The demonstration above of the use of Fairtex Muay Thai Training Pads is a poor one. This striker, who I’m sure has loads of experience and talent, is failing to train and practice they way he fights… or is he? Take a look at the video a 2nd time and watch how his hands drop before he throws each punch, pay attention to how he dips his shoulders AND drops his hands before throwing each kick.

He does a good job with stiking the pad clean. He does a great job of moving with his dummy. He fails in a lot of technical areas that are essential to fighting. He wouldn’t be able to continue fighting if he dropped his hands after each strike.

People. Friends. Fighters. Practice and Train the way you intend to fight. If you’re not going to train correctly because you’re tired you should stop and study film, then return to striking pads or sparring when you can train properly. Not only does this prevent from developing bad habits, it will keep you from over training. Pushing yourself too hard during sparring sessions builds bad habits and creates a greater opportunity for injury.

Fairtex training pads are by far our most popular muay thai training pads. They are an incredible training tool and you’d be hard pressed to find a gym or training facility that doesn’t have them on hand. Check out the Fairtex Training Pads from fightersfocus.com for the latest designs straight from Fairtex in Thailand.

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Update: I don’t care if you like the fighter, or how good he is in competition. He isn’t training properly and is at a lazy point in his career. Much love though, loyal fans are good fans.

Carlos Condit and Dan Hardy was sure to be fireworks. I don’t think a person close to the sport thought that this fight would be a wrasslin snooze fest. Condit was looking to make a name at the UFC 170 weight and did with a big KO of Dan Hardy. The video clip shows the two fighters feeling each other out for a few minutes before they trade left hooks and one fighter was left out cold on the canvas.

In this fight I like Palhares by Submission. I think Nate is big and strong, but his wrestling is going to get him in trouble and I’m going with a sub by guillotine in the 1st or 2nd round.

Here is what the rest of the card looks like:

Efrain Escudero vs Charles Oliveira

Jim Miller vs Gleison Tibau

Ross Pearson vs Cole Miller

Yves Edwards vs John Gunderson

Hared Hamman vs Kyle Kingsbury

Rich Attonito vs Rafael Natal

Anthony Waldburger vs David Mitchell

Brian Foster vs Forrest Petz

First things first, planning a major sporting event in Utah on a Sunday is a poor planning choice. It doesn’t take a lot of market research to come to that conclusion. It’s not that the whole state is full of ‘Mormons’, but a good portion is.

To the UFC – come back to Utah, but on a Wednesday night. We’d love to host a Ultimate Fight Night.

Now, I’ve been thinking about the UFC’s decision to try a Sunday card and to make their first attempt at a Sunday card in Utah. Was it a boastful, we’re so effin’ popular we can even get a bunch of mormon’s in Utah to come out on a Sunday? Or was it an event setup to fail, if the Sunday in Utah card ‘tanks’, we can blame it on the location not the organization.

Either way, it was a bright idea and I’m glad they cut and ran when they did. San Diego will be a great place for this card and I hope it does well. Local Utah fighter Demarques Johnson fights Matt Riddle and is going to tear him to pieces. Go D!!!

Fistic Medicine: The Benefit & Cost of Steroids
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
by Matt Pitt (mpitt@sherdog.com)

As great a baseball player as Barry Bonds was, my children and yours will know him as the greatest anabolic steroids salesman his sport has ever known.

Will the same be said of Royce Gracie in MMA? Will we remember the scrappy 170-pound David who toppled the 6-foot-5 220-pound Gerard Gordeau in UFC 1 to definitively prove technique trumps muscle, or will we remember the steroid cheat who reacted to the Matt Hughes loss by illicitly bulking up for his next fight?

The lesson from Gracie’s steroid use for MMA fans and athletes was unmissable: Technique may trump muscle, but technique plus steroids trumps everything.

As dismaying as the dawn of the steroid era in MMA may have been to purists, it was old news for mainstream sport. A decade before Gracie first belted up a gi, an unremarkable German party apparatchik named Manfred Ewald began the work that would earn him the title “Father of the Steroid Century.”

