How to Defend a Takedown in MMA

Posture and Stance
The best way to defend a takedown in MMA starts with having a great posture and base in your stance. The objective of a takedown artist is to gain leverage and angle over his opponent by offsetting his balance and posture in order to finish the takedown. The best stance is to be squared to your opponent. This means having your shoulders and hips parallel to each other facing your opponent. Your level should be lowered. This is done by bending your knees. How low you should drop your level will be relative to the height/ level of your opponent. In general, your head should never be higher than your opponents. Your level needs to be approximately 2 - 5 inches below your opponents level. Anything more will make you vulnerable to getting clinched and knee-ed or snapped down. Lowering your stance too much will also make you more susceptible to leg kicks.

This is why muay thai fighters stand taller. Standing taller lightens the weight on your legs and allows for you to initiate kicks and block leg kicks faster. The lower your stance is, the wider your feet should be apart from each other from the front to back direction. Your feet should also always be about shoulder width apart as well. You should never be flat footed and always on the balls of your feet for maximum agility in all directions to evade takedowns. Being on your toes also helps prevent your opponent from driving you back. Staying on your toes will help your dig your feet into the ground and counter push your opponents forward drive in clinching and pumbling situations.

Your Arms is the First Line of Defense
Besides our stance and posture, another important factor in helping us defend a takedown is placement and use of our arms. Our arms are the first line of defense against a takedown. Whether they try to take us down with a shot or by clinching first. Getting past our elbows means they are close to our hips. Once our hips are accessible, our balance can be compensated which will lead to giving up the takedown. So we need to keep our elbows in close to our body. If a wrestler was simply just worrying about a takedown and not attempting any sort of offense himself, he would have his elbows in against his ribs with his arms low and his hands by his thighs.

But unfortunately, as a striker, we are simply not just defending a takedown and we have to worry about strikes both in the offensive and defensive aspects. So our arm position must be modified for ability to strike and block strikes. So instead of having our hands low, we need to have them by our temple. Our elbows will still be tucked in. this will help if an initiation of pumbling and clinching occurs. This will also help protect our body from body kicks, and body shots. Offensively this will allow our punches to be sharper and faster as well.

A common mistake most MMA practitioners make when defending a shot is to drop the hands from protecting their head down by their thighs to defend the takedown. This mistake creates a huge opening for the opponent to fake a shot and strike to the head that is unguarded and most likely looking down in attempts to defend the fake shot. Instead of the striker dropping his hands, he should drop his level and use his forearms. The focus should not be to get the underhook to raise the opponent's level, but rather to use your forearms to stop the grappler's momentum. Your body should be leaned forward as your head follows your arms as they push against your opponent which will do three things. It will keep your hips away from your opponent, second it will help drive your momentum forward which will counter your opponents forward momentum and third, it will keep your head from separating from your arms to keep your head guard in the case of a strike attempt.

Where Your Eyes Should Be Focused
Another important factor in stopping a takedown is where the focus of your eyes are. A common mistake most MMA fighters make is where they focus their eyes during the fight. Many fighters tend to look at the opponents face instead of focusing on the upper part of the chest where your clavicle meets. This is a mistake for a few reasons. First it allows for a clever opponent to fake with his eyes. A common muay thai trick is to look down at an opponent's legs to make them think they are going to throw a low kick and at the last second go high for a head kick. Second if your looking at your opponents face and especially if your level is slightly lower than your opponent, that would mean that your head is up.

This is the worst position your head can be when receiving a blow to the head. Keeping your chin down enables your head to be stabilized by your neck and allows you to be able to absorb more blows without being knocked unconscious. The third reason someone should not be focusing on the head of an opponent is because one can not see their hips. Without seeing an opponents hips, it is very difficult to see a kick or knee strike quick enough to block, counter, or evade it. The fourth reason one should not being focusing on an opponents head is to be able to detect quicker when the grappler drops his level to shoot for a takedown.

For all these reasons, the focus should be where the opponent's clavicle meets and with your peripherals, you should be able to see the opponent's shoulders and hips.

What A Grappler is Looking For
Just as important as what one should do to prevent a takedown in MMA, there are many things a striker should not do to prevent a takedown as well. A striker should be cautious when attempting to strike and not get overly ambitious when striking. A grappler will wait sometimes for the striker to reach and over step when attempting to strike to easily shoot under for the takedown. A grappler will also wait for a striker to kick also to catch his leg for a takedown as well. A striker should always setup his kicks and use them wisely as the grappler is always waiting for an opening to get a takedown. Kicking to the body is the easiest for a grappler to catch. Majority of kicks should be very low to the leg or high above the elbows.

Back pedaling is also not a good idea when worrying about defending a possible takedown attempt and should not be done for a few reasons. First it forces you to be light on your feet. When defending a takedown, it is best to be heavy and sinking your weight down. Secondly, backing up goes in the same direction as the grappler's drive/shot and just makes his momentum that much stronger. Third when back pedaling, it forces your body posture to be tall which makes your hips much more readily accessible to the grappler as well as allows him to much more easily knock you off balance. The last reason why someone should not backup while defending a takedown is because it puts your back closer to the cage. This allows the grappler to utilize the cage wall in aiding in his takedown attempts. It also restricts your room to get your hips back or sprawl when defending the takedown.