Shooto: The perfect punch - brutal KO

Makoto Ishikawa vs Kazuya Abe

Makoto Ishikawa is one of the toughest guys in the game, but he gets stretched hard in this one. Ishikawa is a great fighter. His conditioning was on another level and he was never in a bad fight. A lot of the early Shooto fighters were grapplers, who, tended to be a little too passive on the feet but Ishikawa was not afraid to engage and draw you into a dogfight. With that said, if you've seen enough of Ishikawa's fights, you know he tends to eat a lot of punches. No disrespect to Ishikawa, but he is a good study on the importance of fundamentals. For the most part, Ishikawa had enough skill, speed, and power to overwhelm the average brawler, but in this fight you see how a sharp-shooter like Abe can exploit bad habits. To start, Ishikawa has the bad habit of flaring his elbows when squaring up, and he has a tendency to lower his guard while punching, which is especially bad because he has virtually no head movement. Ishikawa likes to move forward and engage but he often comes in stiff and tends to step straight into his opponent without creating the opening. He does not jab his way in or use his feet to open angles. At one point Ishikawa, with his left elbow raised to his shoulde threw a short series of odd slow-motion jabs at Abe that did nothing other than to leave himself open for the right hand while basically . In the beginning of the fight, Ishikawa came in with a very risky and very wide lead left-hook, and Abe of course sees it coming from a mile away. Fastforward a few seconds, to the final exchange, and Ishikawa again throws a wide lead left-hook, and again, Abe sees it coming from a mile away, and this time he counters with a perfectly placed right hand that absolutely flattens Ishikawa. With that said, I absolutely think Ishikawa is a good fighter. In addition to his relentless pressure and durability, his speed and power have proven to be enough to prevent opponents from capitalizing on the holes in his boxing, and although he got stiffened in this fight, he has proven that

Shooto, also known as Shoot Wrestling, combines punching, kicking, throwing, and submissions in a dynamic martial art offering the best of many traditional martial arts. Shooto's founder, Satoru Sayama, incorporated techniques from Muay Thai, Catch-As-Catch-Can wrestling, Russian Sambo, and Japanese Judo to create "a totally combative sport martial art." Shooto was one of the first true mixed martial arts systems, with amateur matches starting in 1986 and professional matches in 1989. Some of today's top names in MMA can trace their roots back to Shooto.

The USA Shooto Association, founded by Yorinaga Nakamura, is based in Marina del Rey, Califorina. Sensei Nakamura was the first Welterweight Shooto Champion, winning four matches in a row in one day, with three by submission and one by decision in June, 1986. He is the highest ranked Shooto instructor worldwide as certified by Satoru Sayama.

(from: https://www.usashooto.com/)

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