Whenever I watch ufc or ofc, I notice the fighters are flooded with so much impact to their bodies. How are they so durable tho? I get they do conditioning. I also do body conditioning because I do mma too. But whenever I spar someone it hurts so much after. In the moment, my adrenaline deals with it but afterwards everything hurts so much. Do they also feel this?
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I’ve seen a lot of poor answers from those without experience so I must answer. There are a few parts to this.
You learn to mentally compartmentalize the pain that comes from damage. It’s training and focus. It’s not about ignoring the pain, but focusing on what matters in the fight. The pain is on the sidelines of your mind. When an untrained person gets hit, their instincts completely take over. They get angry, which clouds their judgement and decision making skills. They focus on the pain of what just happened and can’t see past it. This literally shuts down their higher thinking skills. They can’t think with strategy or creativity. They can’t reproduce anything they have learned. In real life and death situations, this can get you killed.
Training teaches you how to hit and be hit while still keeping a clear mind. This comes from years of sparring hard and learning how to deal with it. You need to spar with people that hit hard, they teach you to keep your hands up and move.
There is also a lot of technique to prevent damage when you are hit. There are ways to breath and flex to handle hits to the body without getting the breath knocked out of you, for example. Keeping your chin down so that head strikes are absorbed on the top of your head and not your jaw. Checking leg kicks instead of letting the opponent dig into your perennial nerve.
Fighters actually have stronger bones. This is because all impact sports flex your skeleton at the moment of impact. Your body responds to this flexing of your bones by making your bones thicker with more calcium (if your diet is healthy). Someone who has trained in boxing or kickboxing for years can take hits to the ribs that would break the average person’s ribs.
Every fighter is sore after and deals with the pain of their injuries. When the adrenaline wears off the healing begins. If a fighter has taken a lot of damage in a fight, the next day they feel like they were run over by a truck. Sometimes worse. Ronda Rousey had her jaw wired shut for months for instance. Most professional fighters will have aches and pains for the rest of their life from the damage they have taken. Learning how not to get hit is the only way to not end up talking like you’ve had a stroke by the time you are 60.
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