Advanced Striking 2.0 - Mauricio ‘Shogun’ Rua
While mixed martial arts descends from the Brazilian tradition of vale tudo, it has become its own sport. The Unified Rules of MMA now dictate what a “real fight” is in much of the Western world. But other rule sets survive in Japan, Brazil and Russia and still permit the techniques and tactics that the Unified Rules cut away for the sake of squeamishness. Yet PRIDE FC—which many MMA fans still consider to define the golden age of MMA—was fought almost entirely under a more permissive, violent rule set.
Mauricio ‘Shogun’ Rua is perhaps the best representative of mixed martial arts under “PRIDE rules” for two reasons. The first is that his style relied heavily on kicks, stomps and knees to the head of a grounded opponent. The second is that as the last grand prix winner in PRIDE’s marquee 205 pound division, he was doing it against the best crop of fighters to ever compete under those rules. Since the moment of PRIDE’s demise, grounded knees and kicks have been part of a niche sideshow to the sport of MMA, and little to do with the best fighters on the planet.
Fig. 1
The devastating power of a soccer kick or stomp demands respect. A soccer kick requires no flexibility, little balance and ultimately no skill to generate concussive force. This low skill, murderous reward ratio is one of the reasons that kicking a downed opponent is a key factor in differentiating regular assault from the far more serious charge of Grievous Bodily Harm (GBH) in UK courts. And yet in professional fighting the soccer kick and stomp are very often overestimated. The vast majority of memorable soccer kicks and stomps in mixed martial arts have been scored on fighters who—were their opponent to hold off on the follow up— already could not beat a ten count. Attempting to stomp a competent modern fighter as they lay in guard is simply asking to have your legs entangled or to lose top position.
Shogun Rua’s signature attack against a downed opponent was the jumping stomp. This was not a new idea: Kazushi Sakuraba had tried to leap over opponents guards and land on them in the two-footed, Enter the Dragon style. But the problem Sakuraba and others ran into was that they often couldn’t clear the opponent’s legs. The most basic reaction to an opponent trying to leap over your legs is to keep your feet pointed at him and most of the time, Sakuraba would run up, jump, and then land cup first on his opponent’s foot.
Fig. 2
Where Sakuraba attempted to tuck jump and pass his entire body over the middle of his opponent’s guard, Rua passed the opponent underneath his knee. He would establishing a stomping leg and a jumping leg, and the stomping leg would be raised high to his side. The jumping leg would hop him up and forward, and then slide down the side of the opponent’s body. The trick of it was that Rua could raise his knee far higher than he could get his hips when jumping. His jump actually took him down the side of his opponent while his raised knee was the part that passed over their upward reaching legs.
Fig. 3
One of the other benefits of stomping in this way was that it carried both of Shogun’s feet past his opponent’s guard. Other stomps and kicks in Shogun’s arsenal saw him kick at the opponents head while his standing leg was still behind their hip line. With these single-footed attacks, Rua would often end up in a position where one foot had landed on the mat next to his opponent’s head, and the other was still between their legs. While he was able to continue his offence from here, these were also the kind of positions that led to fighters getting off balanced and ending up on the bottom as Wanderlei Silva did against Hidehiko Yoshida.
With the leaping stomp, Shogun might miss and land with both feet by the opponent’s upper body, allowing him to turn back into them before they could put him back behind their guard. He might still get obstructed by an outstretched leg on the way over and simply end up behind his opponent’s guard again with nothing lost. Or in extremely fortunate cases, Rua might stomp and drop his hips straight onto the opponent’s chest, landing in a form of S-mount as he did against Hiromitsu Kanehara.
Fig. 4
The jumping stomp was the loosest of loose guard passes. Rua was a competent tight passer and would often use an underhook and head pin to knee cut through half guard and keep his opponent pinned to the mat, but loose passing often served his purposes better. Shogun and his Chute Boxe teammates understood that while it was hard to kick the head against a supine opponent with his legs in the way, fighters became far more susceptible to soccer kicks the moment they turned to their knees. Figure 5 shows an opponent turning into Rua and attempting to come up on the single leg. Rua turns his knee away (2) and forces his opponent down the leg (3).
Fig. 5
Figure 6 shows the reason that giving up a single leg attempt was so worthwhile. After forcing the opponent down his leg, Rua could kick away from his opponent in a limp leg and free the leg altogether (4). Turning back to face his foe, Rua found himself standing with both legs free, over an opponent who was turtled with his head pushed into the mat (5). The moment Rua started throwing soccer kicks, his opponent would try to sit back to a supine position to take his head away from danger, and in this way Shogun was able to create extended offensive cycles of stomps, limp legs and soccer kicks.
