UFC x Boxing 🥊Ryan Garcia Conor Benn👊Din & Gillian

Combat sports thoughts by.Pro fighter D Hamaguchi🥋🥊👊48 kg
US Natl Judo Chmp 45 kg

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Transcript

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Connor Ben is doing absolutely the right thing in his training right now in preparation for Ryan Garcia on September the 12th. I see Connor Ben doing mitts and bag work where he is throwing really hard body shots, and that's exactly what he needs to do to try to get to Ryan Garcia and slow him down. Now the key here is that Connor Ben works in his defensive move off of his hard body shots. So for example, when he's working mitts with his trainer who's got the body shield on, Connor will throw a couple of hard body shots and then weave under the trainer throwing hooks at his head and then come back with more body shots or uppercuts or hard shots to the head. Connor's doing the same thing on the heavy bag. He is using what I call a mushroom bag, which looks kind of like a distorted mushroom, so you can weave under it, and in that little groove where the mushroom stem is, you can throw uppercuts to the mushroom cap, the underside of the mushroom cap, or you can throw more body shots to the stem or the bottom of the stem. But that that mushroom style bag is terrific for getting off realistic body shots and uppercuts off of the weave. And that's really the key to uh wearing down somebody who's very mobile. You have to get to their body. The only way to do that on with somebody like a Ryan Garcia is to cut angles, to weave under their punches, and then come back with a hard body shot or two, and then weave under the counter shots and come upstairs. So props to Connor Ben for preparing well or preparing properly, tactically, technically, and conditioning-wise for Ryan Garcia. Throwing those types of hard bag work shots and mitt and body shield shots is part of the conditioning. You can't show up the night of the fight and think, well, I I want to throw hard shots now, so I'm just going to do it based on willpower. You actually have to force yourself to throw more than 12 rounds of hard shots in order to be able to do that under pressure. Ryan Garcia is trying to go in really hard on Connor Ben, especially on social media and at the press conference. But all of Ryan's arguments against Ben actually work in Ben's favor. For example, Ryan criticized Connor Ben because Connor's he said Connor chose to box in spite of being a, as Ryan put it, in spite of being a silver spoon kid. Well, in my opinion, that actually strengthens Connor's argument that he is truly a fighter. Because yes, he his father was Nigel Ben. Connor did not have to pursue professional boxing. He could have just pursued any career. His father would have backed him in all of his endeavors, but he chose boxing. So, in a sense, that's a huge commitment and recommitment on his part every time Connor decides to step it up to the next level. Because at any given moment, Connor Ben could bail out of boxing, whether it's as an amateur, as a beginning pro, you know, as somebody who's moving up the ranks, as soon as it gets a little bit uncomfortable or a little bit too hard, Connor Ben could say, hey, you know what? I'm out, guys. I'm gonna start a business. My dad's gonna back me. See you later. I don't need this boxing crap. But yet Connor Ben chooses to pursue boxing and take it to the highest level he can. And at this point, really, Ryan Garcia is probably the height of his career so far. In a sense, finding a much bigger Chris Eubank Jr. might have been tougher, but in a different way. Chris Eubank Jr. doesn't not have does not have the speed, does not have the technical left, that technical left body shot, left hook to the head that Ryan has. And now Ryan's developed a decent right hand as well. But really, Ryan, the fact that Connor Ben chose boxing doesn't take away from him as a fighter. It actually reinforces his commitment to the sport. Now, the second criticism Ryan's offered recently on social media is that he calls all of Connor Ben's training methodologies really goofy and performative. Now, this this was put together with a clip of Connor Ben using the slip bag and also using what I call the mushroom bag. So the slip bag, those of you who have tuned into my live sessions know that it's simply it's really just a pendulum. It's a weighted bag. You could take an old speed bag, you could really take any object, put it on a rope, suspend it from a height, and swing it back and forth. And then all you need to do is practice your bobbing, slipping, and weaving under this bag. Now notice when I do it, I make a real point to slip and bob to my left because that's not natural for a right-hander to want to bend your waist in that direction over your lead foot. It's much easier to bob or slip to your right because all you have to do is bend over at the waist. So that's why I invest so much time and energy in doing this the bobbing, slipping, and weaving to the left because it is so unnatural. So now by Connor Ben investing in himself, putting in the rounds on that slip bag, he's doing the same thing. He's working on his defense. He knows that that Ryan Garcia has the speed advantage, and he knows Ryan Garcia has terrific left hooks to the body and head. So he's gotta hone up his