King Pietersen
ICC Board Member
- Joined
- Nov 15, 2006
- Location
- Manchester
I edited, after doing a bit of research and thought, realising that the conditioning required is completely different for each sport.
The top tier MMA fighters are well conditioned athletes that work incredibly hard on their conditioning. There aren't many genuinely successful flabby fighters nowadays. Roy Nelson's probably the only one, but he'll never be a World Champion.
Those injuries generally come from sustained damage, and it's also down to the fact that Boxers train to put more power into their punches more consistently, as they basically purely train upper body strength. In terms of likelihood of a 1 punch knockout, MMA gloves are far more dangerous. That's actually why there haven't been any deaths or serious injuries in the UFC. There's more chance of being knocked out clean, and if you're badly hurt the ref's jump in and stop the fight before further damage can be inflicted. In Boxing, the ref gives a 10 count and if the bloke stands up he can get continually punched in the head for a few more minutes. Far more dangerous a sport than MMA.
Put it this way, would a pro boxer beat an MMA fighter in an MMA bout? Of course not. It's a nothing point. There are seriously talented boxers in MMA as well. Andrei Arlovksi's hands are rated incredibly highly by Freddie Roach, Vitor Belfort could be a top 5 boxer in his Weight Division, and Anderson Silva is trying to get a fight with Roy Jones sorted. Not all MMA fighters could step into a boxing ring and do well, but there are some that could.
A boxer needs a more defined boxing technique than an MMA fighter, because an MMA fighter needs to learn more than 1 facet of the game; well done, we already knew that and that wasn't what we were discussing. Your original point was that Boxing required more technique than MMA though, and you seem to have run away from that and changed your opinion.
