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Any person who is getting into any area of information exchange must learn the process of the exchange of knowledge and, with an open yet skeptical mind, discern what he/she is being told. This is much easier said than practiced, because people want to blindly follow – it’s just easier. What ability does anyone have to discern if they have no basis of understanding of a given subject? Extracting truth is the responsible shopper’s responsibility. Too bad there are too few of those kinds of people. It’s why people get duped and conned, brainwashed and chopped-up. There is a type of person who tends to get brainwashed. Martial arts…

Fights have always been best judged the day after, when the viewer is poised to watch objectively and not get caught up in the hype. The hype, meaning everything from the crowd’s jeers, the commentators’ biases, the sound of punches landing on the gloves, to the noises that the boxers make, does not escape anyone. Even judges have to guess that a punch landed flush when a fighter’s back is turned to him. Not to mention, in order to score rounds—in one aspect—judges have to rule whether a fighter did more damage than the other fighter. Compu-Box, like Punchstat numbers or any of the popular statistic coverage on major…

Last night’s Brock Lesnar v. Randy Couture Championship match-up exhibited how unrefined mma is even at the elite level the UFC sells itself as. Can you imagine any other established sport in which a guy without vast competitive experience in a given sport can encroach his way onto the professional prize competitive field and actually perform well? It should not be so appalling to the mma purists that Lesnar was able to get a shot at fighting Couture. That is not the point. If it were an exhibition or a gym fight, an mma purist should not be mad that the trainers are allowing the guys to spar (this…

A Boxing 10 Point Must Proposal After the ambiguity of the Floyd Mayweather Jr. v. Oscar DeLaHoya and Jermaine Taylor v. Corey Spinks fights, even the most dedicated boxing fans must acknowledge the sport’s flaws in scoring. First, boxing needs to define what is the object of the sport? By that, I don’t mean to solicit the usual boxing cliché, “to hit and not be hit.” That slogan is a euphemism for pitter-patting amateurs who score points for merely touching opponents’ headgears, not kill or be killed professionals and their action lusting fans. The object of any combat sport should simply be to inflict more damage to an opponent…

Soft Chins, Hard Temples: The Interpretation of Taking Blows Absorbing shots to the face and body is often a matter of interpretation. I call it “interpreting force.” Some shots, of course, have the impact beyond the realm of interpreting; fighters just get layed-out. But the great majority of hits in a fight are not going to be KO worthy. And everyone gets hit. So what does one do when he gets hit one of those times hard? Does it depend on how sturdy his chin is? Can his chin get sturdier? Interpreting force is not some spiritual idea. One doesn’t have to reach an inner Chi to start taking…

The surge in popularity of mma is causing an influx of average people thinking they can be fighters only because they have the nerve to fight.  This is the exact naïveté that makes children believe they can do anything they put their minds to.  But fighters are cultivated from birth, not built from the audacity of “choice.”  The cliché goes “fighters are born, not made.”  The problem now is that there are countless semi-successes who are really just average guys, untalented, non-inundated, and who do not embody people with personal life experiences related to being fighters.  They are guys who fell into fighting or think bad tempers can be harnessed into…

The storyline changes once again. Common sense tells us that Manny Pacquiao does not want to fight Floyd Mayweather, Jr. Pacquiao refused to recognize Mayweather as a viable opponent for a couple of years; in interviews, he has been recorded saying that Mayweather wasn’t on his radar. When Pacquiao signed for his last fight, contrary to popular belief, he did it when it was impossible for Mayweather to guarantee a fight with him. The media tends to get this confused. Pacquiao swore that “skills pay the bills” and that his “size or strength doesn’t matter,” but why does he not want to just fight? He is now turning the…

Since the days before Firpo and Dempsey, the public has had a love affair with the ideal of two fighters going blow for blow, shot for shot, in a violent show of bravado. I remember being enthralled when I watched guys teetering on the brink of collapsing, exhaustion so merciless that their blood seemed to drain in slow motion from their cuts, and their lungs sounded too worn-out to gasp any harder, but their last punches all thrust like finish moves of knifings, only these weapons were punches thrown from passion repeatedly thudding against newly weathered skulls. And I, like anyone else, would imagine how impossible it would be…

Cirque de Soleil of combat.  It’s shoved in your face in all its growing clichés.  Is it becoming a pseudo-sport of WWE?It is not embarrassing for fighters to be stopped.  This causes a culture of quitting, whether it’s unanimous or not.  The tapping out and the honor of being choked out (or even the rare limb breaking or joint tearing) is acceptable even to the fighters.  Fighters have already admitted to pretending to go limp to show “guts” in not tapping, and tappers escape fights without any damage.  If a boxer acted like he couldn’t get up, because his will is too broken to continue, it wouldn’t matter—that boxer…

“The bigger they are, the harder they fall.” “It’s not how strong you are, it’s leverage.” “Skills pay the bills.” These are some oft spoken training maxims, but pure fitness has always been a center piece of martial arts, romanticized and necessary in its core. Now, with the boom of crossfit training, the popular implementation of strongman routines, and the everyday mma poseur who thinks he’s showed talent in some bravado bar brawl, how much muscle under one’s bench means so much more. There may be a false pretense because being in shape is starting to mean more than being in fighting shape to many people trying to be…