defense. It's gotta become body reflex for him. That's what he's doing with all those reps on this on the slip bag. Now, in addition to that, there's also the clip of Connor working what I call the mushroom bag. That's a bag that's actually shaped a little bit like a mushroom. So it has a, it's got the roundness at the top, then it there's an indentation, and then there's another round section to it at the bottom. It's not as heavy as a heavy bag, but what it's terrific for is that you can practice your uppercuts on that. You can practice weaving underneath the big part of the bag and then throwing an uppercut as you step over. Or you can weave to the side and throw a body shot to that lower part of the bag. But again, this is Connor Ben prepping for Ryan Garcia. He's practicing going underneath the punches and throwing to the body or throwing uppercuts to the head. So I think it's truly ironic that Ryan Garcia calls this performative. It's actually not performative. It's actually incredibly helpful technically. It's the right type of drilling that Connor Ben should be doing. On the other hand, the stuff that Ryan Garcia posts is incredibly performative. You can't tell me that doing body shots on these completely unathletic influencers, or even in quotations, sparring with these incredibly unathletic influencers like Neon. I'll give Oblivion a little bit of credit. He's marginally more athletic than Neon, but he's a raw beginner. Ryan spars with him. Who else has he sparred with? I mean, he's worked out with Gorlock. None of these guys are adding any value to Ryan's training. So who's doing the performative stuff? It's Ryan Garcia. All those fast, rapid combos on the mitts for 15 seconds or on the reflex bag for 17 seconds, all of that stuff is performative. The point is, what can you do for a sustained three-minute round and then take only 30 seconds off to recover and then come right back and do four to nine more rounds on that same bag. That's not performative. That's practice. Ryan wants to call Connor Ben performative, but it's really Ryan Garcia who's the performative one in this case. Let me know what you think of the Ryan Garcia-Connor-Ben matchup. It goes down September 12th. Let us know your thoughts in the comments and in the fan mail. I look forward to it. The controversy or controversy between Dean Thomas and Gillian Robertson is just not going to go away. Dean announced during the post-fight desk session that he was retiring from cornering following Gillian Robertson's loss to Mackenzie Dern. Now, Dean has since apologized to McKenzie, uh to sorry, to Gillian. He's apologized publicly. He said he sh he should not have made that statement. But here's where I have an issue, and that's with the so-called combat sports journalists who can't leave well enough alone. Now, I get it. They can say, oh well, I'm just getting the other side of the story. Are you doing your due diligence as a journalist or are you just trying to be an instigator? In my opinion, so-called journalists like that, they're just trying to instigate trouble by running back and forth between two parties. What do you think about what so-and-so said about you? For me, as a fighter and as a an amateur journalist, I say that has zero part in any conversation. At this point, it's just between the trainer and the fighter. We don't need to ask both sides to air out their dirty dirty laundry. We don't need to probe Dean and say, Well, why did you say that? Why do you want to not corner anymore? Is it because of Gillian and then ask Gillian for the gory details about what went on between her and her coach? That that's between the two of them to sort out. So I really wish these high-profile so-called combat sport journalists would just leave it alone. Now, that particular journalist is not alone in that practice. There's also a so-called boxing journalist in the Los Angeles area who at least used to love to run around from gym to gym and get gossip, and then he'd go to one gym and talk gossip, and then he'd run to the next gym and say, Oh, you know what, someone's all said and then he'd try to get the, oh, I'm just getting the other side of the story. It's like, no, you're not. You're being an instigator, you're trying to stir up trouble, and it's embarrassing because really you're a male chicken head. Like, just stop it. It's embarrassing. As an adult, as a so-called journalist, as somebody involved in the fight game. Stop being a little male chicken head. Stop doing that. I can think of other words to label that type of behavior, but they're not PG13, so I won't say them. Now I understand that social media is all about clickbait, and it doesn't really matter if you're adding any actual value as long as you get people to click on your headline. But there's a certain point where if your intention is actually to cause trouble and create problems, then you might actually wind up paying a price down the line. And it won't be just a loss of views or clicks, it'll be another price. But of course, it's politically incorrect to insinuate any anything like that, so I better leave that alone as well. So this is it as far as me making any more posts about Dean Thomas quitting cornering post Jillian Robertson's loss to Mackenzie Dern. Like I said, it's now up to them to sort it out. I don't think it's any of our business.