Advanced Striking 2.0 - Anderson Silva

There came a brief pause in the action and the two men stared at each other. Vitor Belfort had tried his usual bursts and hit nothing but air. The champion, Anderson Silva stood in front of him, leaning forward at the waist. Silva was baiting him again. Everyone knew by now that the champion’s magic was in convincing the sloppy strikers of MMA to charge at him, then picking them off as they overextended. The humiliating defeat Silva had handed to Forrest Griffin two years earlier served as a reminder of just how not to fight the middleweight king.

The fact that Silva was stood there, just on the end of Belfort’s reach and just a step away, meant that he was planning something. Belfort suspected that all Silva wanted in the world right now was for him to lead. If Silva’s opponents would not chase him freely, the champion would start giving them his face, sticking it out on the front of his stance. Vitor Belfort wasn’t going to make the mistake of reaching for Silva’s head and allowing Silva to pull back and whip the rug out from under him—he had worked too hard to round out his game and fight his way back into the UFC as something more than a straight line, 1-2 puncher. No, now was the time to use his own craft and to show a patience that was not usually associated with the Belfort brand. At least, Belfort might have thought all of this if the ball of Silva’s left foot hadn’t smashed into the point of his chin from beneath and buckled his legs. Belfort crumbled straight down where he stood like a falling building.

Fig. 1

For Silva, it was a throwaway strike. One he had already used against Dan Henderson and others. The front snap kick came smoothly out of his forward lean, which was intended to draw his opponent into attacking him. The front snap kick to the face is a hard technique to time on a moving opponent. The target area is small, and while the kick can benefit enormously from entering through the blind angle—below the opponent’s field of vision—you have to be close enough to the opponent for it to travel this path.

Because Silva had a reputation as an almost superhuman counter-fighter, opponents were reluctant to reach for him even if he gave them every provocation. The forward lean that you so often saw in Silva’s fights was a simple boxing tactic known as presenting a false distance—where the head is undefended and within striking range, but is also out in front of the fighter’s centre of gravity. Reach for a man who is presenting this false distance and he has all the space to pull back to his upright stance, plus all the distance that he could lean back from his regular position. Belfort was very much in the right in not reaching for Silva, but he ended up lingering on the end of Silva’s kicking range and suffering for it.

The Silva – Belfort front kick was awarded knockout of the year by most online publications, and the UFC listed it at the top of their list of the one hundred best knockouts in UFC history. Over the coming years the front snap kick and the front kick to the face both became common features in mixed martial arts. That was Anderson Silva in a nutshell: he made a lot of moves that never knocked anyone out, and consequently no one noticed, but the moment he scored one of those many, many highlight reel finishes, everyone went wild trying to copy what he had come up with.

A Second Royce Gracie

A legacy in combat sports is generally written with raw statistics: titles won, titles defended, number of main events. In a contest of legacies in that regard, Anderson Silva can hold his own against almost anyone. Silva held the UFC middleweight title from 2006 to 2013, defended his crown ten times, and headlined cards for the UFC well into his forties. Yet Anderson Silva’s legacy is greater than a simple round up of his accomplishments because he changed the face of mixed martial arts as we know it. Just as Royce Gracie had introduced the world to ground fighting by winning the earliest UFC tournaments on the mat, Silva was a fighter out of time—a striker who showed up just how sloppy the standard of boxing and kickboxing was even at the highest levels of MMA. But all of Silva’s success and his incredible impact on the culture of combat sports could only come on the end of a decade of hard, thankless work and underwhelming results.

Through the late nineties and early 2000s, the Chute Boxe academy in Curitiba, Brazil fostered a small army of brawlers. Through rugged aggression and solid Jiu Jitsu, some of the team members began to have enormous success in the last days of “No Holds Barred” and into the years that PRIDE FC ran the MMA game. Today many observers believe that Chute Boxe’s methods belong in the past with its successes. In a sport full of meatheads who sparred too hard, too often, Chute Boxe became legendary as the most meatheaded place in the sport. If the stories are to be believed you could have walked into Chute Boxe on any given day in 2005 and seen Wanderlei Silva and Mauricio ‘Shogun’ Rua—the number one and two 205 pounders in PRIDE FC—trying to knock each other out without an audience or purse. It was in the gym wars of Chute Boxe—against established greats like Wanderlei Silva and ‘Pele’ Landi-Jons that Anderson Silva cut his teeth. While Silva never excelled in the Chute Boxe style as others did, he had good success under their charge. In August 2001, Silva faced the Shooto middleweight champion, Hayato Sakurai—a pound for pound great and undefeated in his twenty fight career—and the Brazilian handed Sakurai his first professional loss.

