duffy immediately got off a right uppercut to the ribs as Poirier’s left arm was extended and he was closing onto the punch. After a couple of uses this counter had Poirier second guessing himself.

Fig. 4

Duffy also demonstrated that retreat was viable against the shift, if fighting distance was well managed from the beginning. Instead of letting Poirier get close to striking range and then trying to retreat out, Duffy did a good job of keeping Poirier beyond the extent of his reach and encouraging him to shift recklessly. Figure 5 shows a later instance of Duffy dropping away and countering. Rather than leading with the left straight and moving in behind it, Poirier—concerned about the uppercuts he has eaten to the ribs—keeps his left arm in as he advances (2,3) and instead reaches for the collar tie (4).

Fig. 5

Duffy—using an extended arm to check distance throughout the bout (1), drops away (2), before flashing the jab and a right straight as Poirier’s feet pass each other (3) and his weight is at its least controllable. An unavoidable downside of the shift is that to change stances a fighter must fall from one stance into the other, he does not have the short, shuffling, controlled movement of being in a single stance. Duffy demonstrated that the shift can be jammed before it really gets going—with the slip and uppercut counter—or drawn out and attacked once the weight is fully committed.

To Poirier’s enormous credit he fought his way back into that bout with wrestling and dirty boxing. When he could get a collar tie and hold onto Duffy, Duffy’s footwork and head movement were no longer a factor and Poirier could land several short punches in a few seconds.

But Duffy had picked at the stitching and it was becoming apparent that that Dustin Poirier was a one-note striker. While a southpaw who does all his best hitting from orthodox is strange, it will eventually be worked out if that is all he does. Luckily the Joe Duffy and Michael Johnson bouts served as a wake up call and Poirier began to round out his striking outside of the shift, which in turn made the shift more successful. Finding around a 70/30 balance between boxing fundamentals and his wilder, shifting sort of blows allowed Poirier to establish enough of a threat that the opponent was genuinely surprised when the shift came.

The shift was a major cause for concern when Poirier signed a second fight with Conor McGregor. The southpaw McGregor had made a career out of sliding back to his left side and firing the left hand across the top of his opponent’s right. As a fellow southpaw, Poirier’s lead shoulder served as a barrier against McGregor’s legendary left hand. But by shifting to orthodox, Poirier sacrificed that protection and exposed himself. In the course of shifting Poirier’s feet had to come level—squaring him up and presenting more of a target, and also leaving him in poor balance should he receive a blow. Finally, the way in which Poirier lunged into his shift—with his head far in front of his hips—presented his jaw on a platter for the counter should McGregor be able to retreat and draw him into overextension.

When the bell rang, Poirier showed how far he had come since the first bout, using the shift to perfection. He seemed aware of the dangers and used his established reputation and McGregor’s expectations to set traps for the Irishman. Figure 6 shows Poirier’s most effective use of the shift in the bout. Poirier threw a wide left swing overhead and began to shift (1), but McGregor dropped away, ready to counter. Yet instead of following with the overhand right, Poirier ducked the return (3) and crashed into McGregor’s hips (4). As McGregor attempted to sprawl his legs back, Poirier stepped around to trip him to the mat (5).

Fig. 6

The Hillbilly Shoulder Roll

The second Poirier – McGregor fight was the culmination of a great deal of work outside of shift. In the first fight, Poirier’s attitude to defence cost him. Whenever it was not Poirier’s “turn” to lead, he simply covered up with a high forearms guard. It took McGregor about a minute to realise that if Poirier was placing his left forearm in the path of McGregor’s left straight every time, McGregor could swing around it. A couple of wide left swings later and Poirier was on the deck, having lost the biggest fight of his life inside the first round.

The technique that allowed Poirier to make the change from a clumsy banger to one of MMA’s best strikers was a form of shoulder roll or stonewall guard. Mixed martial arts fans have often claimed that good shoulder rollers from boxing such as Floyd Mayweather Jr. would not be able to do the same against MMA’s smaller gloves. While the size of gloves does make some difference to blocking and slipping blows, smaller gloves mainly prevent a fighter from using the gloves themselves as a cover up. This was a harsh discovery for kickboxers like Robin van Roosmalen and Alistair Overeem who relied on simply taking blows on their static gloves and returning in combination.

