Bodylocking BMF

Charles Oliveira bodied Max Holloway in their rematch at UFC 326. We’re going to examine why his takedowns were so effective and call out one novel submission he missed that more fighters should be incorporating.

Now let’s get into it.

Ahead of Max Holloway’s rematch with Charles Oliveira I wrote a deep dive on how Holloway likes to prevent takedowns.

Holloway keeps his hands active while circling to the center of the cage. Because he circles so regularly, he hardly ever has to fight off the cage. But if an opponent manages to shoot under his punches, he pushes them to take single legs and stops their forward progress with hard whizzers.

Holloway doesn’t get into extended wrestle exchanges because he’s not usually in a position to need to wrestle.

Oliveira saw through that. He didn’t try to pick up Holloway’s legs for anything other than climbing closer to his hips.

Oliveira beat Holloway because he built his entire strategy around body locks.

Oliveira wasted no time starting his game plan. He had Holloway on the floor in about 30 seconds.

These two spent the rest of the round on the floor.

Holloway started the second with vigor. He snapped Oliveira’s head back again with a few punches. But his offense fell apart when he tried to kick with the Brazilian.

This small exchange is an important look at where the meta of MMA grappling has gone.

Oliveira only grabbed legs so he could climb to body locks for his takedowns. This is exactly how Merab does much of his best work and seems to be what MMA wrestling is devolving into; pick up a leg, run your opponent to the fence while climbing to a body lock, and then the takedowns will largely present themselves.

The following takedown from the fourth round was my favorite of the whole fight.

I don’t know what’s going on but that makes three recent ashi garumas. BSD hit one on Dan Hooker and Melquizael Costa launched Dan Ige with one. Cool to see new judo solutions springing from the clinch.

In the fifth round Holloway finally stopped one of Oliveira’s takedowns.

Did you see what was different? Holloway prevented Oliveira from locking his hands and gluing himself to Holloway’s chest. This was what I expected from Holloway going into this fight. Unfortunately it was too little too late.

If there is one takeaway from Oliveira’s fight with Holloway it is that stepping into your opponent’s stance is really important when you get a body lock on the fence. You can easily lift your opponent from the floor if you continuously step in.

If your opponent wants to avoid being lifted they’re probably going to overreact and overstep. When that happens, follow up trips come easily.

Let’s go on to what Oliveira did after he took Holloway off of his feet.

The Hawaiian had no answer for Oliveira’s suffocating pressure once Oliveira got him down.

Taking a cross grip from behind like Oliveira did above is equally simple and overpowered.

In the second round Oliveira threatened a choke I suspect we’ll continue to see more of soon.

Do you recognize this? This is how Usman Nurmagomedov put Alfie Davis to sleep!

Why didn’t Oliveira’s work? He never moved his weight over Holloway’s head and instead tried to push Holloway’s head down with his secondary arm.

You can read more about this choke here.

While Oliveira wasn’t able to finish the choke he did use the threat to advance his position.

By the time the fourth round came Holloway was barely hanging on.

Even when Holloway found his way to top position he couldn’t do anything with it.

I was blown away with how easily Oliveira dominated Holloway here. It wasn’t the most action packed event, but no one has ever dismantled Holloway like this before. I wouldn’t mind seeing Oliveira rematch Arman Tsarukyan if they’re not going to let Tsarukyan fight for the title.

Before Oliveira overwhelmed Holloway we were introduced to the UFC’s newest submission specialist, Albero Montes.

Going into this fight Montes was 10-1 with three submissions in a row. Two anaconda chokes and one d’arce. And before his only loss Montes secured another anaconda choke!

This is one of the things I love about MMA. Even as the sport seems to be devolving into spazzy kickboxing stacked on top of wrestling, we still get these weird men and women who dedicate decades to overly specific niche techniques for fist fighting. Then they pop up out of nowhere to take many unsuspecting people out.

Think Cody Mackenzie and the McKenzietine, Valter Walker’s heel hooks, and Paul Sass’s triangle chokes. I’m happy to see these weird specialists are still coming.

The second ADCC European Trials was a few weeks ago. This weekend I went back to watch which new competitors stood out.

Marlon Tajik qualified for the ADCC World Championships for his first time. He’s a fast rising Swedish star and the first man from Sweden to win an ADCC qualifying tournament. Swedish UFC fighter Ilir Latifi was also invited by ADCC organizers previously.

What stands out most to me about Tajik is his aggressive wrestling, pace, and re-attacks. It’s only his first year at black belt but he already won double gold at the IBJJF No Gi European and World Championships before winning the ADCC European Trials.