Chute Boxe was not a great fit for Silva’s talents though. The camp valued all out aggression and this could be seen in all of its other famous charges: Wanderlei Silva, Mauricio Rua, Murilo Rua, Evangelista Santos, Jose ‘Pele’ Landi Jons. Chute Boxe fighters went forward, swung hard, and when the opponent dropped for their hips, the Chute Boxe representative would sprawl and dig underhooks. It was a primitive and labour intensive attitude to wrestling and Silva was doing his best impression of it in the Shooto and PRIDE rings.

Silva has always been a long and lanky fighter for his weight, and this was especially true when he was skinny enough to compete at 170 pounds, but it was often made even more obvious by the way in which he fought. That is not to say that he used his reach well or made the opponent play the part of the shorter man. Silva—concerned about takedowns at all times—stood with his feet wide, his legs deeply bent, and his fists in front of his chest. He looked like a bow-legged Mike Tyson and he moved poorly from this squatted, heavy base, but everything about that stance was to compensate for his disadvantage on the level change, and to put him into position to sprawl and dig underhooks. Striking out of this position was wooden and he was seldom able to flow together more than one strike without having to abandon the stance and lose the defensive benefits for which he adopted it.

Study in a Goofy-Ass Stance by Jaques Slaque

The victory over Hayato Sakurai in 2001 was more than enough to be considered a world class fighter, and in June 2002 Silva was signed by PRIDE FC, the Japanese mega promotion which had quickly become the global powerhouse in mixed martial arts. Silva made a good start against Alex Stiebling, slicing the American’s brow open with a high kick which forced a doctor’s stoppage inside two minutes. A tedious grappling match with the unremarkable pro wrestler Alexander Otsuka followed. Up to this point Silva had been undeniably skilled, but had failed to catch fire in the way that his teammate, Wanderlei Silva had. What Anderson needed was a highlight reel moment, the kind that could be replayed and cut into tribute videos on Youtube. Silva finally found a little of the kind of split second magic that would come to define his later career when he fought Carlos Newton in his third PRIDE fight.

Newton had been the UFC welterweight champion and while he was limited as a striker, he was a wizard on the ground. It didn’t take long for the Canadian grappler to show up the issues with Silva’s style. When Alexander Otsuka had taken Silva down surprisingly easily, commentator Stephen Quadros had remarked that it seemed like Silva wasn’t bothering to fight the takedowns. Carlos Newton demonstrated that Silva was just woefully ineffective at doing so.

Out of his squatted stance, Silva skewered Newton with a jab and pushed him back to the ropes and along the boundary, where the sequence in Figure 2 played out. Newton ducked in for Silva’s hips and Silva used his first line of takedown defence: pushing off Newton’s face and chest with both hands (b). Silva physically drove Newton back up out of his level change and towards the ropes, loading up his right hand to punish Newton for shooting (c). The moment that Silva swung his right, he retracted his left and Newton was in on his hips (d). The right hand sailed over Newton’s head and Newton drove up from his knees to sling Silva to the mat with a body lock. Sliding right through Silva’s guard before the Brazilian could close it, Newton began beating on Silva from mount before chasing an armbar and being booted back to Silva’s closed guard.

Fig. 2

Reliance on the closed guard was another Chute Boxe trait. While the Chute Boxe team had made its name in “no rules” Vale Tudo contests, much of their success in PRIDE came from the Japanese promotion’s focus on action at the expense of fairness. If nothing was happening on the mat even for a short time the referee would stand the fighters up and issue a yellow card—which was accompanied by a cut to the fighter’s purse. Chute Boxe fighters would hold closed guard when taken down, kill the action, and then eat the penalty of the yellow card when the referee stood them up.

Fig. 3

Being skinnier and taller than all of his opponents, Silva would use a rarely seen variation of the closed guard shown in Figure 3—locking a triangle with one ankle in the crook of the other knee (a). This put some pressure on the opponent’s mid back and made it tougher for him to posture up and begin striking. It got even stranger when Silva began reaching for the extended leg and trying to pull it inside of his opponent’s thigh to create a butterfly hook (b), but placing a tremendous amount of pressure on both his opponent’s back and his own ankle. Newton wasn’t going to let Silva just pull his limbs about wherever he wanted even if he wasn’t familiar with the “technique”, but Silva had used this position to turn over and mount Roan Carneiro a year earlier.

