Tag: Lyoto Machida

Technique of the Day: The Brazilian Kick

(Video courtesy of YouTube/yegoyan818)

The Brazilian kick, AKA crescent kick, AKA question mark kick is an effective move that could net positive results against an opponent who doesn’t close the distance and who pays close attention to your hip movement in an MMA or kickboxing bout. Adding it to your arsenal offers another option when an opponent is reluctant to engage or is tired or hurt and is dropping his (or her if you’re Brett Rogers) hands in the later rounds of a bout.

Guys like Lyoto Machida and Georges St-Pierre have incorporated the unexpected move into their stand-up bag of tricks

Here’s how to do it:

First, fake a front roundhouse kick by throwing your hip around with your shin drawn back. As your opponent reacts to the movement and braces for a leg or body kick, twist your hip and snap your shin up mid-movement so that it is now moving in the direction of your opponent’s unprotected head while snapping your lower leg back, pointing your heel towards your opponent. These moves must be performed in unison and will take a great deal of practice to put all of the movements together. Flexibility is key, so stretching will help prepare you for the move.

Joe Rogan explains the kick in more detail  and Glaube Feitosa demonstrates how to decapitate someone with it after the jump


(Video courtesy of YouTube/yegoyan818)

The Brazilian kick, AKA crescent kick, AKA question mark kick is an effective move that could net positive results against an opponent who doesn’t close the distance and who pays close attention to your hip movement in an MMA or kickboxing bout. Adding it to your arsenal offers another option when an opponent is reluctant to engage or is tired or hurt and is dropping his (or her if you’re Brett Rogers) hands in the later rounds of a bout.

Guys like Lyoto Machida and Georges St-Pierre have incorporated the unexpected move into their stand-up bag of tricks

Here’s how to do it:

First, fake a front roundhouse kick by throwing your hip around with your shin drawn back. As your opponent reacts to the movement and braces for a leg or body kick, twist your hip and snap your shin up mid-movement so that it is now moving in the direction of your opponent’s unprotected head while snapping your lower leg back, pointing your heel towards your opponent. These moves must be performed in unison and will take a great deal of practice to put all of the movements together. Flexibility is key, so stretching will help prepare you for the move.

Joe Rogan explains the kick in more detail  and Glaube Feitosa demonstrates how to decapitate someone with it after the jump


(Video courtesy of YouTube/TwisterEddie)


(Video courtesy of YouTube/joey408408)

Is Steven Seagal the Best Kept Secret in MMA?

The phenomenon that is Steven Seagal has now extended from the silver screen to the eight-sided cage. A black belt in Aikido, Seagal has parlayed his extensive career in the martial art into a memorable movie career where Seagal has become one of the m…

The phenomenon that is Steven Seagal has now extended from the silver screen to the eight-sided cage.

A black belt in Aikido, Seagal has parlayed his extensive career in the martial art into a memorable movie career where Seagal has become one of the more notable figures in the action/thriller genre.

Films such as Above the Law, Hard to Kill and Under Siege have helped anchor his legend, but now Seagal has found a second life in the world of mixed martial arts.

Recently, the master of “the way of unifying life energy” has been seen alongside notables in former champion Lyoto Machida and current pound-for-pound great Anderson Silva, taking a considerable amount of credit for their impressive performances against Randy Couture and Vitor Belfort, respectively.

In those bouts, the Brazilians had performed incredible feats of action when they pulled off front head-kick knockouts over their accomplished opposition—to which Seagal was proud to say, “Yeah, I taught them that.”

Seagal has also made efforts to cozy up next to other big names such as reigning UFC light heavyweight champion Jon Jones, who deferred to work with the obvious MMA talent, questioning Seagal’s motives and for good reason.

While his accolades as an Aikido expert and movie star precede him, Seagal is now prominent figure in the mixed martial arts world. The legendary Bas Rutten has vehemently worked to debunk the Seagal movement in MMA.

