Conor McGregor's movement method: the missing link in MMA?
The Irishman fights Nate Diaz on Saturday – and McGregor claims his fine recent form comes from a training regimen that looks like something out of Karate Kid
Conor McGregor has the chance to be the first MMA fighter to hold two belts simultaneously. Photograph: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
Sam Blum
Thursday 3 March 2016 06.00 EST Last modified on Thursday 3 March 2016 11.05 EST
Conor McGregor fits the mold of the flashy fighter. While some of his counterparts attend media events wearing an understated t-shirt and baseball cap, McGregor is most comfortable delivering post-fight invectives in a designer suit. He sits at indoor press conferences behind a veneer of ****iness and thick sunglasses, bolstered by a professional MMA record of 19-2.
Before his featherweight title fight against Jose Aldo last December, McGregor predicted he’d make short work of his opponent, a champion of 10 years, and guaranteed the world an explosive victory by way of first-round knockout.
That knockout came in 13 seconds.
McGregor’s surge to dominance could see him potentially lay claim to both the featherweight and lightweight UFC titles. The Irishman makes his welterweight debut against Nate Diaz this Saturday at UFC 196. The Diaz matchup is a consolation bout, concocted in haste after current lightweight champion Rafael Dos Anjos was injured in training. If McGregor wins Saturday, he’ll eventually be given the chance to hold two belts simultaneously – a first in UFC history.
Much has been said about McGregor’s prowess in the cage, but the UFC featherweight champion claims his competitive edge isn’t just the product of freak talent or gruelling hours spent walloping a heavy bag. Rather, McGregor attributes much of his recent form to movement training – a regimen that champions free-flowing bodily rhythm and a merging of the mental and physical aspects of fighting.
Movement training prizes a combination of mindfulness, timing and precision drills that are seemingly arbitrary – like catching wooden sticks or marauding on all-fours like a panther – and seeks to optimize one’s spacial awareness while in a fight. The training is said to help fighters navigate the rigors of combat with a sixth sense – meant distinctly for hyper-alertness – and if seized on properly, can endow an air of supreme of calm.
McGregor now views his craft in a different light, and he has even denied he is a fighter on more than one occasion: the Irishman is now, in his own words, “a master of movement.”
Although movement training is derided by some MMA purists as a trend that will eventually fizzle, its core tenets – fluidity, cerebral awareness and precision – have been ingrained in the martial artist’s repertoire for centuries.
Movement training is “something that’s always existed,” says Erwan Le Corre, a prominent instructor and movement coach to former UFC welterweight champion Carlos Condit.
“You look at the Shaolin monks, you look at the samurai, the warriors of ancient Greece – Spartans and stuff like that – they weren’t just swinging swords or throwing spears. They were also climbing stuff, they were learning stuff, jumping and doing all these movements geared towards becoming better fighters.”
If Le Corre’s description of ancient warriors jumping and climbing walls seems incongruous with traditional combat training, the regimen appears even funkier in present day. Video of McGregor training before his fight with Aldo appeared online last year. It shows a montage of the fighter performing drills – presumably cobbled together in a random sequence – that might seem culled from the B-reel of a Bruce Lee movie.
Under the direction of his movement coach, Ido Portal, McGregor assumes a squat position, and catches sticks as they slowly fall to the training mat. He dodges Portal’s advances with handstands, crawls on the mat like a sauntering bear, and balances a stick on his feet while lying on his back. These maneuvers may seem disjointed and experimental, but they’re deliberate, and have helped broaden McGregor’s sense of clarity amid the unceasing chaos of a UFC title fight.
“I’ve always been fascinated by movement, and I’ve always looked at people who can move in unusual ways. I don’t just see them as people who have control of their bodies and control of their frame, but control of their mind,” McGregor said in December.
Movement training and mind-control has subsumed much of McGregor’s devastating approach, but Portal notes that the idea isn’t a sensation or revolution, but merely a study in “perspective.”
Portal – an Israeli martial artist and movement specialist with a niche group of devotees around the world – says the teachings offer “governing rules, laws and principles of everything you can do with the human body”. They can be applied to any physical endeavor, whether it’s “fighting, dance, somatics, or sports”.
For McGregor, Portal has been tailoring a specific regime to optimize the fighter’s abilities and home in on his deficiencies. “We’ve been focusing a lot on footwork, on movement in space,” he says.
Portal thinks some fighters lack a certain “quality of movements”. He helps McGregor tackle certain issues that may arise in the crux of combat, providing guidance on when to use “peripheral vision versus focused vision,” and helping him “have more efficient movements and more quality patterns”. Portal says of his training with McGregor: “We’re using gymnastics rings, we’re using a lot of very difficult quadrupedal movements to create that strength and durability.”
It’s unorthodox, but Portal claims this kind of work “allows you to see possibilities that the average fighters don’t get to see. It touches a lot upon mindset, mental control and embodying the moment and embodying the possibilities inside the moment.”
If there’s one payoff from McGregor’s commitment to movement training, it might have come in the form of mental calm. “It’s about entering the contest with your body supple and free,” he said in December, after deftly overpowering Aldo in a matter of seconds.
McGregor said that his work with Portal “re-centers the mind,” and makes him feel “in control and free,” ahead of high-pressure fights.
Because of this, McGregor says that when the bell sounds, “I see these shots, and I see these sequences and I don’t shy away from them.”
Against Diaz, McGregor will be on the hunt for all of the sequences and hidden space that allowed him to devour Aldo, not to mention the glory it afforded him afterwards.
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