Dominick Cruz explains his Fighting Style (from Joe Rogan Experience #921)

Train by day, Joe Rogan podcasts by night, all day. Now you developed a really unusual fighting style. I mean I think I've said about you that one of the more unusual things about your style is that I could watch you like as a silhouette. Someone could show me a silhouette of you moving around. I go, oh that's Dominic Cruz. There's very few people that you would say that about like where you would instantaneously recognize their movements. Like your movements are very unusual, very difficult to pattern and they're not really indicative of like a style. Like you know there's the Muay Thai style, people have that light front leg, there's the karate style, like you know Wonderboy Thompson. There's a bunch of styles where you go, oh I see what this guy's doing. Your style is very uniquely yours. What sort of caused that? Where'd that come from? It's a mixture of things as, I mean I've been fighting since as long as the Diaz brothers. I started when I was 19 years old back in 2005 and I've been doing it since then. So that's part of it is that just years and years of fighting and facing different people and seeing what the issues were. But more than that it was built around the fact that I knew whether I knew I was ahead or not, my mind set said I have to fight do something different because this is a new sport with new rules and new different equipment than has ever been seen in the history of this world. So that means there's four ounce gloves, we're using kicks, knees, elbows and hands, everything right? All eight limbs. So I said I need to make sure that I'm not taking damage. As long as I'm not taking damage I should win. I got to be hard to hit and my defense needs to be flawless with these size gloves. It's not gonna be the same as boxing. I can't just sit here and cover like this because my gloves are a quarter the size things peek in and I learned that real quick. And so I said alright so I need to move non-stop. I can't sit still like I do in boxing or kickboxing because you're gonna get taken down as well. So that's that's where my mind started changing is with the takedown. That's where I knew I really had to do something different. In no striking sport on earth is there a takedown involved. So that means that I need to attack on a different plane and that means I need to not be down the center line. As long as I fight not down the center line it takes away as long as I don't fight on the center line all the time it takes away almost all weapons from all styles. Boxing is probably the one style that flows most off the center line. But we're talking about Muay Thai or we're talking about wrestling or we're talking about judo or we're talking about almost every other martial art they attack down a straight line. And so I knew I could take away most of their weapons just by changing the plane that I fought on. If I fought on a different plane than them then they would not have answers for the plane that I'm fighting on because everything they do is on that line. So instead of fighting them in their style I fought the lines that they're fighting on and then that kind of changed things mixed with the defense. Well I've always enjoyed watching you fight and I've always enjoyed explaining how you fight to people that have never seen martial arts or don't understand it because for people on the outside maybe someone who's not a fan or never did any martial arts training they look at it like just violence you know they see guys just beating the shit out of each other. And what I the way I try to describe it to a friend once I said think about it this way it's it's a lot like a conversation and the more words you have at your disposal the more verbal memory you have the more used to stringing together sentences you are the more fluently the conversation is gonna come out of your mouth the more it's gonna flow. And when you're watching and then I'll show someone like you when you're trying to have you know let's call it a conversation trying to have a conversation with dominant crews inside the Octagon you don't know where the fuck he's going like you you you're setting up so many weird angles and so much weird movements so many false entries and there's so much going on that you're in a lot of ways you're overloading a person's reactions. Yeah. You're overloading their mind. Well that is partially what I'm trying to do yes I agree now you're starting to see that over time there's an answer for every style there's an answer for everything yeah and that's the fun of this thing is that it's not always stagnant it's not always the same and there there is an answer to everything that's and then you got to adjust right so that's what I'm built on is adjustments my whole game is built on adjustments so it can always change and always look different because every round I come out with a different adjustment off of what you did to me and now you're fighting a different guy every round you just don't know it but that comes from fakes and seeing what they want on you and that comes from their game plan it's a whole mixture reads in there and that's a that's something that you either have you don't have you know somebody like Anderson Silva can make reads extremely quickly right and that's what's made him so successful Demetrius Johnson reads extremely quickly makes him successful the best in the world adjust and the best for me the best in the world aren't the ones who just win it's the ones who win and stay on top for a long period of time right because now you you don't just have a style to win a fight you have a style to stay winning which means that your style hits so many different avenues that you can compete with all these different styles no matter what they match you up against until now my style I built it so that no matter which style you try to throw at me it was going to give it a problem and that was the basis that I wanted to create when I fought every single time I fought somebody it was it doesn't matter what your gift is the planes that I'm going to fight you on make it impossible for your gifts to be your gifts anymore now I've seen you practice and I've seen your footwork drills and I've