UFC 🇮🇪Conor McGregor Blew it! And his Knee, too🦵

Pro fighter D Hamaguchi breaks down how and why Conor McGregor injured himself in the opening exchange in Round 1 of his UFC fight vs Max Holloway.

Pro fighter D Hamaguchi🥋🥊👊48 kg
US Natl Judo Chmp 45 kg

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Transcript

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I cannot believe Connor McGregor injured himself in his opening move versus Max Holloway at UFC 329. Now, of course, my prediction that Connor would prevail over Max was completely wrong, but I don't think any of us anticipated that Connor's body would mutiny on himself. Why on earth would anyone choose to open with a leaping, flying, roundhouse kick to the head? That's beyond me. Even if you aren't coming off a five-year layoff, that's an incredibly high risk reward move to attempt. I mean, surely Connor's coaches advised him to get going with the jab first. That's typically what most striking fighters would do, regardless of whether they're throwing hands only in a boxing or bare knuckle, or even if they're a Muay Thai or Dutch kickboxing style specialist, you almost always start out with a jab. If you're gonna choose to lead with a kick, well, why not maybe start out with a low kick to your opponent's thigh or calf? At least make sure you know you have your range finder attuned to judge distance well. Head kicks are always risky for the person throwing it because you are, by definition, putting yourself off balance. The canvas can be slippery, so your support leg can easily slip. And if you miss that head kick, you might wind up throwing yourself way off balance. Or, of course, that the kicking leg can be caught by the opponent and then they can just drive you down into the ground, like Josh Van did to Alex Pantoja. Now, a flying head kick is even more risky because both feet are off the ground and including the support leg, right? And then that's how Connor injured himself. It's when he landed back on his support leg, which was his right leg. I mean, nor I guess the normal injury I would expect to see when somebody lands from a flying kick is for that support leg to crumple and maybe have they would roll their ankle, come over on their ankle. But it's not easy to tell exactly from the camera angle that the UFC gave us. It's you can't really tell exactly where the weight distribution was when Connor landed on his right foot. Now, the key thing is whenever you're throwing some type of flying kick or any kick for that matter, the mechanics of the support leg are critical. You want to be loose enough so that your whole leg can be like a shock absorber, but you also have to be loose enough so that you could pivot on the ball of your foot of your supporting leg if you needed to. That's why you see those of us, even for just those of us who throw hands, we like to skip a lot, jump rope a lot. Tie boxers and kickboxers also spend a fair amount of time doing jump rope work, and that's precisely why. Because you want to get used to being on the balls of your feet and being very light on your feet. All fighters have to practice having feet that are feet-like hands in a sense that we can adjust, we can fine-tune these adjustments between a gliding motion where your foot is just skimming the surface of the canvas to planting your feet and having your weight solid so that you can get good leverage from the ground up for a punch or for a throw. So, of course, the rumor mill is running amok as far as Connor's injury goes. People have decided right away that he tore his ACL. Don't quite see that injury happening from landing on his right foot the way he did, because an ACE, the ACL, the anterior cruchet ligament, cruchet cross. There's actually ligaments that cross behind inside the knee, behind the kneecap, to stabilize everything. And typically that can get torn when imagine you have your leg straight out in front of you, and then you keep your thigh still and you then try to bring your toes backwards. Like your leg does not bend that way, right? It bends from your heel to your rear end, it doesn't bend from your toe towards your hip, the front of your hips. So that's how you tear your ACL. It's from that extension of the leg. When you twist or land awkwardly like that, that's typically what gets torn, is what's called the medial ligaments, the ones that are on the outside. It's never fun to tear a knee ligament, but as you guys may or may not know, tearing your ACL is just unfortunately a more devastating injury than tearing the medial ligament. Both would likely require surgery. It's just that the ACL takes a little, takes longer to recover from. So my I'm not convinced yet that Connor tore his ACL. The UFC just left it vague and they said he had an interior knee injury. So, in addition to ligament and a ligament being torn, Connor could have torn the meniscus, the inside of his kneecap, or had damage done to that. So, why did this injury occur? Well, the only thing, the only conclusion is it occurred when he threw that very first flying roundhouse kick to the head and landed back down on his right foot, which was the uninjured side, right? Connor previously had that titanium shin bone implanted into his left leg. Now, from the footage showing Connor landing on his right foot, again, it's hard to tell what the weight distribution is when he's him when his foot actually makes contact with the ground. But remember, he's got the weight of his body mass coming down on that foot. And that's because Connor's body mass is accelerating down towards the center of the earth, which increases the amount of force with which his foot hits the canvas. Now, on top of that, the pressure generated is the amount of force divided by the area. So the say the number of square inches or centimeters that Connor's foot is in contact with the canvas. And it is not his whole foot. You would not want to land flat footed from a kick like that. So you've got a greater amount of force coming down a very small area. So if Connor's mechanically incorrect, meaning his technique isn't perfect on landing, I can easily see how something could tear. I will 100% leave it to the kickboxing experts to evaluate Connor McGregor's landing technique off of that leaping kick. There's only one more little piece of intrigue that I'd like to add to the uh question of his injury, and that is did Connor's PED use over the last five-year span have anything to do with the injury? Athletes who are involved in sports that rely on very heavy PED use, such as bodybuilding and to some extent strength competitions such as powerlifting, those athletes know full well that the danger of using PEDs is that you can develop the muscular strength faster than you can develop ligament strength. There are two completely different types of tissues, and the ligaments get stronger with more, as we say, time under tension. So now I'm not an expert on the details of PED use either. So I do not know if whatever Connor took could actually weaken his ligaments, but I do know that depending on how much weight training he was doing, it's possible that his ligament strength relative to his musculature could be lowered. Remember, there was a period of time where Connor was posting these pics of himself on social media where he really bulked up. I think he admits fully that he was enhanced. So was there some type of imbalance created between his superdeveloped musculature and his relatively speaking underdeveloped ligaments? And did that play a part in this latest injury of his? Now, finally, in terms of uh Connor's injury from this leaping head kick, the biggest question is why on God's Green Earth would throw such a risky technique as your opening move? The only riskier kick Connor could have chosen would be to throw a flying sp. Maybe Connor figured if he could head kick Max with his titanium shin bone, he could get the fight over with in one move, and that would become, you know, a completely viral clip on social media. Unfortunately for Connor, his landing has become the meme. So the singular question remains: what exactly is Connor's injury? And I say it's going to be up to Connor to let us know what he wants us to know. He left the UFC building ASAP, did not want to get seen by their doctors on site. I'm sure Connor wants to get checked out by his own personal medical staff, and he will let us know the details that he feels best serve his narrative. Regardless, that too short main event did not take away from how great the rest of that card was. So tell me what your favorite moment from UFC 329 was. I look forward to reading your comments and reading your fan mail. Thank you.