I'm not gonna go into it all, but he's got extremely good foot placement, weight-balance, movement, energy-usage, positioning-understanding and -use, and he uses a variety of strikes that allow him to maximize his abilities with all that stuff. It looks unorthodox and uncomfortable and ineffective, but you can just try to do a lot of the stuff that Newton does and just
try to feel as comfortable doing it as Newton
looks when he's doing it.
It might seem simple, but look at how relaxed Newton is and how deceptively-hard he's throwing his strikes (that's a hard combination to have), and notice not only how fast and balanced he throws a high-roundhouse kick off his lead leg, but how casually and subtly he saunters towards Zayats after he throws the kick and repositions his feet. Zayats tries to throw a jab to re-establish his preferable distance, thinking Newton's further away than he is after the threw a kick, but Newton's a lot closer, and he's in range to land a solid one-two that drops Mikhail. You'll also notice that Newton quickly bounces back after he throws the right-hand to get back to his own range, before he notices Zayats is hurt and follows him down.
This gif's also real basic, and the slow-motion of it shows enough that I don't need to say much. Newton's on the outside and throws a big, long one-two and he steps forward with his right leg on the two, suggesting that, if it landed, he was gonna use that leg push himself out (Eddie Alvarez and Lion Takeshi do that a lot when they throw rights), but he sees it doesn't land and his opponent [I'm pretty sure it's Attila Vegh] is backing up, so he stops for a sec and, instead of pushing himself out, he throws a quick side-kick to the body that just lands with the toes. It doesn't do much damage, but body shots, even light ones, don't feel good, and they add up and will tire you out, and Newton knows how to land light body-kicks that his opponents won't wanna do anything about until they're breathing heavy and have no idea why.
Speaking of Newton's body-kicks, here's another nice example of what they're like, how often he throws them, how seamlessly he uses them with his feet, and how balanced he is when he strikes and moves.
Try kicking like that from those positions and just try to be that balanced as you're doing it. That takes
way more skill than you'd think.
The fact that Newton does this so much in a lot of his fights has another purpose, and in the fight with Beltran it led to Joey eventually dropping his hands. You can already see Joey start to lower his hands just in the time it takes for the above gif to end, and then this happens:
This leads me to the next thing: there's also a lot of real basic striking-fundamentals that underly Newton's striking game that end up being one of the keys to what makes his striking so strong. You look at the knockout of King Mo that launched his popularity
and it
looks sloppy to a lot of people and, thus, people tend to think it wasn't legitimate, but there's a lot that happened before this that led into it. If you watch the fight, you'll notice that Newton threw a lot of jabs at King Mo before he threw this big backfist. You'll even notice he throws a jab that just touches King Mo's face as he does this. That shows Newton's understanding of striking; an extremely basic and effective way to set up a spinning backfist is to jab a lot. The jab goads your opponent into making certain actions that leave them open to a backfist (namely either weave your head or move to the left, which leaves you open to the most round-swinging of arm strikes: the backfist.)
A
real nice thing about it, too, that went over a lot of people's heads is that Newton's foot-placement shines through again and
leads to this moment. Look at what Newton does with his right foot right before he throws the backfist; he throws the overhand-right, his foot's on his toes and almost off the ground, his head's down and his body's hanging-low and he looks like he might be off-balance, but then he simultaneously pushes off his left foot and darts his right foot
right across and plants it, and the second he plants it, he's turning his hips so hard as he's pushing off his left-foot that his foot slide across the mat, and he lands the spinning backfist. That combination that goes over everyone's heads makes that strikes so much more powerful than it looks that, combined with what Newton did to build it up, it's no surprise it knocked out King Mo.
King Mo's striking was also largely built on keeping his hands low and using a shoulder-roll; Conor Ruebusch (Sherdog's own
@Discipulus)
wrote a big article on King Mo's striking a few years ago if you wanna look at it. It made his defense good, but against someone like Newton... the combination of striking styles at play in the first fight left King Mo much more open than most fighters in the world would have been able to leave King Mo. It's like a guy who jabs a lot vs. a guy whose specialty is a cross-counter, but everyone thinks the guy who jabs is perceived as one of the best in the world and the guy who does the cross-counter isn't really known for much and his overall style looks less clean... If you take out preconceived notions about their individual qualities and all the stuff about them that's been determined by marketing, you can easily see that one guy is facing a
big challenge here, and it's not gonna be a surprise if the jabber gets knocked out with a cross-counter by the cross-counter-er.
King Mo eventually changed his striking style afterwards and did something I've noticed a lot of fighters do: he changed way too much way too fast and went up against fighters who were at way too high a level to leave the odds of success in competition at a really high level, and, at that point, it was understandable why Newton was able to outstrike him en route to a UD.
Lately, and I think it's really Newton's recent fights that have left people wondering why he was able to have so much success against King Mo, Emanuel's just had some difficulties. It's a combination of in-hindsight-that-choice-wasn't-that-preferable choices and unfortunate circumstances. Emanuel said outright that he was doing a lot of unconventional things before his fights before the Mcgeary loss. He was only doing two-week training camps for his fights; he didn't eat for three days before the Joey Beltran fight to prove to himself that he could win off of only his spirit energy, and he said right afterwards that now that he's proved it to himself he's never doing it again (it's understandable why he looked so tired after one round with Beltran when you know this); he had a vision of him submitting Linton Vassell and kept trying to grapple with him even after he'd basically been horribly grapple-fucked for two rounds straight and his corner was begging him to strike (where he was handily winning and would've ended up getting a decision) and to not take down Vassell, cuz' Linton was failing with his own takedowns every time and Newton was either getting- or at risk of getting swept badly all the time; and he smoked marijuana right before the Mcgeary fight which would've led to him getting his victory overturned had the extremely-close decision gone his way. It might be controversial, a lot of what he did, but it worked.
Then when he fought Davis, he went in the complete opposite direction, followed his corners instructions completely and avoided all of his older mental preparations, and his striking looked so uncharacteristic and he abandoned all of the striking and movement ticks that led to him being so great that he just basically stood in the southpaw stance and threw low-lead-leg-roundhouse-kicks inbetween doing ineffectual stance-switches until Davis eventually timed one and got a takedown, then the submission came shortly afterwards.
Newton's also really become a five-round fighter over the last few years. His style really benefits from being able to fight for five rounds as opposed to three. That was the case in his recent three-round fights against Vassell and Erokhin; they were very competitive fights, but it was clear by the end of them that it could've gone a
very different way had Newton had two more rounds to work. In the Vassell rematch, the groin shot and point deduction in the second round ended up completely throwing off Netwon, and he wasn't the same going into the third round, so that was just circumstantial.
People tend to think that recent things are all that matters, but that's not the case. Emanuel Newton's career since the King Mo fight in particular has been an extremely circumstantial thing.