For physicians Ewald’s work has borne little fruit: The use of anabolic hormones like HGH and steroids in the treatment of burns, aging and neuromuscular disease is quite limited. For elite athletes and their trainers, however, Ewald’s research on anabolic steroids and performance is the Magna Carta of doping. Every “enhanced” MMA fighter — Gracie, Leben, Barnett, Sherk, Shamrock and how many undiscovered others? — are the pharmaceutical children of Ewald’s black genius.

Ewald performed his groundbreaking anabolic steroid research in East Germany. All of East Germany. In 1961 Ewald — a party functionary with no scientific background and nothing on his resume other than service in the Hitler Youth and Nazi party — assumed the post of Minister of Sport in East Germany, the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Upon assuming leadership he promptly initiated a cooperative effort among biochemists, pharmaceutical companies and the state-run athletic development program to engineer superhuman athletes.

What he achieved was impressive: The GDR won nine gold medals in the 1968 Olympics, 20 in 1972 and 40 in 1976! This for a nation with a small, genetically homogenous population and a crippled economy. Starting in 1974, buoyed by the success of doping and the international acclaim East German athletes garnered, Ewald initiated near universal anabolic hormone doping throughout the entire GDR athletic program. Often the doping was conducted without the athletes’ knowledge or consent. For more than a decade, athletes as young as 11 years old, males and particularly females, were started on pharmaceutical “assistance” programs as carefully engineered and scrupulously monitored as a modern Kentucky Derby winner’s diet and training.

As the Ministry’s work was done with the full cooperation and support of the state, there was no need for internal secrecy. Detailed records were kept on thousands of athletes over their entire professional lives. When the Berlin Wall fell, Ewald lost his job and that startling data became available to the world.

It showed two dramatic findings: first, steroids work. Unquestionably and dramatically. Aside from the astronomic international medal count of a tiny nation with little genetic diversity and a third world economy, the data shows quantifiable individual performance improvements. With steroids, 100-meter sprint times were cut almost three quarters of a second — the difference between a world champion and a runner whose career ends in college. Athletes on steroids put the shot an additional two to five meters (World Record: 23.12m), hurled the javelin eight to 15 meters farther (WR:72.2m) and added as much as 20 meters to their discus throws (WR:74.1m).

Those data are unambiguous: In “strength” sports, anabolic hormones are indispensable. To the degree combat sports are strength dependent — and the beating Matt Hughes subjected Royce Gracie to at UFC 60 makes that argument forcefully — the advantages of using steroids are abundantly clear. If that reality is clear to the doctors and scientists who study performance, it is all the more clear to the fighters whose lives, careers and livelihoods depend on gaining that performance advantage.

The second clear lesson from the 30-year GDR anabolic hormone program is that the human costs of steroid use are gruesome. A lawsuit has been leveled against the makers of the most commonly used steroid, Torinabol, by several GDR athletes suffering from its long-term effects. Many of these athletes are so physically crippled after their athletic careers end that they are incapable of other work. Women subjects, those athletes whose performance benefited most from the masculinizing anabolic steroids, suffered peculiarly: severe acne, hirsutism, infertility. Among all doped athletes, rates of premature heart disease, liver failure, cancer are increased.

These are not isolated cases of over-amped muscle junkies taking bizarre steroid doses and compounding their danger with alcohol and drug abuse — these are physician-controlled doses in carefully managed athletes. The conceit among fighters that steroids can be used without consequences to speed the healing of an injury or add lean mass is just that: a fanciful notion unenlightened by the evidence of 40 years.

Even for someone not familiar with the GDR’s anabolic hormone data, for someone coming up in smokers and no-name gyms, the benefits of steroids are clear. Anyone can look at the weekend’s baseball box scores, or the latest Hall of Famer’s heartfelt confessional, and see the evidence.

Tragically the long-term costs of anabolic hormone use are not nearly as evident or as publicized. Perhaps even if they were, it would not matter: Athletes who engage in combat sports have already reconciled themselves to a hard life of sacrifice and risk. The additional, deferred risks of steroids are all too easy to ignore in light of the tremendous “next fight” advantages they offer.

