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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Why didn’t you simply do a web search for this?
Look at Khabib’s head. Dude is a caveman. There’s a tiny brain encased in 2” of skull. Not everybody has that.
The answer is that they do hurt. Some people are able to manage the pain differently than others.
I can take a lot of pain and not notice it. My dad is the same way. I’ve often got big bruises, cuts, blood dripping down from my arm and I have no idea where it came from. I feel pain fine, I just ignore it.
That only applies to traumatic injury. If my ankle or back is a little sore, I’ll whine and complain endlessly. I’m only good at major injury. Minor stuff makes me a complete wimp.
I MMA/spar as well. That difference between you, me, and other people who do extreme sports/fighting sports is that we’ve been conditioned over a long time to take the pain and retranslate it into something else temporarily. The body deals with it in various ways. Adrenaline for sure plays a big role, but the mental fortitude to withstand pain is also a big plus. You have to remember that 99% of the people on the planet have never really experienced or can withstand the violent pain of being hit in the face, felt bones break, or endured long bouts of physical exertion.
I’ll give you an example from my personal experience. My father was an abuser. He wasn’t a slapper, or a belter, or a switch user. He was a puncher and a torturer. His abuse while horrible taught me how to handle violence and pain and make it into something else. It is so now that my tolerance to pain threshold is in fact very dangerous to myself in that if I have damaged myself I risk doing even more harm because my pain response is delayed by my mental conditioning to it. In the ring that’s fine, out in the real world? Not so fine. It may prevent me from seeking help and just dealing with it and I may live with an injury that may cost me my life. I have to pay really close attention to that and be cognizant of it. Also, when I do experience extreme pain, I laugh. Pain induced in me translates into actual laughter, almost like I’m being tickled.
I get hit in the face, I laugh. I get a really hard/deep tissue massage, I laugh. Oddly if I cut or burn myself, I feel that and it hurts but in a different way and I react by standing still and breathing through my nose and out of my mouth for a few minutes. But this is my and this is how I deal with pain. Other people deal with it differently, but now I’m curious how other people deal with theirs.
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.
The reason you’re watching them on UFC main cards is because in large parts they were born with the durability to make it to that stage. You can train hard, be skilled, have great conditioning but if you’re made of glass some crude shit kicker is going to break you to pieces eventually. Some people are just tougher than others naturally.
You also get used to the pain when you’ve done it for years. I’ve been in martial arts for 15+ years and it doesn’t hurt as much anymore. If I show a technique to a friend, that in my opinion doesn’t even hurt like a sweep or a hold, they get pain instantly. It doesn’t matter if they’re in good shape.
I believe it’s mindset but also your body adapts to pain. Substance-p is released if you get hurt to tell your brain for example “your leg are injured“, which is released by endorphins (the body’s Morphine ). So if you do a lot of martial arts your body is better in releasing endorphins to stop the pain to get you to move forward. And goes for all sports of course. So mindset yes but also your body gets better at not feeling as much pain.
This is also genetics as well as people having great jaws that you can’t knockout.
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