Example of Range and Technique : Jose "Pele" Landis- MMA Training and Jujitsu

An instructive way to analyze the question of range as the basis of strategy and technique selection is to look at a concrete example drawn from contemporary MMA competition. Jose "Pele" Landis, a distinguished MMA fighter from Brazil, is an apt example of a fighter who demonstrates the limitations of classical theories of range and distance in real fighting.

Pele came from a background in Muay Thai kick boxing and Brazilian jiu jitsu. The former is a style that strongly emphasizes knee strikes from many positions and ranges. Pele's natural body type-long legs and flexible hips-made him ideally suited to the use of the knee as a striking weapon. In MMA events around the world, Pele made the knee strike the basis of his offense, often catching unwary opponents from the unlikeliness of angles and positions. In both the free movement phase of combat and the clinch, Pele was without doubt one of the most dangerous and unpredictable fighters in MMA, largely as a result of his uncanny use of the knee strike.

One might ask, then, what was the basis of Pele's successful use of the knee strike? According to classical theories of range and distance, it ought to be due to the fact that Pele was an expert at controlling distance and range, since there is supposed to be a range at which the knee strike is the optimal weapon. The fact is, however, that Pele used the knee strike at all ranges. Range was not the relevant factor is predicting how he would attack. Rather, his training background and body type made him unusually suited to knee strikes, and it was these factors that made him continually select the knee strike as his weapon. It did not matter whether his opponents were short, medium, or long range, or at "kicking range," "punching range," or "grappling range," or at any other distance for that matter. Pele would look to score with some variant of the knee strike.

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