Stealing tools from the absolute best...
Newsletter - May 2nd, 2023
I try to encourage folks to be students of the fighting arts, and to be such a student, you must watch great fights involving great fighters.
When doing so, you should pay particular attention to the best techniques and 'weapons' employed by the fighters... especially when those weapons seem to turn the tide of a fight.
After all, I'm not here to be a spectator... I like adding to my own toolbox more than admiring the boxes and tools of others. This is how I develop new ways to win the imaginary fights that take place in my shower.
This brings us to today's video... and if you have 6 minutes, I would strongly recommend that you watch the whole thing.
Yes, yes the video starts with the final blow of the fight, proudly displayed in the first 10 seconds. Despite such a blatant spoiler, the entire video is completely awesome.
The fighter with his foot ricochetting off of the other guy's skull is Tawanchai, and he is currently the featherweight champion of The One Fighting Champtionship.
You might not know this, but such a title makes him one of the best strikers in the world.
'One FC' only focuses on striking. There's no wrestling, no BJJ, no cage snuggling, nothing... other than pure blunt force trauma. This allows us to witness the 'pinnacle' of the stand-up fighting arts.
(It's remarkable how great you can become at punching and kicking when you don't have to focus on 7 other pesky martial arts simultaneously...)
Nevertheless, the first thing that you will notice about Tawanchai is his ability to throw effortless bomb-like kicks to his opponent's head, without any telegraph, without bending over, and without even slightly altering his face... which remained completely unchanged for the entire fight in an emotionless display of robotic malice, and the implication of remarkably clear sinuses.
But head kicks are not a tool easily mastered, and not the weapon that I am hoping for you to absorb from this newsletter. If you're anything like me, your groin is seized up from years of being a meat-head, and violently clinching my butt when things make me uncomfortable.
If I could give you one easily absorbed weapon that I observed in Tawanchai's style, it would be the way that this dude bounces his bodyweight forward when throwing insanely powerful front kicks that jolt Clancy's body.
You can't see how he bounces off of his rear leg here, but you can certainly see the jolt:
He throws this kick several times in the fight, each time with great results.
4:57 - Tawanchai visibly bouncing the rear leg back to launch his blast forward.
1:17 - Another respectable forward weight transfer into a kick.
3:08 - A sick double kick, again driving his rear leg BACK to drive momentum forward into the big boot.
...and then the one in the gif above.
You probably know how to throw a front kick... but taking just an instant to drive your rear leg back into the mat will create a tremendous amount of momentum, all of which ends up transferred to your opponent's solar plexus.
Tawanchai does a lot of bouncing... so this backwards drive is easily disguised as just another bounce, when in fact, it is a launch.
This is the kind of tool that can clearly change the tide of a fight, and it's definitely the kind that I want to stuff in my box.
Have a clench-free week...
-Trav