Matt Pitt is a physician with degrees in biophysics and medicine. He is board-certified in emergency medicine and has post-graduate training in head injuries and multi-system trauma. To ask a question that could be answered in a future article, e-mail him at mpitt@sherdog.com.

Problem #1 – Strikeforce ‘WWE-style brawl’ on CBS

• Great fight card turned boring turned circus. Great fight cards turning boring isn’t anything new to professional sports. NBA, MLB, NFL, tennis and golf all experience let downs in super duper match-ups.
• The circus that erupted post Jake Shields mauling of Dan Henderson set the sport back a bit. While bad publicity is still a good thing, it does mean that our sport is still full of delinquents who haven’t’ matured.

Problem #2 – Cries of foul play due to boring title fights.

• First GSP carries a weaker, ill prepared Dan Hardy for five rounds. GSP makes mistakes because he’s human. But GSP also has the ability to close anyone of the half assed submission attempts he made that night. He carried Dan Hardy for five rounds to show his prowess.
• Second, BJ Penn attempts to carry Frankie Edgar and ends up losing a decision as a result. BJ coulda-shoulda finished that fight in the first round. His attempts to carry Edgar, ala GSP-style, cost him a boxing match decision.
• Last but definitely not least, Anderson Silva goofs off like a twelve year old picking on his brother in a disgraceful fight with Damian Mia. IF YOU’RE THAT MUCH BETTER THAN YOUR COMPETITION GET RID OF HIS ASS EARLY IN THE FIRST ROUND.

Has MMA grown so fast that it’s peaking well before it’s time or is it one of those awkward times where the line-ups need to change and some new blood needs to be infused in?

Show me more Demarques Johnson, show me more Mike Swick and Josh Burkman.

Antonio Nogueira “Nog” vs Cain Velasquez
Wanderlei Silva vs Michael Bisping
Joe Stevenson vs George Sotiropoulos
Keith Jardine (yeah the dude from ‘Gamer’) vs Ryan Bader
Mirko Cro Cop Filopovich vs Ben Rothwell
Elvis Sinosic vs Chris Haseman
Stephan Bonnar vs Krzysztof Soszynski
Chris lytle vs Brian Foster
CB Dollaway vs Goran Reljic
James Te Huna vs Igor Pokrajac

** As I said, a couple of interesting match ups but nothing I’m going to lose it over **

Enjoy.

I’m not debating which I’d rather attend, I’m simply implying that two of the three main bouts on this card are more of an old reunion than an interesting MMA matchup. These fights could set the UFC back a bit in terms of popularity and excitment. I’ll bet this UFC 109 ticket doesn’t sell many PPV’s. Anyone on here buying it?

Randy Couture vs Marc Coleman – this fight never should have been signed, let alone made the headliner for the largest MMA show in the world. There are far more intriguing matchups that are taking a back seat to this nostalgic card. In this fight I see Randy destroying Marc. Randy’s wrestling has always been better, Randy’s dirty boxing and clinch work have always been better and his submission game is head and shoulders better than Marcs ever was. Randy wins this fight way before Coleman has a chance to embarrass middle aged men everywhere.

Matt Scera vs Frank Trigg – this fight is a third shot for both of these fighters in the most competitive weight class in the UFC! Why is the UFC bringing back these two fighters who have proved their good, just not good enough to dominate the division? Frank Trigg has always been good, but never entertaining and never good enough to win a big fight. Matt Scera has the bjj and the hands to be good, he’s just a little guy in the wrong weight class. Matt Scera will win this fight on the ground choking Trigg till he tapps out.

Nate Marquardt and Cael Sonnen are the reason I’ll be viewing this show from home. Both of these fighters are legitimate contenders. Anderson Silva is ready to be done and I see one of these two taking over for him. In this fight I see Marquardt edging out a decision in what I hope is the most exciting back and forth fight ever.

Thoughts?