Starting MMA from a boxing background

In my opinion wrestling and boxing both are good. Both are my favorite activities. Both are beneficial and good for everyone. In short its a very interesting thread.

 

If I was a boxer and I was a boxer and having a one time bout with a MMA fighter like James Toney Vs Randy Couture. I would learn to counteract my oppoent game. I wouldn't over complacte things.

If I was changing sports. I'd start from scratch. Find the best gym and have them teach me everything I need to know.

 

Go to an MMA gym. Most bang for your buck.

Everyone is right about wrestling, judo, muay thai, etc. They all have their strengths and weaknesses. Your goal is to combine th strengths and win MMA fights, so the best thing to do is go somewhere where they teach all the best techniques from each discipline.

You never truly master two disciplines. All the guys that are supposed wrestler/strikers are generally pretty shitty strikers as far as strikers go. Guys that are Boxer/BJJ black belts typically are shitty as far as bjj black belts go. You can master boxing and become very good at everything else, and the way to do it is to keep up the boxing and add an MMA trainer.

I think judo is a good one to focus on. The key in judo is to remain standing and put your opponent on the ground. Incidentally, the key in boxing is the same. What judo does for you is give you exceptional feel for inside fighting/standing grappling. It gives you great balance and teaches you how to unbalance an opponent and capitalize. It teaches you how to control, stall, and defend on the ground and apply a submission quickly. And it teaches you how to dump someone on their head really hard, which is good stuff. Judo is all about following principles rather than pre-defined technical sequences.

Wrestling is great but you want to not wrestle. You aren't going to be jockeying for dominant position to ground and pound, you just want to either catch them with a sub or escape and stand up. The main benefit of wrestling is that it's no-gi and teaches you how to manipulate a big strong sweaty man. Which brings us back to the first sentence of this paragraph. The perceived advantage wrestlers seem to have is because MMA is relatively new and wrestlers have spent their whole lives wrestling. There are still college wrestlers who started before MMA got popular.

Muay Thai is good for clinchwork and leg kicks. Focus on learning those things (at the MMA gym). Many boxer won't leg kick because it opens them up for a takedown, but you need to control distance and set up your punches so leg kicks are pretty much necessary unless you want people shooting in on you the whole time.

Boxing is good because you have a head start in it. Obviously it's great for hitting people, but it's also good for controlling the pace/location of the fight, and you'll have the advantage of being able to take a punch, unlike most MMA fighters.

You need:
Sprawls
Leg kicks
Muay Thai clinch
Throws
Guard position
Sweeps/escapes
Precision combination punching
A handful of submissions (guillotine, armbar from guard, triangle choke, arm triangle from standing, RNC, etc.)

You don't really need:
Head/body kicks
Takedowns
Mount position
Back positions
A million submissions (gogoplata, electric chair, rolling knee bar, flying armbar, etc)

You'll learn all that stuff but you don't need to drill it to perfection like someone who specializes does.

So yeah, basically you just need to go trane UFC (sorry, I'm really high). While continuing with boxing and giving special focus to judo techniques.

 

GSP rarely trains in the gi. When he does, he uses no gi grips a la Marcelo Garcia. If you find training video of GSP, you'll be hard pressed to find one with him in the gi.

I love BJJ more than any other martial art in the world. I disagree with you. As a boxer, he would not want to play guard against any grappler with more experience than him. Wrestlers are guard killers in MMA. They will stay in your guard and shut down your offense. BJJ guys are experts in passing your guard thus making it useless.

A boxer wants to learn defensive wrestling. It's important to know BJJ to avoid getting subbed. It's important to know wrestling to avoid getting taken down. But the most important thing is to use what you're best at.


Cro cop is a great example. Cro cop wasn't a guard player. He was a sprawler.

Kicking is something you should do when you're already good at it. It's not exactly necessary. It's free food for wrestlers when you throw leg kicks. When you're not really good, you're more likely to get taken down. A good guy like Aldo and Renan Barao are fine, plus they practice TDD religiously.

The myth that everyone is believing is that you have to be good at everything. The truth is you have to know everything. You have to know everything enough to defend your weaknesses and enforce your own game. He doesn't NEED kicks. He needs to learn how to check, block and dodge them. He doesn't NEED BJJ. He needs to learn how to avoid subs.

 

First off, you don't "trane" UFC.

Second, while Judo is useful in getting the takedown, a simple double leg will take down a judo player....because double legs are banned in most judo schools because they train for medals and double legs are not an accepted takedown for most competitions. Judo is definitely not somewhere you want to focus on.

Second, you don't NEED leg kicks. You need to learn the defense against them. Nogueira, JDS, and a number of other guys aren't leg kickers. You don't NEED it. It's nice to have it. But it's not needed. The defense against them is needed.

You don't NEED a muay thai clinch. Most of the times you're in a body to body clinch or a 50/50 clinch. Unless you're a master of the plumb, don't bother. You'll get uppercutted to death or taken down for your troubles. What you NEED is a proper clinch game.


You technically don't need kicks at all, but a good liver kick is something worth practicing. It's a high percentage TKO blow and you'd be wise to practice that as often as you practice sprawling.

You WILL NEED a proper back mount. In MMA, if you're a striker, you're going to get a knockdown and a short window of opportunity to follow up. That means you'll inevitable have guys turtle up on you. If you don't know how to maintain back control, you run the risk of getting reversed, submitted, or just allowing the guy to recover while you gas from throwing too many punches.


Also, the electric chair is also a sweep, so, since it's in the "need" category (lol), learn it. It's good stuff.

 

I trane UFC every day bro, and I bet you don't even lift.

 

Common misconception about judo. Morote gari is banned in competition, but the majority of judoka don't train for judo competition and the technique is far from banned in schools. Many judoka are also successful wrestlers (my teacher was a Japanese guy who was also an assistant coach on my school's DI wrestling team). Kata guruma and morote gari are still taught (even emphasized in some cases). The body triangle is also banned, but that doesn't mean a judoka is especially susceptible to it, because most of them still encounter it in training. Judo is some good stuff.

That's true, but leg kicks are also some good stuff and a fighter who has dangerous hands should use them to set up punches. It's more of an optimal thing. You can do fine as a boxer who only knows how to sprawl and box, but you want to be better than that hopefully.

Good point, I tend to consider any clinch as a "muay thai" clinch in MMA. Proper term would be "clinch game."

Nothing wrong with some liver pain.

I think alot of fighters make the mistake of taking someone's back when they could just as easily keep them down and bash them up from a standing position. Worst case the guy recovers and gets up and you can beat him up some more. If you mount his back you stand a good chance of being reversed if you don't finish him.

It's good as a sweep but you don't want to be trying to finish anything too crazy. My philosophy is if you're on the ground and aren't working a really high percentage submission you're best off getting up and fighting where you have the massive advantage. Too many BJJ guyy and wrestlers will reverse you and have you out of there if you play around in their world.

And it is extremely important to trane UFC.

 

Go for Wrestling over Judo 10 times out of 10.

And I am a fan of Judo.

It's just less practical for the MMA game. Still has many useful elements but its not as god as wrestling in that sense.

 

England is terrible for wrestling classes, it costs more than one night with your mother just to through the door

Since you live in the UK, you should be doing Judo at a high level place, we're their entering the olympics, not a **** dojo. You also should find no-gi bjj classes fairly easy

Since you won't find wrestling, drill it until your dead at MMA class. Trust me, judo combined with wrestling will give you everything.