Silva held the guard long enough to get the stand up and the yellow card and then, as Newton ducked in for his hips, Silva timed a beautiful flying knee. The Brazilian flew over the top of Newton as if he had been taken out at the shins by a Porsche Carrera GT. Both men wound up on their knees facing in opposite directions, but Silva turned and pummeled the dazed Newton with punches to pick up his most spectacular win to that point.

Yet no matter how highly touted a victory is, it does nothing to shore up defensive flaws. A couple of months later Silva met the unremarkable Daiju Takase in what was a very clear attempt to get Silva an easy victory in devastating fashion, as PRIDE often did with its stars and potential stars. Again fighting out of a low squat and trying to push forward, Silva was taken down when he attempted to strike. Silva attempted to open up and play guard more actively and was surprised by the fact that Takase could actually pass guard fairly well. The victory came as Takase abandoned top position to lock in a triangle choke from side control, but the fight went eight minutes and Silva never looked even a little like the talent he was thought to be as the American commentary team pointed out what a bad look it would be for him if he were to lose this obvious gimme match up.

An Unlikely Alliance

The loss to Daiju Takase was so embarrassing that Silva assumed he had blown it. He wasn’t making big money and he was already twenty-eight, it would have been a respectable decision to walk away and move on with his life. Silva was already struggling to make ends meet and had—by his own account—almost gunned down head coach, Rafael Cordeiro after Cordeiro attempted to fire him from teaching Jiu Jitsu classes at Chute Boxe. It was an unlikely friendship that saved Silva and propelled him to become one of the greatest mixed martial artists who ever lived.

Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira was the most successful product of Brazilian Top Team. They were Chute Boxe’s biggest rival in Brazil and the two teams regularly met in PRIDE. Yet Nogueira took a shine to Silva and it was he who convinced Silva to keep fighting, inviting Silva to the Nogueira brothers’ new gym. Over the course of the next couple of years, Anderson Silva quietly rebuilt himself. Nogueira was a genius when it came to Jiu Jitsu and he brought a great deal more understanding not only to Silva’s ground game, but his takedown defence as well. Furthermore, while Rodrigo Nogueira was not a great boxer in his own right, he and his twin brother Rogerio had trained with the Cuban boxing team and both had a great appreciation for the sweet science.

Whatever the Nogueiras did with Silva, he thrived at their camp and developed into a very different fighter as he quietly amassed some more fighting experience in Brazil, Japan, and even Hawaii. He was invited back to PRIDE once more and lost by submission to Ryo Chonan, who was also doing well on the feet in that fight, but looking at that bout in the context of Silva’s career it seemed more like progress and experimentation in a loss than a disastrous exposure of serious flaws like the Takase fight. As Silva ticked towards thirty he filled out his frame and middleweight—185 pounds—became his new home.

Silva’s work in Cage Rage showed him to be a more complete fighter than before as he went forward after his opponents and struck them in combination up and down. His stance was higher and his striking was more fluid and free as a result, yet his takedown defence was more nuanced as he learned to feed the single and to use the fence as his ally. While Cage Rage was a fringe British promotion—which always gave kind of a grotty impression as though you could get a blood infection from attending the event—the UFC was scouting its talent when Anderson Silva defended his Cage Rage middleweight title against Tony Fryklund in 2006.

Silva looked brilliant for the two minutes the fight lasted, but his fluidity and serenity under fire were largely ignored because at the end of the second minute Silva dropped his lead hand low and brought it up again to knock Fryklund out with a back elbow. Silva was the picture of calm as he performed the strike, while Fryklund was a horror show in the aftermath—one of his arms paralyzed by his side as he tried to stumble to his feet. The story goes that Silva learned the technique from watching the brilliant Tony Jaa movie, Ong Bak but that his coaches thought it was a nonsense move so Silva had his wife hold a sofa cushion in order to practice it at home. The knockout went viral, Silva was signed by the UFC, and the technique was very quickly added to the list of legitimate moves for MMA.

Plenty of fighters have tried the Anderson Silva back elbow in the years since, with few having much success and no one scoring the same kind of knockout that Silva did against Fryklund. In fact, Urijah Faber lost his WEC featherweight title in 2008 when he loaded up a back elbow against Mike Brown, swung wild, and ate a quick counter punch as Brown moved his head off line. Faber was almost thrown through the air by the force of the connection and it served as a cautionary tale on the dangers of trying cool shit against dangerous opponents. Though it would be short-sighted to ignore that Silva has failed to score another knockout with the weapon himself.

