punches are thrown the most of all strikes and are easier to learn to do than kicks. Some dudes can't and don't even throw kicks but everybody throws punches. Being able to kick effectively takes at least twice as long to learn as punch effectively. I liked the article. I've always liked the cross. We all know what the most powerful strikes are though. Spinning kicks, punches, and elbows. Too hard to learn to do effectively but when they land they starch people.
Thanks for the comment Nicslagan. I'm glad you liked the article. :icon_chee
One of the comments to our Top 10 MMA Submissions article
http://mmafightdb.com/top-10-mma-submissions/ was that some fighters just don't know how to apply certain techniques like the D'arce properly. The same may be true of strikes like spinning kicks.
The trouble I have is that argument is sort of circular. It seems to work on the basis that if a technique fails then it is because a fighter didn't know what he was doing. that would make pretty much every strike or submission 100% effective. In philosophy you would call that "begging the question" - you assume the conclusion.
Our approach is to try and stay as objective as possible. We record what works and leave the why up to you. The MMA Fight DB database includes over 1300 fighters. I would imagine that is a relatively large sample size of the population of professional MMA fighters, although I don't know what the overall population size would be. It seems reasonable to conclude that what is true of the sample is true of the overall population.
What I think is reasonable to say is that in the population reviewed, spinning techniques caused KOs at a relatively low rate when compared to the cross and the hook. That could be due to the power of these techniques, ability of the fighters, fear of a takedown, difficulty of landing a spinning technique, distance or any other number of factors or all of these factors. It is difficult to attribute it to any one/all without some objective reason.
On another personal note, I am also not sure that there really is one way to do many techniques. Fighters styles and body shapes are very different and this changes the angles and shapes that fighters have to work with. A 5'5'' guy fighting a 6'2'' has different options from two opponents of the same height. Add in that one fighter is a wrestler and the other a BJJ blackbelt and you may see some pretty unconventional striking