Monday, November 16, 2015

How Not To Get Rousey'd

Tonight in my jiu-jitsu class, I taught the students "how not to get Rousey'd." The idea is from the point of view that as grapplers, we cannot make the same mistakes Ronda Rousey did this past weekend against Holly Holm.

Rousey made plenty of mistakes - several of which are covered here. To be fair, I did not read the article until after my class. In that article, two beautiful and honest points mentioned are:
1. The storm of uneducated opinion in the wake of the fight has been deafening and everyone wants to pretend that they always knew how to beat Rousey, they just didn't know if Holm was the 'level of athlete' to pull it off. When someone starts talking about 'A-level athletes' and ranking fighters by 'athleticism', you should immediately disregard their opinion on anything related to fighting.

2. The second moronic opinion that you will encounter is that Rousey lost because she chose to engage Holly Holm in a striking match. This fits nicely into the storyline of Rousey falling in love with her hands, being put on the cover of Ring magazine to sell copies, and so on. But it isn't true.

We had one white belt bring up the second point in class. That person will be excused due to lack of training time. Meanwhile,what I taught my students was threefold:

3. Cover your opponent's hands to clinch. Do not try to punch your way in to a clinch on a world class boxer.

2. Cut off the ring.
This is mentioned extensively in the article.

1. Shoot for the legs.
Ronda stayed with a plan of attacking for an upper body clinch, and it wasn't working. Holm had just enough defense to make it work. It was time for a double-leg attempt.


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