Dr. Johnny Benjamin
A guy named Dr. Johnny Benjamin writes a column for mmajunkie and answers questions from MMA fans. One of the questions in a recent post had to do with foot stomps - think Marco Ruas slamming his big flippers down on the insteps of a bewildered Remco Pardoel in early UFC - a technique the questioner thought was "brutal." Here's the doctor's weak reply:
"I think this is a brutal technique." I think you're being far too kind to refer to a foot stomp as a "technique." I refer to it as a desperate measure employed by a desperate fighter. If your go-to move is to stomp on an athlete's foot while in a clinch, I have some advice for you: practice more. Dirty boxing, Muay Thai, judo throws and sweeps are "techniques." Stomping on a foot is a muffled cry for help. Please, please someone recognize my deficiencies and teach me honorable legitimate techniques.
A foot and ankle surgeon once told me that people never think about their feet until they don't work correctly. Let someone stomp your foot and break it, and watch how miserable your next few months (if not more) become. Every step hurts. The foot is an architectural masterpiece. Destroy its integrity and get ready for a potential lifetime of pain.
Ask people with simple foot disorders such as flat feet or plantar fasciits (not to mention a tarsal or metatarsal bone fracture) how happy they are. Ask them how many miles can they run for their cardio or how training is going. And if you were the troll who stomped their foot and caused an injury, I pray that he or she (politically correct) pokes you in the eye and knees you in the groin.
I consider a foot stomp nothing more than a nuisance foul -- like fish hooking, but with potentially far greater consequences. Foot stomps have no place in MMA.
Brazilian legend Marco Ruas.
And here's a great response from sherdog member "Ah Man"
Not honorable? Is that his medical opinion?
I really don't understand why so many people treat doctors as the go-to guys on dangerous techniques. Sure, you have to have a basic anatomical knowledge that gives you a leg up on the layperson, but nothing in medical school really qualifies a person to watch one man hitting another man and make a call on whether or not that level of force poses a significant risk of permanent injury. If anything, they're less qualified to make that call than professional fighters are.
We have no shortage of evidence that groin shots and eye gouging can cause permanent damage, very easily, so they're banned. I believe the same is true of shots to the back of the head or back of the neck. However, we also have no shortage of evidence that heel hooks can cause permanent damage, yet we still allow those because it simply doesn't happen often enough to warrant removing them from the sport, any more than banning punches would make sense in boxing because sometimes people die from them.
MMA is a contact sport. Competing in contact sports can be dangerous, and the participants go into it knowing that. Making an effort to keep it as safe as possible is a good thing, but banning everything that looks like it could potentially be dangerous is lunacy. Picking and choosing techniques to ban based on unfounded western norms like "it's dirty" or "it's not honorable" is absurd, and isn't made any less so because they come from a person with a MD.
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