When a car has an abundance of fuel and horsepower and you need to stop it or slow it down, you find the source of that power and drain it. For Merab, his greatest weapon has always been his seemingly endless gas tank, and the body is where you attack it. Yan was slow to start (not unusual for him), but his work over the final 15 minutes was brilliant. He systematically attacked the very thing that makes Merab so dangerous: his engine. Rather than trying to match Merab’s pace, Yan went after his ability to sustain it. What an effort from both men! Petr and Merab put on a show! 🔥

A truly great fight takes you on a roller coaster ride of emotions. The stakes are so high that the tension, anticipation, and emotion experienced by the fighters become palpable to the fans watching live and at home. At some point, the experience transcends the visual and becomes visceral. You don’t feel like you’re watching the fight. You think you’re actually feeling it! Merab Dvalishvili vs. Petr Yan was exactly that. 👏🍻

One of the more intriguing things I’m discovering about competitive shooting is how different the sensory experience is compared to grappling, and how much more it resembles striking. Grappling is predominantly tactile. Pressure, balance, leverage, tension, and physical connection provide continuous feedback about what’s mechanically correct or incorrect. You can literally feel the principles at work in real time. Striking and shooting, however, are much more visually driven. Your eyes gather information, identify opportunities, and guide your body’s response. But even striking provides feedback through an opponent’s movements and reactions. Shooting, particularly transitioning between targets, offers far less tangible feedback about the efficiency of your execution. Perhaps that’s why it feels so mysterious to me right now. I haven’t yet developed the visual sensitivity in shooting that decades of fighting have given me in striking, or the tactile sensitivity I’ve developed in grappling. Ultimately, the objective may be identical across all three disciplines: to internalize the principles so thoroughly that efficient execution becomes intuitive rather than consciously managed. The sensory pathways may differ, but the destination is the same. And perhaps the most interesting distinction is, in striking, your visual system is largely solving a problem created by another person. In shooting, it’s largely solving a problem created by your own movement. One requires you to interpret and respond to a dance partner. The other requires you to refine and trust your own dance.