Yet the idea of using the shoulders, elbows and forearms to stop and deflect blows in MMA is one that has always held great promise. If you cannot rely on a four ounce glove to stop another four ounce glove, get a big shard of bone in the way instead. Anderson Silva was one of the early adopters of this strategy, but even then the perception was that Silva could only “get away with” shoulder rolling because of his already elite striking and reflexes. For Dustin Poirier it worked the opposite way: he taught himself to use the shoulder roll and this allowed him to become an elite striker and hone his reactions.

It all came back to the conditions that allowed Dustin Poirier’s shift to thrive: MMA fights take place from too far out to box and both men end up running in to swing and running out to avoid a return. Poirier’s shoulder roll is different to most of the ones you will see in boxing, but it serves the same purpose: it allows him to stand in front of his opponent and safely pick off their blows while staying in range to counter.

Fig. 7

Figure 7 shows Poirier’s shoulder roll position. If it looks a little goofy, that is because it is. The best stonewall guarders / shoulder rollers in boxing tend to keep their lead hand down at their side and folded across their body as if they are about to barge a locked door. Many tend to stand more side on—showing only their shoulder and hip to the opponent and presenting most of boxing’s legal targets to only one of their opponent’s hands. Even though most of the back side of the fighter is an illegal target in boxing, savvy shoulder rollers like Mayweather will keep their lead elbow by their side to block or even “spike” the kidney punch.

In Figure 7 you can see that Poirier is more square-on and his lead arm is away from his body, projecting the elbow towards the opponent at eye level. Poirier also places his left hand high on top of his head, putting the middle of his wrist and forearm in the path of swipes at his jaw from the side, instead of just the glove as is the norm in boxing. Poirier’s position is not ideal for presenting his opponent as few targets as possible—it is entirely concerned with giving the opponent only nasty connections when they swing for his head.

When Poirier met Max Holloway for the second time, the two put on one of MMA’s best “technical brawls” and Holloway seemed perplexed by Poirier’s newfound defensive abilities. Between rounds the UFC’s broadcast caught Holloway exclaiming over his cornerman’s advice “he’s blocking weird!” While Poirier’s jab had been coming along in leaps and bounds since he fought Jim Miller, it was against the brilliant boxer, Holloway that Poirier’s jab was demonstrated to be one of the best in MMA. When Holloway hand fought with Poirier in order to score “skipping stone” jabs over the top, Poirier was able to turn his elbow up, get down behind his shoulder and deflect the blow either over the top of his head or into the hardest part of his skull as in Figure 8.

Fig. 8

The use of the shoulder roll and this high elbow also removed the need for Poirier to get hand back fast from the jab. Figure 9 shows how Poirier could pitch his own jab, with little concern for it being parried, and immediately turn his elbow over to stop or parry a returning jab. Both power punches and flicking jabs are somewhat undone by the target hiding his eyes, jawline and temples between harder, larger surfaces than a fist on all sides.

Fig. 9

Comfort under fire was the revelation. Poirier’s belt-and-braces form of stonewall didn’t require split second reactions, but the better he became at applying it, the more willingly he could stand inside exchanging range. Time spent in exchanging range resulted in Poirier getting sharper at seeing the punches coming. It was especially clear in matches against Max Holloway, Dan Hooker and Eddie Alvarez. These were tip-top strikers in a mixed martial arts context, but they couldn’t decide where they wanted to be against Poirier. Any time they were close enough to hit, they were close enough to get hit back, and Poirier would simply walk up to them again each time they tried to circle off and establish some breathing space. Seeing the punches coming—combined with a move up to lightweight and a more forgiving weight cut—seemed to allow Poirier to take blows far better in his later career than when he was a young buck.

