If you follow any of the UFC MMA fighters, you've probably heard of Lyoto Machida. For those who do not follow any of the MMA sports, Lyoto is the half Brazilian, half Japanese fighter from Brazil. About a month ago he beat Rashad Evans for the UFC Light-Heavyweight title via knockout in the second round.
Lyoto's background in martial arts consists of Shotokan Karate, Sumo and Brazilian Jujitsu. It helps that his father is a Shotokan master and he started training Lyoto at the age of 3. Lyoto has been training all his life. That's not really unusual for anyone to start training at such a young age. What everyone seems to be in awe about his is unusual fighting style. What may seem to be unusual to some, may be common to others, though...
A lot of people report him as being a cautious and elusive fighter and a precise striker with excellent timing. Well, if you think about it, that's what everyone, to some degree, tries to achieve in the first place. What's so unusual about that? Well, what I believe to be the key to his fighting is not necessarily the above mentioned skills, though they do play a large role as a whole to him being such an excellent fighter. I believe it's his adaption of his Shotokan karate for the ring with some "change body" techniques.
Remember, he's elusive... while his opponent comes in for a strike, Lyoto changes his body position just enough to avoid the strike and at the same time, he counters with his own technique. This "elusive style" is a predominate part of almost all the Okinawan karate. You change your body position to basically "slip" the offensive move in order to be in good position to counter. I don't mean to step directly back or forward to your opponent, but to actually turn just enough to dodge a direct hit. Most sport type karate no longer teach this technique as it seems to have been lost over the years of transitioning. Though it is still taught in Okinawa and in most Okinawan styles of karate.
Shotokan is the child of Shorin Ryu karate. Let's reverse the history real quick.... Founder was Funakoshi Sensei, who was taught by Yasutsune Sensei, who was taught by Matsumura Sensei, the founder of what we know as Shorin Ryu. Granted there are now several styles of Shorin Ryu... but that's for another blog. Shorin Ryu students practice "change body" techniques. Though Shotokan is now a style upon itself, it still has some of it's techniques from it's parent style.
Lyoto obviously knows good change body techniques in order to counter strikes as he does. He's not really elusive, he's just something that the "normal" MMA fighter doesn't know how to deal with. They don't know how to deal with someone who has an actual fighting background. I know, I'll get posts now of how MMA is real... but most of your good MMA fighters have a base style they build upon, be it Jujitsu, karate, judo, etc. Remember Royce Gracie? He came out and no one could beat him. He put Brazilian Jujitsu in the mouths of people who had never even known that Brazilians even practiced Jujitsu. Fighters didn't know how to defend against him. Lyoto is the new Royce Gracie.
Lyoto brought back that karate is a legitimate fighting art. I never had a doubt that it was, but the way the media will have it, you would of thought it would be a waste of time to even step foot in a dojo. Is Lyoto doing something different than is so unorthodox? No, he's doing what myself and thousands of others before me have trained to do, when you see the attack, get out of the way and counter it. How hard is that? Obviously it's pretty hard as he's currently undefeated. Someone will eventually come by and beat him, but time will only tell who that will be.
The media has already started dubbing his style has Machida Karate. It's fitting for us to name something that we're not use to seeing after the person we have seen perform it. Though, I think we know it better as Shotokan karate. Not so unorthodox now is it?
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