seen you know a lot of your steps and the different various entries you have techniques are these moves that you've learned from somewhere have you acquired them from other martial arts have you sort of adjusted them and adapted them or did you figure them out your own it's been a mixture working with Eric Delferro was a huge step because I had a lot of natural one of the best coaches in the sport and one of the most underappreciated guys because it doesn't blow his own horn that's why I love him I like the coaches that don't need the pats on the back for themselves right about the athlete Eric is about every athlete he's ever coached he's not about himself he's a great corner man too when he starts just talking in the corner he's been in this sport 20 plus years and the bigger thing that Eric doesn't get credit for is his understanding of the psychology that goes into preparing somebody to win a fight you can have all the tools around that person they could be the best human being on earth but if their mind is not pieced together the psychological pieces are not there you're not going to be able to trigger them and get them in the fight when you need to Jeremy Stevens a great example of somebody like that sometimes you got to like get crazy with that doing the corner and like even like slap him around a little bit maybe and he's just goes and he'll kill somebody it's like there's a psychological thing about certain athletes that you have to be able to touch on the same with Greg Jackson is another guy who can do that and that's what makes a good coach on that night a good corner man on that night not just what you did for eight weeks holding pads and you know padding the guy in the back and wiping the sweat off their shoulders and you know doing interviews and looking famous with them like what are you doing to make sure this person wins on that night not what are you doing to make sure you look good in this person's corner while he wins right and that's something that I've run into a lot with people is people a lot want to associate themselves with you when you're winning and not actually be there for you but be there so they look good in your corner while you win and those are the people you got to cut out those are the yes men and those are those are the ones you got to be careful with Eric is the opposite of that and he's somebody that's why I stick with them he's somebody I can trust he understands my psychology understands my the emotional roller coaster of outside at life lot is very effective that will always be my argument with every conventional coach and this is why I break what makes them relevant well it's not necessarily you break what makes them relevant you figure out a way to make your style work in a way that confounds the experts well what I mean by that is when they talk to me so like maybe not to 20 million other people they are the shit right but when you try to tell me that and you I've had I can't tell you how many countless world champion kickboxing coaches go only you can do that you're awesome keep doing it and I and I couldn't disagree more well anybody can do it if they mimic your movements and your movements aren't like Cirque du Soleil movements that you have to be like physically gifted in order to pull off or I'm not gonna say towards them for a hundred years yeah I'm not gonna sit here and break it down but there are obviously movements that I'm doing and they can be read it took 30 rounds to figure out with the same camp for 10 years but they figured it out right you know I think and they can imitate you ever see Justin Buckholtz do yeah there's you pretty well know what they're doing but with how else has fought somebody as much as they fought me I mean right about it Benavidez twice favor twice TJ Dilshaw Charlie Valencia has fought with them Scott Jorgensen trained with them before I fought him he McCall train with them for a tiny bit of time before I fought him essentially every single person I've ever fought for the past 10 years has at some point been friends with favor trained with that camp because they were the little guy camp well I said why join him if you can beat him and I just did it my own way and let them all hate me and train together and it was okay with me you know I needed to do things my way in order to build something different in a game that hadn't really caught up to the things that I was thinking about yet in my opinion it didn't make me the only one that was right in these things is just how I used the things that I used they had theirs too but my whole mindset was like I said if I fight like them I'm gonna be like them and they're gonna adjust to me like they adjust everybody else now going back to the early days when you sort of learned the style we kind of got off this but I really wanted to touch back on it when you said that your style no one had your style before no one could tell you that it you know was the wrong way to do it because you're being very effective with it but did you take it from anywhere did you look at boxing footage did you look at kickboxing or Muay Thai like where did you get all your footwork from well there's a mixture things one it all started with me fighting at 155 pounds weighing 142 pounds that's where this whole mindset started so it was there already twice as big as you and on fight day they're gonna be three times as big as you so you better not get touched you better not get grabbed and you better not get hit at all don't let them touch you because they're too big they take you down your energy is gonna be zapped by the time you do get up if you get up and if they hit you they're big and strong and they're probably gonna put you out so you have to use all that strength all that size against them and make it their weakness instead of their strength and that's how I started because I was so little that I said all right I need to focus on defense I'll obviously I gotta hurt him too but after they do what they're trying to do with their big strength and be stronger and be more powerful and be more athletic they're gonna wear themselves out and then I do now we're even around middle around to all those things that they had early were even now and now I can just outthink