What Silva has been able to do is build the back elbow into his game in a far more cohesive way. Nowadays—particularly as he fights more competent boxers who will stay on top of their feet—Silva will use the back elbow out of a shoulder roll or a duck. The shoulder roll / stonewall defense is one where a fighter’s lead hand is carried low anyway—removing the telegraph that cost Faber against Brown. If you can shoulder roll or get under an opponent’s power hand to close the distance from this position the elbow can be brought up through that blind angle below the opponent’s vision. Silva has glanced opponents with this, and came within inches of knocking Michael Bisping’s head off, but thus far no knockout has been scored so few have paid attention to it.

Fig. 4

Brian Ortega did catch Max Holloway with a Silva style back elbow (not to mention a spinning back elbow) out of the shoulder roll in a match where he was getting utterly dominated in the boxing portion, so there are a few fighters who have been paying attention to the developments The Spider has been making in his twilight years.

But without overshadowing the all around improvement Silva made during his time after departing from Chute Boxe, much of his success after the camp change can be put down to a simple switch: he stepped back the urgency. Silva had always fought on the ticking clock of the striker. He was trying to land as hard as possible, as soon as possible, before the opponent could take him down. By the time he got to the UFC, Silva wasn’t walking his opponents down and hoping to slam his hips on top of their head before they could take him down. Instead he was allowing them to come to him. In his UFC debut Silva knocked out the number one contender at middleweight, Chris Leben—whose chin had seemed unbreakable—and he did it while going backwards.

The idea that Silva hit on was that advancing and trying to sprawl on takedown attempts was doing half of the opponent’s work for them. It is so much tougher to take someone down when they are moving away from you even in a pure wrestling context. Long, reaching shots are far easier to stop or simply move away from than short range level changes where the attacking fighter runs himself over the top. More than that, the state of striking in MMA was such that if you just maintained distance a great many fighters even at the highest level would lose patience and charge at you—abandoning their stance and the safety of their guard to overextend and try to knock you out.

While Silva was consistently credited as a master boxer, Silva’s use of distance was very different to the many boxers and kickboxers who get their opponents reaching and execute pull counters. Instead of setting himself up on the end of the opponent’s reach and waiting on a jab, Silva stood beyond their reach and waited for them to rush to close. One of the common features—and flaws—in mixed martial arts at the time was shifting out of necessity.

Shifting is the act of stepping with punches and is a legitimate tactic in striking martial arts. It has found a home in modern MMA as a means of covering the greater distances involved, and men like Dominick Cruz, Demetrius Johnson and T.J. Dillashaw have more than proven its worth. But for many of the fighters Silva faced shifting was almost accidental. Figure 5 shows an example of the sort of falling shift that Silva ruthlessly exploited. The middleweights and light heavyweights Silva met would throw their jab and a right hand, projecting their head and shoulders far in front of their centre of gravity (b), and they would have no option but to step through (c) into the opposite stance to keep up the chase.

Fig. 5

Good boxing or kickboxing requires a fighter to be able to mount offence and defence from his stance at all times. Draw a vertical line from x and then from y in frame (b) and you will recognise the position from countless MMA matches in the 2000s: it is a completely committed posture of the moment and it is very difficult to recover from.

This was compounded by a tendency to drop the hands down to the chest because the upper body was inclined so far forward, as shown in Figure 6. Against Chris Leben, Forrest Griffin and others, Silva would give ground with his own hands low so as to encourage even more confident aggression.

Fig. 6

As the opponent’s punch fell short and dropped to their chest, Silva would swat them on the snout. Because they had committed their weight, the opponent would be lunging forward and Silva would just have to time his counter between one missed punch and the next. His aim was sharp and his timing was always on and it gave Silva the appearance of being a monstrous puncher that he could down tough veterans with arm punches. Chael Sonnen, Nate Marquardt, Dan Henderson, Forrest Griffin, all were sniped with counters to varying effect as they fell in face first following a missed swing.

After defeating Leben, Anderson Silva seemed perfect through his next fifteen fights. But perfection doesn’t exist in fighting—even the very best are just making the most of chaos. Silva’s place in mixed martial arts, and his legacy, was as a vicious mirror. A man who stood in front of Anderson Silva would be made to see anything he was doing wrong, and he didn’t get a lot of time to fix it.