“I don’t think he’s teaching anything to the likes of Silva and Machida,” said Rutten while speaking with MMADieHards.com.  

“I imagine Anderson’s just giving a handout.  He’s always laughing when Seagal’s around and I think to him it’s just a fun thing. With that front kick, the fourth or fifth thing you’re taught in most martial arts usually involves a kick to the face.  I imagine the guys respect him for the movies he’s been in, but that’s about it.”

So whose opinion will you lend respect to more? That of a tiring movie actor who is looking to catch a second wind in a new and popular sport, or that of a two-time world champion who’s widely considered to be one of the best mixed martial artist to ever lace up the gloves?

I’ll go with the latter. 

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Movember Gallery: The Greatest Facial Hair in MMA History


(You can make fun of your opponent’s voice, and you can trash his fighting style. But mock a man’s sideburns, and you’re asking for the worst beating of your life.)

Start sharpening your razors, folks: We’re just eight days away from the official start of Movember! To help get you in the moustache-growing spirit, we’ve put together a photo gallery of our favorite facial hair arrangements in MMA history, which you can check out after the jump.

Start sharpening your razors, folks: We’re just eight days away from the official start of Movember! To help get you in the moustache-growing spirit, we’ve put together a photo gallery of our favorite facial hair arrangements in MMA history, which you can check out above.

Visit us.movember.com for more information on Movember’s efforts to raise awareness and money for prostate cancer and other men’s health issues, and join our CagePotato Mo Bros Team to help us support the cause this year.

Related:
– Hulk Hogan cuts a promo for Movember
– Movember Central on Break.com

Steven Seagal’s Ascent as MMA Trainer: Should Greg Jackson Feel Nervous?

Steven Seagal is not one to rest on his almost US$775,000,000.00 lifetime box office laurels, as proven by his incursion into training teammates Anderson Silva and Lyoto Machida how to, ahem, kick lethally. (There would be no mention here on the exact …

Steven Seagal is not one to rest on his almost US$775,000,000.00 lifetime box office laurels, as proven by his incursion into training teammates Anderson Silva and Lyoto Machida how to, ahem, kick lethally. (There would be no mention here on the exact kind of KO kick that the Black House fighters successfully executed as you must know it by now…Ok, for the less informed, it can be referenced from part one of a 1980s teen martial arts flick. Or from an aviary.)

It’s also true that Seagal is the first foreigner to run an Aikido dojo in Japan. To Americans, he is to traditional martial arts what Neil Armstrong is to space exploration.

So what if his expertise is sought by UFC’s current middleweight champion and MMA‘s pound-for-pound king? Along with the former light-heavyweight champion?

Jeff Wagenheim of Sports Illustrated‘s “Inside MMA” best articulates the contrary opinion:

I have nothing against Seagal’s martial arts background…although with him apparently having spent so much time in dojos over the years, I would have expected him to have learned a little humility. I didn’t miss his comment about Bones being “so much better” than what he showed, just as I didn’t miss his smirk when interviewer Ariel Helwani asked him about the Jones front kick that didn’t quite connect … whereupon Seagal suggested that it hadn’t landed because “I haven’t taught it [to Jones] yet.” Do you really, truly believe he taught Silva and Machida how to kick?

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Steven Seagal isn’t a laughable buffoon whose straight-to-video movie career is so feeble that he has to grab attention wherever he can find it, which unfortunately at the moment means sticking his nose into the UFC world. Maybe he truly is the sensei to whom Brazil’s greatest fighters bow down as teacher. If so, Jon Jones is in a whole lot of trouble, because he declined Seagal’s offer to visit before the Rampage fight, and his next bout is against Machida, one of Steven’s guys. Add a melodramatic score from Taiwan and some dubbed dialogue, and we have the makings of one heck of a martial arts action movie. Straight to video, naturally.

 

Here’s also an allegation from Portal do Vale-tudo, a magazine from Silva and Machida’s home country itself, stating that it could all be a public relations coup targeting North American fans:

The declaration of the champion Anderson Silva (Seagal helping him with the amazing kick) was contemplated with humor by the fans, who knows that the actor was at most twice with the Brazilian.