Fig. 6
Even when he was performing controlled passing and pinning, Shogun would allow his opponent the opportunity to roll to their knees. Most often Shogun did this by popping up to the knee-on-belly position from side control. His opponent would either roll away from him, serving up the soccer kick immediately, or turn into him on the single leg takedown, beginning that limp leg to soccer kick sequence.
While the jumping stomp was Mauricio Rua’s trademark and something he favoured, he sprinkled in other types of kicks to a downed opponent. When standing in front of an opponent’s guard, Rua would use lateral movement to force his opponent to turn, which would keep them from kicking at his knees momentarily. And when Rua could get control of one foot, he could make an attack.
Figure 7 shows Rua’s step around soccer kick. Controlling one ankle, Rua would shove it across the opponent’s body (2). In that instant, Rua would cross step his opposite foot to the opponent’s hip line (3), and soccer kick them with his outside foot over their arm (4). While he could land decent connections with this technique, the single grip afforded him little control. All Rua could really do was redirect his opponent’s foot momentarily to limit the possibility of getting upkicked in the face while attempting his own kick. His opponent’s foot would often still obstruct him and Rua never passed his opponent’s guard with this trick shot.
Fig. 7
The effectiveness of this kick was improved by Rua’s frequent use of diving punches off the same single foot grip. Slapping the foot out of the way to stifle the upkick momentarily, Rua could throw himself bodily into the opponent on the mat. He did this hundreds of times through his career, and dozens of times in his fight against Antonio Rogerio Nogueira alone, but it is best remembered for the time he managed to end up missing Alistair Overeem’s guard, but knocked the Dutchman out with a punch that came up from between his legs.
Fig. 8
Throwing himself into closed guard with the diving punch, Rua found himself somewhat hampered by the rule set from there. While PRIDE allowed kicks to the head of a downed opponent, PRIDE forbid the use of elbows to the head. This meant that when Rua was in the closed guard for prolonged periods—as against Nogueira and Overeem—he was forced to use elbows to the body and hammerfists to the head. Hammerfists are slow, and telegraphed, and the fist is gloved, so Rua often had to grip strip and raise his hand all the way over his head to bring it down with anything like the effectiveness he would have with a much shorter elbow. It made for dynamic viewing though as Rua dropped blows on his opponents from above the ring. This all fed into the slightly surreal kung fu movie / video game aesthetic that Rua’s fighting style seemed to have when compared to any of the other top fighters in the world at that time.
Figure 9 shows Rua’s second favourite kick to a downed opponent, a straight stomp. Standing in front of his opponent’s guard, Rua would use both hands at the same time to scoop in and palm his opponents feet outwards, away from each other (1,2). In that instant he would bring a knee up the middle and stomp straight through at his opponent’s face (3). The unfortunate Japanese journeyman, Yasuhito Namekawa got caught with this as the back of his head was jammed against the ring post pad. But Rua was also able to use this repeatedly and effectively against legitimate Jiu Jitsu threats like Antonio Rogerio Nogueira and Ricardo Arona.
Fig. 9
While we have touched on the issue of getting caught or off balanced from an attempted stomp or soccer kick, Rua treated the entire thing as a balancing act. He wasn’t going to stomp into mount and hold it. He would ride his opponents attempts to turn in on single legs and turn that into more offence, but push his advantages where he found them. Ricardo Arona had been an unstoppable force at ADCC, the world championship of no-gi grappling, and against him Rua completely missed the target as he used the same double hands scoop to stomp through the centre of Arona’s guard. Arona’s legs got knocked out of the way during the stomp, but he brought them in to begin attacking Rua’s legs and base. It looked to be a bad move for Rua. Unfortunately, the hammerfist that Rua quickly dropped from overhead rendered Arona’s Jiu Jitsu accolades useless as it knocked him unconscious before he could begin capitalizing on the leg that he was controlling.
Fig. 10
Just as in striking on the feet, range dictates the possibilities in striking on the ground. Stomps and soccer kicks require space and for the fighter to be on his feet, this means that they are suited to loose guard passing situations (one man standing, the other man grounded) and standing vs turtle situations (as after limp legging out of a single leg takedown attempt). PRIDE FC’s rules also permitted the use of knees though, and these were far better suited for pinning situations as seen in Figure 11. Rua was a very formidable guard passer in the traditional sense, using an underhook and head pin to cut through his opponent’s half guard and land in side control. While many fighters would try to hammer in short knees from a traditional chest to chest pin (1), Rua would perform a hip switch to create a longer, more variable path for his knee strike (2). Rather than holding himself tight to the opponent with his head-side arm, he would frame in front of their face to keep their head down on the mat.
