One of the most reliable methods of entering into the clinch is... your opponents fear of getting hit in the face.
If your opponent has the
expectation that you are not going to throw at him, that all you are going to try is run at him looking to wrap up, he will pull the trigger every time you come in range with few second thoughts, and you will likely take a lot of damage chasing him around the ring trying to get inside.
Watching muay thai competitions one might see that the majority of clinches take this form actually; one fighter presses the attack, the other reacts by going
en guard and shelling up in anticipation of a blow, the first fighter simply keeps moving in and puts hands on the other guy, pushing him into the ropes and rolling elbows and knee strikes in.
To an outside casual observer it would seem like clinches are something that sorta 'just happen' naturally over the course of a fight, which i suppose in a sense is actually sorta true in an abstract way, but the animating principle at play here is it's all contingent on
conditioned expectations.
This is something that Khabib Nurmagomedov for instance understands very well.
Feed in with one arm out, one arm up high like a shield block trying to block with your elbow. Try to feed inside of oppos guards on to the back of his head and dig your elbow into his collarbone, that’s your pivot point to pull his head down. After you controlled his head, then you can feed in your other hand.
You know i always kinda felt like this was one of those... 'day one' type things like, that their coach themselves learned on day one, which their coaches' coach also got showed on day one... and et cetera.
Like, the sorta memes that everyone seems to end up teaching to beginners when they think to themselves, 'shit, where do i start with teaching a rank beginner how to fight; well lets see, what was
i taught as a rank beginner?'... but which you hardly ever actually see play out in comps; some sorts of things which you're practically expected to
'grow out of' even (cause hamstringing peoples development with red herring boondoggles they can waste their days on before ultimately figuring to move on to something else builds character, or something).
By which i mean in this particular case, it's not that that's not what you
'see' happening in competition, in terms of gross motor movements, but that
the emphasis is on the wrong parts.
(Not singling you out either or anything by the way, just quoting to use the example)
Whether you have one hand extended, two hands extended, or even
no hands extended, it's all
functionally isometric in terms 'frankensteining'
without the conditioned expectations.
Rory Macdonald, god bless him, tried to clinch with Wonderboy in this manner, and, well, he had a bad time.
Textbook long guard or no, the crucial concern was that he did not
condition Thompson to expect serious strikes at hardly any point; hardly even gave the
indication that he was intending to do anything but grimly march forward into the blender in hopes of grabbing a hold. Consequently, this presented Thompson with a simple and straightforward problem to solve, making it trivially easy for him to dance around Rory throwing shot after shot freely and without fear (He's a great kid, but sometimes he can listen too his coaches a little
too much [a problem which a number of tristar fighters seem to have at times actually {besides GSP who pretty much boldly commanded his own destiny}]).
Or basically in other words; just bang, bro.
