Thought experiment: what does the perfect fighter look like?

The best striker who ever lived is arguably Giorgio Petrosyan, but fighters adapt to their body shape, rather than their being a perfect body for fighting.

Floyd Patterson and Mike Tyson where taught the same methodology one is tall the other is short.

There's a difference between learning the basics of a sport and expressing it in your own way and learning a system form a coach and expressing yourself through said system.
 
Floyd Patterson and Mike Tyson where taught the same methodology one is tall the other is short.

There's a difference between learning the basics of a sport and expressing it in your own way and learning a system form a coach and expressing yourself through said system.

They adapted that system to their body shape too. Tyson often gets remembered as an in-fighter, when he was more of a collision maker - interesting stuff
 
They adapted that system to their body shape too. Tyson often gets remembered as an in-fighter, when he was more of a collision maker - interesting stuff
I agree they did.

Collision maker? What does that mean?
 
Daniel-Cormier-UFC-226-Two-Belts.jpg
 
I agree they did.

Collision maker? What does that mean?

Normally its when a fighter specifically targets the opponent as they come forward, in the case of Tyson he'd typically hit you AS he was closing in rather than when he was up close, he usually had a lot more space between him and his opponent than people remember. I'm not completely sure but I remember tape of Floyd being more of a straight up in fighter - but I could also be confusing him with Frazier
 
Whenever these sorts of hypotheticals are floated, you'll usually see a few of the 'easy' low imagination answers floated, based on identifying a number of different prominent features of some prominent fighters, and saying if you slapped all those together, you'd have 'the perfect fighter'.

Naturally, this kind of nominalistic grab-bag 'cut and paste' approach to 'imagine something really great' always bothered me on some level. Since, if you actually had a guy who actually had enough talent to be that good at all those different things, he would kick ten times as much ass with a more optimized training focus, including the ass of his grab-bag doppelganger too.

Basically, it's imperceptive of what 'deeper reality' may be at work beyond contingencies; not seeing a 'greater form' of things, transcending particular expressions instantiated in the form of any one given fighter; levels beyond the levels you merely see; the excellence that an excellent competitor is participating in, to a better degree or worse degree, rather than something that is encapsulated by them; to see the best there is and see better still; to see not simply better, but better ways to be better; what essential contours of Being that they access, that they channel, that they embody; what which influences victory in a given context; what which are more influential than others.

Or in short, to have a standard where man is not the full measure of things.


In order to be better than the crowd you have to be different from the crowd.


You know a lot of people say this... which is ironic. That in itself is good reason to give pause and think again i wager.

I think if there is one word you could use to describe a great deal of foibles a man might have, it might be, 'laziness'. Including and especially intellectual laziness.

One unfortunate tendency i've too commonly noticed, in people in martial arts circles (and really life in general), is too much of a tendency to cast about for 'hacks', 'workarounds', or 'rAre techs' upon encountering the first sign of resistance or difficulty in a path they are taking... rather than maintaining focus on best practices, since most don't like to consider a thought that maybe they simply aren't that good any ways. Or rather... they desire a mythical 'hack' precisely because they fear (or in their heart of hearts, know) they don't actually have the same level of talent as the people they hope to beat; that if they tried to do things similar in way to what they did, they wouldn't measure up.

Ironically, it would be that very fear, and subsequent attraction to marginalia, that would actually hamstring their competitive potential even lower than it might otherwise have been, relative to people on their own level. Their insecurities poison them.

It's a matter of reframing your outlook; rather than a question of, 'how do i beat the best', it is a question of, 'how do i be the best i can be'. If a certain kind of competitor haunts the nightmares of your peers, if sherdog is daily filled with threads about 'what strategies should i use to counter [X] ?', then in many cases, the answer is seductively simple: you become [X]. You be the thing that haunts the nightmares of contemporaries as they fruitlessly spend hours agonizing over any way possible to overcome the problem... save the obvious. You look at that super scary and intimidating prospect people worry about having to face, and you use it.

To get consistent success against a wide range of top opponents with a wide range of different specialties, one ought, to borrow a phrase from GSP, 'use the best weapon'. If another guy could beat you with your 'best weapon', chances are, he could beat you were you trying most anything else too. Sometimes a better fighter is just that: plain better. And because of that, its foolish to try and base a game plan around figurative cases of such a nature. If you adopt a losers mentality, then naturally, you'll be a loser. A big dog doesn't game plan to merely 'counter' the big dog, they game plan to be the big dog.

It's almost like, the intimidation they feel when considering someone with a formidable skill, somehow sublimates itself into the prospect of acquiring such skills themselves feeling intimidating to them, resulting in fatalism on the subject.

Too be sure, there is an element of meta-gaming to the whole process; even a highly marginal strategy can be(come) adaptive if few others are gameplaning or spending training time on the matter. Or, if so many are overspecializing into an essential 'meat' that was popularized in previous years, that the field then becomes vulnerable to more secondary 'potatoes'. Certainly it would behoove one to make sure to have at least one guy in their camps that are each a specialist at different popular metas, if only for the purposes of camp preparation.

The question becomes, at what point does trying to go 'uphill' through more essentially disadvantageous TTPs stop being contingently advantageous? I think in a lot of cases that margin in fact is fairly narrow, and if you've got a world class talent on your hands, and you're in charge of grooming them to stand on the podium, i think trying to make them a fighting hipster is in fact doing them a disservice; the easiest way to beat the best is to do what the best do better (which is actually the hard way; which is the easy way).
 
Last edited:
Whenever these sorts of hypotheticals are floated, you'll usually see a few of the 'easy' low imagination answers floated, based on identifying a number of different prominent features of some prominent fighters, and saying if you slapped all those together, you'd have 'the perfect fighter'.

Naturally, this kind of nominalistic grab-bag 'cut and paste' approach to 'imagine something really great' always bothered me on some level. Since, if you actually had a guy who actually had enough talent to be that good at all those different things, he would kick ten times as much ass with a more optimized training focus, including the ass of his grab-bag doppelganger too.

Basically, it's imperceptive of what 'deeper reality' may be at work beyond contingencies; not seeing a 'greater form' of things, transcending particular expressions instantiated in the form of any one given fighter; levels beyond the levels you merely see; the excellence that an excellent competitor is participating in, to a better degree or worse degree, rather than something that is encapsulated by them; to see the best there is and see better still; to see not simply better, but better ways to be better; what essential contours of Being that they access, that they channel, that they embody; what which influences victory in a given context; what which are more influential than others.

Or in short, to have a standard where man is not the full measure of things.





You know a lot of people say this... which is ironic. That in itself is good reason to give pause and think again i wager.

I think if there is one word you could use to describe a great deal of foibles a man might have, it might be, 'laziness'. Including and especially intellectual laziness.

One unfortunate tendency i've too commonly noticed, in people in martial arts circles (and really life in general), is too much of a tendency to cast about for 'hacks', 'workarounds', or 'rAre techs' upon encountering the first sign of resistance or difficulty in a path they are taking... rather than maintaining focus on best practices, since most don't like to consider a thought that maybe they simply aren't that good any ways. Or rather... they desire a mythical 'hack' precisely because they fear (or in their heart of hearts, know) they don't actually have the same level of talent as the people they hope to beat; that if they tried to do things similar in way to what they did, they wouldn't measure up.

Ironically, it would be that very fear, and subsequent attraction to marginalia, that would actually hamstring their competitive potential even lower than it might otherwise have been, relative to people on their own level. Their insecurities poison them.

It's a matter of reframing your outlook; rather than a question of, 'how do i beat the best', it is a question of, 'how do i be the best i can be'. If a certain kind of competitor haunts the nightmares of your peers, if sherdog is daily filled with threads about 'what strategies should i use to counter [X] ?', then in many cases, the answer is seductively simple: you become [X]. You be the thing that haunts the nightmares of contemporaries as they fruitlessly spend hours agonizing over any way possible to overcome the problem... save the obvious. You look at that super scary and intimidating prospect people worry about having to face, and you use it.

To get consistent success against a wide range of top opponents with a wide range of different specialties, one ought, to borrow a phrase from GSP, 'use the best weapon'. If another guy could beat you with your 'best weapon', chances are, he could beat you were you trying most anything else too. Sometimes a better fighter is just that: plain better. And because of that, its foolish to try and base a game plan around figurative cases of such a nature. If you adopt a losers mentality, then naturally, you'll be a loser. A big dog doesn't game plan to merely 'counter' the big dog, they game plan to be the big dog.

It's almost like, the intimidation they feel when considering someone with a formidable skill, somehow sublimates itself into the prospect of acquiring such skills themselves feeling intimidating to them, resulting in fatalism on the subject.

Too be sure, there is an element of meta-gaming to the whole process; even a highly marginal strategy can be(come) adaptive if few others are gameplaning or spending training time on the matter. Or, if so many are overspecializing into an essential 'meat' that was popularized in previous years, that the field then becomes vulnerable to more secondary 'potatoes'. Certainly it would behoove one to make sure to have at least one guy in their camps that are each a specialist at different popular metas, if only for the purposes of camp preparation.

The question becomes, at what point does trying to go 'uphill' through more essentially disadvantageous TTPs stop being contingently advantageous? I think in a lot of cases that margin in fact is fairly narrow, and if you've got a world class talent on your hands, and you're in charge of grooming them to stand on the podium, i think trying to make them a fighting hipster is in fact doing them a disservice; the easiest way to beat the best is to do what the best do better (which is actually the hard way; which is the easy way).

You are actually over thinking this, Humans are generally a bunch of lazy monkeys with large brains, we are wired to find ways to cheat a system, to the point that we will put in more work trying to cheat a system than the energy required to function within the system......... It is part of our nature, it's why we invent things to make our life easier.....
 
You are actually over thinking this, Humans are generally a bunch of lazy monkeys with large brains, we are wired to find ways to cheat a system, to the point that we will put in more work trying to cheat a system than the energy required to function within the system......... It is part of our nature, it's why we invent things to make our life easier.....
kinda like weight cutting?
 
You are actually over thinking this, Humans are generally a bunch of lazy monkeys with large brains, we are wired to find ways to cheat a system, to the point that we will put in more work trying to cheat a system than the energy required to function within the system......... It is part of our nature, it's why we invent things to make our life easier.....


Which is exactly what i was talking about... You were either just skimming the wall or had trouble understanding...

It precisely is what methods what might bring easier victory that are the concern, and more than that and in particular, ways by which you might find or recognize such better methods; ways by which people fool themselves and fail to pursue methods that might bring the most ease, grasping a simulation or simulacrum of methods that might bring ease rather than the real thing, because it would be the methods themselves that were easier.

A subtle but monumental distinction: the difference between how easily you might grasp a method, and how easily you might grasp results.
 
Last edited:
I don't think MMA has settled on an ideal body type in the way that some combat sports (Olympic taekwondo, point karate, arguably amateur boxing) have.

Some sports medicine people might have looked into this, though. There's probably a journal article out there somewhere.

EDIT: It's not very enlightening, but one answer might be: "bigger than his opponents". There's got to be a maximum effective size for a fighter, given the limits of the human body and the weight class he fights in. The "ideal" fighter would be that size.
 
Last edited:
Which is exactly what i was talking about... You were either just skimming the wall or had trouble understanding...

It precisely is what methods what might bring easier victory that are the concern, and more than that and in particular, ways by which you might find or recognize such better methods; ways by which people fool themselves and fail to pursue methods that might bring the most ease, grasping a simulation or simulacrum of methods that might bring ease rather than the real thing, because it would be the methods themselves that were easier.

A subtle but monumental distinction: the difference between how easily you might grasp a method, and how easily you might grasp results.

Yeah, the 9 paragraphs will do that.....
 
Forgive me if I wasn't being clear.

The original intent for this question was for you all to first describe your ideal fighting style.

The next phase was to determine if you are training to become good at that style. If so what drills and methods are you using to create said style? If not then why not?
 
No because, weight cutting is operating within a set of rules that allows it.......now, taking PED's is a different story........;)
Weight cutting is one of the worse ideas to ever grace combat sports
 
Jose Aldo with better boxing and movement.

So like McGregor's Boxing meshed into Aldo.
 
Forgive me if I wasn't being clear.
The original intent for this question was for you all to first describe your ideal fighting style.
The next phase was to determine if you are training to become good at that style. If so what drills and methods are you using to create said style? If not then why not?

The ideal fighting style is no fixed fighting style. You adjust your style to negate your opponents' strengths and exploit their weaknesses, and have various ways of countering a given style of opponent. Thus, if a fighter is similar in style to a past opponent, he cannot learn from the mistakes & patterns of past fights since he'll be facing something he hasn't seen before. You keep him off balance, stay a couple steps ahead, walk him into traps, and drown him.
 
Back
Top