The approach between the two was actually a marketing maneuver planned by the agent of Anderson, Jorge Joinha, to give more visibility to its champion in the American media. The plan worked very well in the first stage, the problem was in the wrong dose and reached the absurdity of assigning a brilliant victory by the biggest name in MMA of all time to a “Master of Hollywood” who never climbed in the ring. The worst of all is that Seagal, perhaps influenced by some of his films, believed and even stated in several interviews after the fight that “He (Anderson) did everything the way I taught him and made me very proud”. For God’s sake…

And Aikido being a mostly “reactive” martial art with fantastic wrist throws, from my admittedly layman’s understanding (by “layman’s understanding” I mean unaided by Google), I find this to be a valid question: Just when, where and from whom did Seagal learn to strike effectively in the first place?

In any case, I don’t think we’ll find Jones’s top-of-the-line MMA trainer Greg Jackson frequenting cockfights anytime soon before UFC 140 (Jones vs. Machida), to discover a novel defense-and-counter-attack technique from another feathered species…

Or will he?

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Jon Jones, Brock Lesnar, and the Most Hyped Fighters in UFC History

There’s one thing in MMA that’s bigger than Anderson Silva, Georges St-Pierre, and Jon Jones put together. It’s made mediocre fighters look good, great fighters look unstoppable and Kimbo Slice look like something other than a glorifi…

There’s one thing in MMA that’s bigger than Anderson Silva, Georges St-Pierre, and Jon Jones put together.

It’s made mediocre fighters look good, great fighters look unstoppable and Kimbo Slice look like something other than a glorified street fighter.

It’s the UFC hype machine.

The UFC does a good job at hyping it’s fighters from top to bottom. Some live up to the hype. Others have failed to live up to what they were built as.

Here’s a list of the most hyped fighters in UFC history. 

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UFC: Rashad Evans Wants to Fight Jon Jones and Lyoto Machida the Same Night

Former UFC light heavyweight champion Rashad Evans was set to square off with current champion Jon Jones at the end of 2011.Evans later found out from doctors he would only have three to four weeks to prepare for Jones and the biggest fight of his…

Former UFC light heavyweight champion Rashad Evans was set to square off with current champion Jon Jones at the end of 2011.

Evans later found out from doctors he would only have three to four weeks to prepare for Jones and the biggest fight of his career.

As expected, Evans opted out of the championship bout as Lyoto Machida stepped in.

In an interview with MMA‘s Karyn Bryant, Evans addressed his return and the possibility of fighting once more before a title shot would occur.

“I want to stay active, I want to keep on fighting. If another opportunity comes and it’s an opportunity to stay active, I might take it,” Evans said.

Evans went on to address the circumstances and hardships he endured as he had to withdraw from the chance of regaining his much desired championship belt.

“Everything happened the way it did and it happened for a good reason,” he said. “It worked out for the better. When it comes down to it, there’s really no mistakes in life. It’s about when something bad or something you don’t expect happens, you got to find the silver lining.”

Evans has found the silver lining nearly every time he’s stepped foot inside the Octagon, losing just one time in his mixed martial arts career.

Posting a career 16-1-1 record, Evans’ only loss came to the hands of Machida when he was knocked out at UFC 98.

Evans addressed Machida’s chances at UFC 140, saying, “I think he has a really good chance against Jon. He trains with Anderson Silva and Anderson is the guy he gets a lot of his style from. If he understands how Anderson moves, he’ll understand how Jon is.”

While Evans may have to fight again before getting his shot at gold, it’s likely he’ll eventually be squaring off with either Jones or Machida in the near future.

“I want to fight them both and I want to fight them in the same night,” Evans said, laughing. “Tournament style.”

“Honestly, seriousness, it doesn’t matter to me. I’m looking to compete with the best, so whoever wins is the best.”

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