Fig. 11
Figure 12 shows the scarf hold position that allowed Rua to arc in his knees as a Nak Muay would do against the heavy bag. As he acquired a reputation for ground and pound excellence, Rua’s opponents began to reach for his top knee, hoping to jam the strike. Often this would fail to hinder Rua’s knees at all, but the bottom man willingly extending his arm away from his body gave Rua the chance to knee over the arm and drop directly into a mounted crucifix position, with the arm trapped between his legs. This position has become very well known in modern MMA under Unified Rules due to Khabib Nurmagomedov, but this entry is one you are unlikely to see in mainstream MMA again.
Fig. 12
As an upright striker, Rua was always a patchwork of abilities and faults. His kicks were mechanically beautiful, especially for the era in which he competed. His hands were among the flappiest in a camp of flappy punchers but they served their purpose. At Chute Boxe, Rua’s gameplan was the same as any other Chute Boxe fighter on the feet: swarm and force the cover up. Like Wanderlei Silva he swung hands until his opponent put up their guard and committed to defence, then Rua and Silva would grab behind the head with both hands—the double collar tie or “Thai clinch” as most MMA fans knew it at the time. From there the Chute Boxe boys would hammer in knees and Rua would look for trips to get the fight to the mat.
Rua’s career was marked by long lay-offs due to injuries and he had learned his craft in the famous gym wars of Chute Boxe. So by the time he arrived in the UFC in his late twenties he had mileage on his body that most fighters are not able to accrue by the end of a lengthy career. While he won the light heavyweight title in the UFC, his UFC career was a hit-and-miss affair. From one fight to the next Rua might look like a completely different person. He left Chute Boxe and his new team was tasked with finding a way to accentuate his talents—namely kicking—while working around his catastrophic and repeating knee injuries.
Two of Rua’s signature looks were a triangle guard, and his shifting left hook. The first was a form of very high guard, with his hands on the top of his head and elbows out in front of him—creating that wedge or triangle shape. This technique is commitment to protecting the head at the expense of the body, and the gap between the elbows means that there is always a large hole in the guard that blows can sneak through. So it was necessary to combine this guard with head movement, but then it became something special—every punch thrown at him could end up being spiked by a moving elbow. It caused good hitters like Chuck Liddell and Lyoto Machida to slow down and think about whether it was worth really opening up on him. At the end of every salvo Rua absorbed on his forearms and elbows, he would extend his arms out to the sides and look his opponent in the eye. Just another flamboyant touch to Rua’s already theatrical style. Every writer had their own take on it from “doing the aeroplane” to “playing peek-a-boo.”
Fig. 13
Rua’s shifting left hook was a means to cover ground and continue swarming opponents but it stayed in his game as he slowed down and fought more methodically. Unlike a short shifting jab or drop shift, Rua’s shifting left hook was a completely committed technique. He would first step deep and heavy onto his lead leg (1), loading up his hips, and then step forwards and throw his weight onto his right foot while whirling in the left hook (2). Against Chuck Liddell this blow scored him the knockout, but it was more commonly seen as the beginning of a rush to the double collar tie or later against Lyoto Machida as a run up into a low kick as Machida retreated.
Fig. 14
Mauricio ‘Shogun’ Rua never became the untouchable great that his PRIDE Grand Prix run suggested he could. Yet in spite of his checkered record Rua won the world light heavyweight title in the UFC after years of uncertainty due to injuries, and with many of his best weapons taken away from him. There were plenty of fans and commentators pointing to the difference of rule set between PRIDE and the UFC at the time, but there simply wasn’t another fighter who relied so heavily on grounded knees and kicks as Mauricio Rua. That statement might draw ire as if Rua used “cheap” techniques as a crutch, but the truth is that for most fighters grounded knees and kicks were occasional attempts that seldom worked. Even today, fifteen years removed from Rua’s best performances in PRIDE, we can look overseas to the Japanese promotion, RIZIN and observe that soccer kicks, stomps and knees are still mostly a gimmick and only really landing on opponents who have already been knocked out in all but an official capacity. Shogun Rua had elevated grounded kicks and knees to an art form that worked time and time again against the best fighters in the world and now, in the modern age of MMA, that art form is essentially lost.
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Check out the previous entries in the Advanced Striking 2.0 series: