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I was thinking of how the sport has progressed in its short history, and how people have thought about how to periodize MMA since BJJ was dominant. Here is a way to look at fighter advance:
1) Specialists: at first, fighters come knowing a single discipline and not others. This is what we saw in the early days of the sport in which the question was: which martial art is most effective? The closest thing to this today is someone like Maria or Askren, though both are already one step beyond really...
2) Cross-training: A more developed fighter brings together different disciplines, say wrestling, boxing, and BJJ. They can do all of these things by themselves, but at this stage they don't have a good time integrating them. For instance, Khabib is an absolute monster when wrestling, and has been learning very good striking, but he hasn't yet integrated these things very well, so he does one or the other, i.e. he either strikes with good movement or goes robotically forward for the takedown. He hasn't yet integrated both dimensions well, but he's consistently improving. Cody is also of this ilk.
3) Integrated skills: At this stage fighters learn to integrate their different skills into cohesive transitions into their gameplans, using their strikes to set up their takedowns, and the threat of the takedown to set up their strikes, etc. This is the level that fighters like Frankie Edgar, Gerard Mousasi, Poirier or Cain Velasquez are.
4) Dynamic integration: At the very highest level, however, fighters do not only know how to integrate their skills, but potentially shuttle between different ways to do so mid-fight, so that they can switch gameplans on the spot if need be. This is the highest level of MMA competence, which for instance you see GSP, Mighty Mouse, and Jones deploy. Those guys are not only top notch in all aspects of the game, and do not only integrate them well, but they have many ways to integrate them. In contrast, someone like Mousasi, Silva or Frankie do not have the same adaptive capability mid-fight, if things don't go their way at the start they tend to not go well until the end.
Of course this doesn't mean that fighters at (4) are necessarily more efficient than those at (2): Khabib may not yet know how to integrate his stuff as well, but his ability in one domain is so far developed he compensates for it.
1) Specialists: at first, fighters come knowing a single discipline and not others. This is what we saw in the early days of the sport in which the question was: which martial art is most effective? The closest thing to this today is someone like Maria or Askren, though both are already one step beyond really...
2) Cross-training: A more developed fighter brings together different disciplines, say wrestling, boxing, and BJJ. They can do all of these things by themselves, but at this stage they don't have a good time integrating them. For instance, Khabib is an absolute monster when wrestling, and has been learning very good striking, but he hasn't yet integrated these things very well, so he does one or the other, i.e. he either strikes with good movement or goes robotically forward for the takedown. He hasn't yet integrated both dimensions well, but he's consistently improving. Cody is also of this ilk.
3) Integrated skills: At this stage fighters learn to integrate their different skills into cohesive transitions into their gameplans, using their strikes to set up their takedowns, and the threat of the takedown to set up their strikes, etc. This is the level that fighters like Frankie Edgar, Gerard Mousasi, Poirier or Cain Velasquez are.
4) Dynamic integration: At the very highest level, however, fighters do not only know how to integrate their skills, but potentially shuttle between different ways to do so mid-fight, so that they can switch gameplans on the spot if need be. This is the highest level of MMA competence, which for instance you see GSP, Mighty Mouse, and Jones deploy. Those guys are not only top notch in all aspects of the game, and do not only integrate them well, but they have many ways to integrate them. In contrast, someone like Mousasi, Silva or Frankie do not have the same adaptive capability mid-fight, if things don't go their way at the start they tend to not go well until the end.
Of course this doesn't mean that fighters at (4) are necessarily more efficient than those at (2): Khabib may not yet know how to integrate his stuff as well, but his ability in one domain is so far developed he compensates for it.
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