If you don’t know what happened at UFC 168 then shame on you. Here’s a recap for those few who didn’t get the news yet. Anderson Silva broke his leg when Chris Weidman checked his leg kick.
A lot of the attention has been on Silva and his recovery, but it seems now we get a chance to hear from Weidman’s trainer Ray Longo about the fight and specifically the technique used to end the fight. It appears that the technique used by Weidman to check the kick has been named ‘The Destruction’.
In a recent interview with MMA Fighting, Longo discusses where the technique came from and how it works.
“The origin, I’ll give you for how it came to be for me. I was a Jeet Kune Do (JKD) practitioner under, technically, the lineage of Dan Inosanto, who was under Bruce Lee. And I think Bruce, or at least Dan, had incorporated a lot of Filipino martial arts.”
“They have a concept in the Filipino martial arts that comes from knife fighting, which is called ‘defanging the snake’. If you can defang the snake, obviously the snake can’t hurt you. There’s a thing called ‘destructions’ where – and it’s been around forever, I didn’t make it up. I’m just giving it to you the way I learned it. I think Paul Vunak at the time was the guy that was really pitching it. This was back in the 80s. From the waist up, anything that comes in your elbow takes care of and anything from the waist down your knee takes care of.”
“When your knee is in a flex position, it can withstand a lot of pain. So, more the concept is if a guy is punching at you, you can parry the punch or slip the punch. That’s a defensive maneuver. With the term ‘destructions’, it kind of takes a defensive posture and makes it an offensive posture. When a guy is coming to punch, you now look at that as a target, not as a ‘get out of the way’.”
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“When you break a guy’s leg any time, that’s not really the objective. It’s just really to make them think twice about kicking you. That’s really it. It’s not really like you can look at it as a mystery. Even at the basic level of Thai boxing, you want to get the highest part of your shin on the lowest part of the guy’s shin that’s kicking you.”
“The downside with doing the destruction is you need the attribute of really good accuracy and awareness because instead of blocking with your whole shin, you now have to take your knee tap and point it on the guy’s shin. That’s not easy to do.”