Yushin Okami was considered something of an interesting match up for Silva. Okami was a grinding wrestler who had also turned some heads with an effective and consistent jab. But it was a good jab for MMA in 2011, it was not a good jab by jabbing standards. Every time Okami took a step forward, the jab popped out. His feints were either absent or unconvincing. Once Silva had circled out of a few Okami advances he had the timing, he slipped to the elbow side of Okami’s jab, and he popped Okami with a jab of his own which dropped the challenger and was followed soon after by a knockout.

Vitor Belfort was seen as Anderson Silva’s biggest challenge. He had been a standout in the early days of the UFC because of his blistering hand speed and thudding power. Since then he had fought all around the world, worked with Ray Sefo and some karate coaches to add some kicks to his arsenal, and had easily melted Rich Franklin in his UFC return. Belfort’s great flaw was that he worked in straight line bursts. Had Silva simply retreated on a line—as he so often did to draw opponents out—he might have been troubled by Belfort’s speed, but when Belfort advanced Silva would retreat off the line of attack and let Belfort run past him.

Fig. 7

Figure 7 shows a sequence that played out a couple of times in the short Silva – Belfort title fight. Belfort would jab in and Silva would pull his head back (b). As Belfort—a southpaw—uncorked his left hand, Silva would step his lead (right) foot out to his right, turning his hips to the left so that he was effectively back-stepping out the side door (c) into an orthodox stance. In spite of Belfort’s highly touted boxing, he was just the same as all those others—the moment his power hand came, he was stepping through uncontrollably. On one occasion Belfort tried to change stances towards Silva and fire out a back handed jab, but Silva simply retracted his left foot back to his right and pulled his head away again (d).

Silva’s movement in the Belfort fight stands out because it shows that Silva knew what he was doing in his other fights and made decisions based on his opponents. In boxing, going back on a straight line is a taboo because if the opponent double jabs you backwards or bursts in fast enough you are still on the “train tracks”. Because the MMA fighters Silva met so often exposed themselves as they came forward, Silva spent much of his career going backwards on the train tracks and beating the train. Vitor Belfort was a different model though, and whether he opened himself up between his punches or not, he was bloody fast. Against that kind of threat Silva decided that the time was right to step off the tracks and when he did, Belfort flew past him.

As Silva’s UFC career progressed he became more and more reluctant to lead. Fights with Patrick Cote and Thales Leites were lackluster because neither man was willing to lunge at or chase Silva and Silva would only occasionally go on offence himself. The wheels finally came off the Silva wagon when the young wrestler, Chris Weidman came out jabbing and shuffling his feet cautiously. Weidman wasn’t considered an especially dangerous striker but he stayed on top of his feet and left very few obvious openings—he was a night and day contrast with men like Forrest Griffin and Dan Henderson who led with their faces.

When confronted with a conservative striker, Silva would begin to goad and taunt them. Playing to the crowd and to the judges had always been a part of Silva’s style. In just his third fight, Silva fought Luiz Azeredo and was thoroughly unprepared for the latter’s grappling. After being dominated through the first round Silva came out for the second round showboating and dancing—though cautiously not throwing strikes for fear of being taken down—before being tackled and dominated for the rest of the fight when Azeredo realized he wasn’t actually doing anything.

Sometimes Silva’s horseplay was was to make the opponent lead, other times it was to hide his own inactivity as he kept the opponent a safe distance from him, as against Demian Maia, Thales Leites and Patrick Cote. As Weidman shuffled in, refusing to open himself up to counters, Silva’s antics became more exaggerated and more frequent. As Silva dropped his hands and invited an attack in the second round, Weidman obliged and actually found himself out of position as Silva leaned back at the waist. But Weidman followed his missed right hand with a flailing backfist off the same side. Silva pulled away again, his head far behind his centre of gravity and his position completely compromised. A left hook came in as Weidman’s feet caught up and Silva had nowhere to go. The moment he was hit, Silva’s legs buckled and Weidman followed the champion to the mat to secure the knockout finish. Silva broke the rules of boxing in his successful defences, and his title reign ended in exactly the manner that boxing coaches reference when telling their charges about the dangers of leaning back.

