Footwork
- Lead-foot battle
- The fight under the fight. Whoever gets his lead foot outside the other man's lead foot owns the angle. Decided in the first ninety seconds of most fights and rarely reversed.
- Pivot reset
- A short pivot off the lead foot to re-establish lead-foot-outside after the opponent has circled. A drilled pivot reset is unconscious. If the fighter is thinking about it, he already lost the exchange.
- Square stance
- Feet parallel, hips facing the opponent. A defensive catastrophe. Happens when a fighter is tired, hurt, or trying to punch from a position his feet don't support.
- Step-and-plant
- Moving the lead foot first, bringing the rear foot to stance. The only footwork most amateurs ever learn. Fine. Limited.
Hands & punches
- Lease-payment jab (house term)
- A touch jab with no commitment behind it, thrown to keep the opponent from settling into his stance. Not a damaging punch. Rent on the real estate in front of the fighter.
- Check hook
- A short lead hook thrown while pivoting off the line. Used against a pressure fighter walking in. Requires weight on the rear foot. If weight is on the lead foot, it's not a check hook, it's a flail.
- Sit-down right hand
- A right hand thrown with the knees bending, the weight dropping into the shot. Travels about an inch. Lands like a kicked-in door.
- Shoeshine
- A flurry of non-damaging punches thrown to steal the round on the eyes of a judge who scores on volume. Occasionally works. Should not.
- Telegraph
- A visible cue that a punch is coming — a shoulder dip, a foot shift, a sharp exhale. Every punch has some telegraph. The good ones have less of it.
Ring & position
- The center
- The ring geometric center. The throne. Whoever is standing on it, all else equal, is winning the round in the eyes of a competent judge.
- Cutting off the ring
- Moving diagonally to shrink the other fighter's available space, rather than chasing in a straight line. The first thing good pressure fighters learn. The last thing bad pressure fighters learn.
- Rope real estate
- The two-foot-wide strip along the ropes where a fighter can't pivot freely. Expensive to stand in. Cheap to put the other guy in.
MMA-specific
- Fence-cage differential
- The difference in how a fighter performs with his back to the fence versus in open space. Some fighters wrestle better on the fence. Some fall apart there. Tape will tell you which. Every time.
- Calf kick
- A low kick landed on the peroneal nerve just below the knee. Cumulative. Fights don't end on the first one. They end on the twenty-first.
- Level change
- Dropping the hips to threaten a takedown, whether or not the takedown is actually coming. A credible level change pins a striker's feet and opens the head.
- Sprawl-and-brawl
- A striker's answer to a grappler — defend the takedown, punish on the way up. Mostly marketing. Rarely executed cleanly outside the top thirty fighters in any weight class.
House terms
- Film room
- What I call the long-form breakdowns that are timestamped against the broadcast feed. If a post is marked Film Room, it means I've watched the tape at quarter speed.
- Corner work
- Paid consulting for a camp — video review, scouting reports, or sitting on a stool between rounds. I do the first two. I stopped doing the third a few years back. The chair is for a coach, not a writer.
- The Bluff City card
- A regional pro show in the upper Midwest that runs most Octobers. I travel for it. The matchmaker actually matches fights, which is rarer than it should be.
- Mailbag
- Reader questions, answered once a month, without the reader's name unless they tell me I can use it. Usually I don't ask.
This list gets longer as I remember things. Last tended in the same week as the most recent breakdown. If I use a word in a post you don't know, it should be here. If it's not, that's my fault — I'll add it.