Do professional MMA fighters ever "lose" against their sparring partners?
Thanks for the A2AThis is a great question!!Sparring isn’t usually about winning or losing, that’s not it’s goal, not really.The purpose of sparring is to prepare, it’s to practice, sometimes specific techniques against specific kinds of opponents. You’re in there to drill techniques and work on both offensive and defensive strategies. There’s no record kept, except maybe gym reputation and this shouldn’t play a big role in higher quality gyms.If a fighter isn’t being pushed, he/she isn’t getting proper work in. I’m not talking about getting into a full smoker during a fight camp, but a capable sparring partner should push the fighter. Make the fighter consider and reconsider their approach and strategy, which is important for the coaches to observe when formulating a fight plan.When it comes to grappling. Oh man…. frequently, Brazilian jiu-jitsu in particular, will be world-class dedicated grapplers. I’ve seen professional fighters get tapped by their coaches and dedicated grappling competitor sparring partners a lot. It should push you, challenge how good your grappling is. Because the conditioning for grappling is so dependent on brutally hard work, being pushed is vital.Similar, if the fighter is a strong grappler, he may not look as good against a top Muay Thai fighter that also trains at the gym. He/she will frequently get pieced up in a sparring match. That’s fine. It’s how you improve.A fighter in a top gym should have members in a gym that will push him or her, in a bunch of different facets. It should be a furnace in which steel is forged. Ideally it’s also a family to celebrate with.This doesn’t mean training to the point of injury, far from it. Sparring smart is important. There are several high level gyms that only have their fighters sparring full contact once a week. The rest of the time is conditioning and drills, technique specific drills that is.As such, most professional fighters don’t care about winning or losing sparring matches, they only care about getting in good work. Train hard, fight easy.
Why is a real boxer able to outclass a fighter like McGregor? Is boxing more highly-skilled compared to MMA, where it is a brawl?
So you take two people. One of them spends 30 years drawing nothing but circles. The other one spends those 30 years drawing circles, squares, triangles, hexagons, octagons, pentagons, stars, ovals, and dodecagons.Then you put those two people together in a room and make them draw the best circle they can.Chances are the guy who has drawn nothing but circles will draw the better circle. He’s had more practice, circles are his thing.But if you ask him to draw all those things the other guy has drawn as well as a circle, he wouldn’t do nearly as well.So the reason McGregor is outclassed in boxing by a boxer, is because the boxer has done nothing but boxing, while McGregor has been doing wrestling and jujitsu and muay thai. He’s used to fighting in a completely different way.Chances are, the world’s best boxer will always be a better boxer than the world’s best MMA fighter when it comes to boxing. Otherwise he wouldn’t be the best boxer, would he?But the idea that MMA is a brawl is wrong. While some MMA fights can be brawls, the same can be said for boxing matches.Neither is really more skill based than the other, the skills needed are just very different.An MMA fighter needs to be able juggle all these different methods of fighting. Punches, kicks, elbows, grappling, submissions, etc. They can’t focus entirely on just one or their opponents can exploit their lack of experience in the other.Meanwhile, a boxer only has to focus on punches. But they also need to potentially fight for much longer, hit harder to make up for thicker gloves, deal with a much tougher defense also due to the bigger gloves, and various other details that MMA fighters don’t deal with.Just because the guy drawing nothing but circles draws better circles than the guy who also draws squares doesn’t mean drawing squares is inferior to drawing circles. They’re two different shapes. Boxing and MMA are two different sports.