The key to defeating a counter striker—whether it is in boxing, kickboxing or mixed martial arts—is to throw his timing off and to limit the openings he is given. That can be a very difficult thing to do but the key is feinting and staying on position. And not just feinting: the feints must look like the legitimate attacks and the attacks must look like the feints. Unfortunately the greater the threat you are confronted with, the worse your mind tends to work. Silva was the cream of the crop, the very finest and most dangerous counter fighter in the UFC so when fighters did feint at him it tended to be jittery and the real attacks wouldn’t follow. The other extreme was also common, men like Forrest Griffin showed no feints and visibly psyched themselves before each attack. The sweet spot was navigated (not always completely safely) by Michael Bisping, who was able to use feints and volume to throw Silva’s timing off and sneak through quality blows when Silva took his finger off the trigger.

Perhaps the most interesting part of Silva’s game was also the bit that he was most reluctant to show. Silva on the lead was crafty and almost gimmicky. Despite being billed as a tremendous boxer, Silva didn’t establish his jab and build combinations from there. Instead, Silva’s leads tended to conform to two requirements: they had to be eye catching—all he showed against Patrick Cote were jumping knees and switch kicks—and they had to have a good chance of finishing the fight immediately if they scored.

Few have taken advantage of psychology as well as Silva did in the cage. If he was coming to the end of a close round, or the extremely rare round that he felt he might have lost, suddenly Silva’s hands would start waving and milling and he would be moving in on his opponent. Observers often stated this was the “Wing Chun influence” but in truth the purpose was to fill the opponent’s vision with movement and start panicking them as the most dangerous knockout artist in the division walked them down.

But while the “Wing Chun influence” might largely be nonsense, Silva was a great believer in hand fighting and hand traps and used them routinely in his leading. If you weren’t going to offer up openings to The Spider, The Spider would put his hands in and tear new ones. One of Silva’s most overlooked techniques was the hand trap he used to set up his high kicks (Figure 8). Most notably this was used against Yushin Okami to stun the Japanese challenger at the end of the first round.

Fig. 8

As the hammer went to signal ten seconds remaining in the round, Silva began his Wing Chun hand waving and then showed Okami a very obvious one-two. But instead of trying to blast Okami with the “two”, Silva placed his left straight between Okami’s hands and Okami (also a southpaw) used his lead hand to parry. Silva’s punching hand turned thumb down and his fingers hooked around the back of Okami’s forearm. As Silva yanked Okami’s lead hand back towards him, he threw a high kick over the top and cracked his shin over Okami’s occiput. Silva also used this punch-hook-and-pull tactic against the orthodox Michael Bisping, the only difference being that he hook Bisping’s rear hand instead of his lead and he didn’t manage to almost knock Bisping out off the kick.

In the later days of his career, the British heavyweight boxing champ Lennox Lewis once stated offhand that in his next fight he was hoping to try a trick he had seen Jersey Joe Walcott use on old film. Jersey Joe Walcott is known more as a piece of trivia for even hardcore boxing fans because he was one of the least successful heavyweight champions boxing ever had in terms of wins and losses. Anderson Silva was as crafty as Walcott but he also had the benefit of knocking out a lot of top flight fighters in very well publicized events. When Silva scored a knockout, the way he did it was the talk of the gym the next day. Every Silva fight was filmed and every one can be plundered for new tricks: and every day it is likely that dozens of fighters all across the globe are are doing just this.

The front kick, the back elbow, back stepping counters—we have Silva to thank for their success in MMA. We owe Silva our thanks correcting the course of striking in mixed martial arts and taking the focus off powerful swings into shifts and putting it onto functional, crafty boxing and kickboxing. We can also be grateful to Silva for the glut of young fighters taking traditional martial arts techniques or techniques from wrestling, boxing and kickboxing that were considered too sport specific and proving that they do not simply “not work in MMA”, they can be made to work in MMA.

Anderson Silva was not perfect—and writing that back when he was on top of the world would invite a mob to your door—but he was the perfect man for his time. It is well worth noting that his “prime” came years after what would generally be considered his athletic prime. The knowledge that Silva acquired through study and experimentation very clearly changed him from an also-ran into the greatest fighter on earth. If the standard of striking in MMA had never improved, it is probably safe to say that Silva would be happy as the middleweight champion, knocking off men twenty years his junior with the same ease. But the fact that the sport of MMA did catch up with him is even more of an accomplishment than Silva’s many belts and medals: he grabbed the sport by the scruff of the neck and forced it to improve to the standard it has reached today.

For more in the Advanced Striking 2.0 series check out Advanced Striking 2.0 - Badr Hari.

For more current articles take a look at Rose Namajunas - Long and Short Rhythm or The Tao of Hagler