In my last post I talked about the importance of recognizing the relationship between our stance to our oppnents.
In the coming articles I’ll be going indepth on the two primary stance relationships. Closed stance and open stance and I’ll be talking about switch hitting, which is the combination of both and the new options it brings.
In this article we will focus on the closed stance, specifically fighting at range with kicks for MMA.
Regardless of the stance we take we first have to close the distance to hit our opponent. In boxing we would work behind our jab but in MMA we can kick making the jab less effective as the first strike to build our combinations off of.
You do see people working off the jab in MMA but a smart opponent will use leg kicks to punish the step in.
This is because you have to step in to land the jab. So it’s best to build off of a kick at range and follow up behind it.
The longest and less telegraphed kick is the lead leg calf kick. Landing just a few well placed calf kicks has taken out some of the toughest men on the planet.
It’s almost impossible to catch where as a regular leg kick to the thigh is easy and sometimes rides up the opponents leg on its own.
Also when your opponent checks your kick he does so with the smaller part of the shin where with the leg kick he can check and sometimes you will hit him on his knee. This has resulted in multiple leg breaks in MMA and Kickboxing.
Weird fact. Chris Weidman has been on the receiving and giving end of this horrific injury.
And as if that wasn’t enough to get you to focus on this strike it also acts as a trip if you time it right as your opponent steps in.
The next important kick in the closed stance is the Oblique kick. Where as you use the calf kick at range or as your opponent is moving away the oblique kick is great at jamming your oponent as they try to step in on you.
As mentioned before the calf kick is great at knocking your oponent off balance when they step in but often times they can still recover and punch you.
But the oblique kick stops them in their tracks and often hyper extends the knee.
The lead leg round kick is the next strike we use to build offense. You can target the body or head or just aim for the arm right above the elbow. This ensures you don’t hit the top of your foot on there elbow (this is very painful and a good way to break your foot).
Also you can deaden their arm to the point that they can’t physically lift it up to block and you can just head kick them. Just landing a hard kick on the arms will stop your opponent from coming forward and it adds up over the fight.
And the last kick I use in this system is the rear leg kick as the opponent is retreating. Once you have your opponent moving backwards it becomes difficult for them to lift their trailing leg to check.
The point of anaylasing fighting like this isn’t to just talk about what you should throw but also what you should avoid using. Like I said in the last article everything works sometimes but we want to know what works most of the time and if we decide to be creative and get wild then so be it.
There are three reason not to use a certain strike.
1) The target isn’t open
2) The strike goes across your bodyguards leaving you off balance
3) There aren’t a lot of option to follow up with after you have established the strike
I will go into more detail about this in the next article.
With this set of kicks in this stance you can effectively control your opponent. I like to think of it as drippling a soccer ball, you want to keep you opponent right infront of you at range. If they move forward you can use the oblique kick to stop them. If they are standing in infront of you, you can kick their lead leg, arms, or body. If they retreat you can hit them with a leg kick. If the circle you can hit them with a leg kick.
These kicks are the bread and butter of the closed stance. Once you get these kicks going it’s easier to step in and land punches. We will talk more about this in the next article.