Winkeljohn: Diaz’s Body Punches Wear You Down
Few
work the body better than Nick Diaz. | Photo: Sherdog.com
Nick Diaz has some of the best boxing in mixed martial arts today, and a big part of that is his ability to attack the body. In fact, the former Strikeforce welterweight champion’s body punches were No. 3 on Sherdog.com’s Top 10 list of “MMA’s Most Dangerous Weapons.”
Carlos Condit will have to defend against Diaz’s volume punching style in their UFC 143 interim welterweight title bout at the Mandalay Bay Events Center in Las Vegas on Saturday. Condit’s striking coach, Mike Winkeljohn, shared his thoughts with Sherdog.com on why Diaz is so effective when working the body.
“He hits hard to the body. A lot of people, if you’re getting hit lazily to the body, the counterpunches are there. But when they’re the kind of body punches that Nick Diaz throws, they’re very hard to counter,” Winkeljohn said. “He leads those things in there, and it ruins a guy’s fight. If you go back over a lot of [his previous] fights, people think, ‘Well, he wore the guy down because he kept walking forward,’ but a lot of it has to do with the body shots earlier. We want to avoid those places as much as possible because Nick does hit the body very hard.”
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