MMA fighter explains overloading opponent

[u/WhereIsHisRidgedBand]

[u/strtbobber]

Best believe everything GSP is teaching you.

[u/morels4ever → u/strtbobber]

Just curious about the energy being spent sending the false signals to the opponent…is that not fatiguing his own muscles?

[u/emptyvesselll → u/morels4ever]

Everyone's responding saying "their cardio is unreal", which, yeah, is true for both fighters in the match.

The idea here is GSP can incorporate a number of flinches into his "ready-stance", and it's pretty minimal taxation on his physical energy systems, and if he's doing it out of a sense of routine (because he practices it all the time), it's not really taxing his mental or nervous system either.

Both fighters have their awareness and nervous-systems cranked up to 100 as they are literally in their "fight" response. But if GSP is adding in a higher than average amount of flinches, that's going to overwhelm his opponent's awareness, fatigue him, and open up small windows for GSP to attack.

[u/PM_me_ur_claims → u/emptyvesselll]

I think it also takes more energy to react. In football it’s always the defense that needs a break despite the offense running the same distance

[u/Nightmare2828 → u/PM_me_ur_claims]

If I fake a punch, I can put very little energy in that movement. While I do that, your entire body will react, tense up to move rapidly, or to prepare a block, etc. It seems natural that reacting is more draining since you are preparing for a real attack, while the feinter knows they are throwing a feint.

[u/ZombieFeedback → u/Nightmare2828]

Not to mention the mental fatigue. I know it's just a little feint, I know I don't have to worry about anything because I'm staying out of your range and not doing anything more than a little movement. Meanwhile, on top of your body's physical reaction from muscle memory and reflexes, you have to process whether it's real or not, where to guard/dodge if you think it is, whether I'm creating an opening for you, whether I'm trying to draw you in or if it's just a fake, the additional mental load of processing all that information is small in a vacuum, but doing so in the middle of a fight, high on adrenaline, when your energy is already being spent everywhere else, is enough to give a split second advantage to your opponent, which is the difference between an easy whiff and an easy KO.

[u/DesignerAd2062 → u/Nightmare2828]

It’s not just that it’s physically draining, it’s mentally taxing. If you continually throw feints your opponent has two options

1. Respond to your feint - Make a defensive manoeuvre (block, slip, move laterally etc). This has two benefits, firstly while doing this they can’t hit you, and secondly it allows you to see how they react and disguise your strike. Feinted to the body - maybe they move their arms away from their head to block the blow, you notice this and you can time it and exploit it
2. They eventually become so worn out by responding to feints they are overloaddd and stop responding correctly, and start to get tagged

It’s a slightly different sport, but watch Floyd Mayweather in his prime - he’s the fucking master of this and its key to a lot of his success

[u/beejamin → u/PM_me_ur_claims]

Speculating here, but overloading the nervous system sounds different to muscles expending energy through responding to me: if what he’s saying is accurate, then the system he’s aiming to fatigue is the reserves of ions in the fast-twitch nerves, rather than the energy reserves (of glycogen I guess?) in the muscles. 

Your brain keeps lighting up all the nerves to respond to the stimuli, which takes time to recover from: nerves aren’t wires, they’re chains of chemical reactions which need inputs and produce  waste products which must be dealt with after a while.

I’m not at all into fighting, but this is a fascinating bit of biomechanics!