The general purpose of the shoulder roll in boxing is to draw the opponent’s right hand, take it on the shoulder, and return with a right hand of one’s own. A southpaw cannot roll his orthodox opponent’s right hand as effectively with his lead shoulder, so the southpaw’s shoulder roll is used to pick off orthodox jabs and left hooks. Yet Poirier’s best counters still come when he can get his opponent to reach for the right hand. Figure 10 shows the drop-away left straight that Poirier used repeatedly on Eddie Alvarez in their two fights. Poirier had been frustrating Alvarez with handfighting, jabs, and hard left kicks to the body. Alvarez tried to close for right hands to the head and body, but as he surged forward, Poirier would kick his left foot back and to the left, and pump out a left straight at the same time to stop Alvarez in his tracks.

Fig. 10

Against the rangier Dan Hooker, Poirier used a similar punch to intercept Hooker reaching for right straights to the body. Figure 11 shows that instead of sliding his left foot back to stretch his stance out, Poirier would shift back into an orthodox stance as he threw his left straight.

Fig. 11

While Poirier did good work with his jab against orthodox fighters like Holloway, Alvarez, Hooker and Justin Gaethje, his fights against fellow southpaws opened up more opportunities for his lead hand. It was in the Jim Miller fight in 2017 that Poirier started looking like a surprisingly competent boxer—jabbing to draw the return and swaying back to land a checking right hook.

Poirier’s transformation seemed complete when he met the southpaw Conor McGregor for a second time in January 2021, seven years removed from their first meeting. Rather than running in swinging and then covering up on the return, Poirier came out with his hands comfortably around his chest. He poked at McGregor with jabs, and watched the Irishman’s responses. In the opening seconds he jabbed to draw McGregor’s left hand, then swayed back and cracked McGregor upside the head with a counter right hook (Figure 12).

Fig. 12

The public fixated on the calf kick that won Poirier the fight, but that was something Poirier had experienced first hand against Jim Miller. When he jabbed, or when he tried to hit his drop-away left straight (Figure 13), Miller would punt Poirier’s extended lead leg and buckle it inwards.

Fig. 13

In the second McGregor fight, Poirier used the calf kick to buckle McGregor’s lead leg. McGregor’s answer to low kicks had always been to pick them up and drive through with a left straight, but as the calf kick came in below the knee he was forced to stoop down to catch it. When McGregor tried to score his left hand, he threw his whole upper body forward to stretch it out—similar to how Poirier had “led with his face” on the shift. Poirier’s calf kick and jab exacerbated McGregor’s tendency to lean in and try to bite off more than he could chew. McGregor was repeatedly caught with the counter right hook throughout the bout until he was knocked out in the second round.

The Lesson from Dustin Poirier

In spite of our focus on Dustin Poirier’s defence, he is by no means infallible. Poirier gets hit hard in almost every fight, especially as he opens up wide to swing. Yet his career transformation from a good and exciting fighter to an all time great is in large part due to an enthusiasm for defence. The way that he uses his shoulder roll and cover ups is far from textbook and he is certainly no Floyd Mayweather or James Toney, but playing with the shoulder roll despite a lack of boxing accolades has only helped him.

Opponents do not want to throw hard at him because they might break their hands on his elbow. When they do throw, he can minimize the blows and stay in range to land his own terrific power—no sprinting or shifting needed. And most importantly, away from the bright lights he has been able to stand in front of dozens or even hundreds of sparring partners and know that if he cannot keep up, he always has that shell to return to.

Furthermore, while learning to shoulder roll “wrong” and having enormous success with it, Poirier mastered the textbook jab in a way seldom seen in MMA, but never threw away the goofy, shifting blows that brought him success in the first place. In his rematch against Conor McGregor, he used the high crotch dump and cagework that Khabib Nurmagomedov had used against both he and McGregor. Against Dan Hooker, two rounds into a frantic five-round brawl, Poirier decided to “pistol whip” Hooker with standing hammerfists. In combat sports, and especially striking ones, every idea is treated with a response of “that will get you killed if the opponent x.” It is all about why things shouldn’t work, and yet Dustin Poirier has achieved the highest of highs in MMA by taking on board what can improve him, discarding what cannot, and trying any crazy nonsense he feels like in between, while never losing sight of what he already knows works.

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Check out some of the other entries in the Advanced Striking series.