them and pick them apart and beat them and I always had that mentality rather than fight fire with fire it just didn't make sense to me when my body was on the line I wanted the path of least resistance and so it started with that until I got to about five and oh fought in total combat I took that fight on two days notice went out there with no coaches no cornermen and went by myself and they just picked cornermen random cornermen and put them in out there that night was why Eric liked me because he saw you know I took it short notice wanted it was a tough fight but I had no cornermen I came solo on a flight just went and so he's like okay I can work with this you know this guy wants to do it so he picked me up but then that's really when the progression started meeting Eric like and that's because I'd never had I mean I had pallets held for me here and there in Tucson but only if guys were getting 65 bucks to do it or something for it because there's not a lot of money in fight game so they're all as hungry as I am the trainers and I wasn't really like some star pupil that everybody wanted to get on board and make a world champion at this point I was just a guy right so I wasn't getting pad work I wasn't getting one-on-one training I lined up my own coaching I'd have guys that knew what they were doing being pro boxers pro high-level wrestlers high-level blue belts at this time and roll and wrestle and make my own team and my own coaches with the people that I had available but I didn't have a head and when I found Eric at six and I won that fight found Eric and he said I'll coach you I'll get you a manager and I'll get all this figured out for you that's what I was really looking for that's why I went to California and got out of Tucson's because I knew I wasn't finding that in Tucson hmm when I went there and got that it was like a gift I was like this is what I'm talking about I knew if I went there and won with no one in my corner somebody would want to pick me up and they did Eric did and we stay together ever since so was your style something that you worked on with Eric like learning those footwork drills like when you came to him you essentially were a smaller guy who was fighting bigger guys and had to be a little trickier in your movement where were you getting that stuff from well now when I meet Eric I'm no longer the smaller guy fighting bigger guys because well a little bit but 45 and 30 45 is now allowed now 145 pounds is just getting into these small shows not just the WEC so by the time I meet Eric at six and oh I take that fight on two days notice at 145 pounds but I was getting ready to fight at 155 in Colorado for a world title but the whole show got canceled that's why I was in shape to take the fight on two days notice so when I met Eric the 45 pound weight class was there 55 was what the one that was basking so that's that was how I got into the UFC but your question exactly was what was how did you devise your movement how did you devise your footwork did you study other stuff did you learn it with Eric did you guys put it together honestly like I had a couple things that I did naturally and then Eric and Eric has a skill set where he if you have a natural movement he doesn't tell you to fix it he lets you do it and then turns it in has you add a weapon to it that's his gift and I had a lot of those little weird odd things that I did and those weird odd things you had just devised to learn how to get away from bigger people yeah and there's a mixture of wrestling stance with punching and kicking I kind of have a if you watch wrestling there's no set stance there's no set well you know what I mean it's constant if you watch college high school like the highest level wrestlers it's all fluent motion in both stances so I made fighting that because I started out wrestling and then I added the punches and the kicks to that move to that motion instead of trying to change what I already did with my wrestling and try to make it this way he just let me do what I did up to five and oh with my wrestling and whatever I taught myself and then he just tightened it up and made it into a pro level look to an extent speed timing range these type of things and now what do you have it now as a system do you have it organized I have a system down no I have a system but I'm a visual learner so you could you could literally just do a movement in front of me and I'll learn it really quick but if you write it or I have to read it I'll never get it it's I'm all visual so I just there's certain things that I was running into when I would spar early on starting that I came up with habits to deal with because of my wrestling in my and and not having a coach that instead of the coach saying no do this I just adjusted and found my own answers and do you keep a training log of all these lessons that you learned no I know they're just all in your mind yeah I know I know I know very well and you studied it a hundred percent confident you keep that stuff in your memory you don't need to write it down no I don't need to write it down because I drill it right once I have a memory I don't just write it I do it I drill it padwork show Eric and I'll say what do you think about this and he'll be like okay well I do this this and this to make it a little better and keep you done it out okay and we use it but I mean I'm using I'm not using the craziest moves in the world you know John Jones use crazy moves certain people like Stephen's Stephen Thompson throws has crazy moves you know what I mean yeah I'm actually using crazy movements to stay defensive and offensive simultaneously mm-hmm that's that's the idea to do both at the same time and to be very hard to read well you're hard to read if you're being offensive and defensive at the same time yeah it's hard to read because you don't know if I'm being offensive or defensive it's one or the other or both I can do both because where I put myself I'm defensively in a generally speaking when I when I've been doing very well in my matchups I put myself in the in the in the gray area where even if you do hit me it's limited power and I'm still able to hit you more and you're able to hit me basically that's the idea now generally Composition