How To Flow Like Fluffy

First Things First

UFC 298 is finally here. Before Alexander Volkanovski and Ilia Topuria square off, one of the most interesting up-and-coming action fighters, Anthony “Fluffy” Hernandez, takes on Roman Kopylov. We’re going to look at what makes Fluffy’s grappling so damaging.

If you want to learn how normal fighters can melt their opposition, this article is for you.

Anthony “Fluffy” Hernandez

Fluffy is a 30-year-old middleweight contender. This relatively unassuming 185-pounder debuted in the UFC about five years ago to mixed results.

Fluffy started his career going 1-2 with all three fights ending by stoppage. Normally a middleweight starting their UFC career 1-2 is a recipe for forgetfulness. And that’s exactly what the UFC tried to get us to do.

Fluffy’s fourth fight looked like a showcase match-up for his opponent. He was matched against Brazilian jiu-jitsu superstar Rodolfo Vieira in what looked like an attempt to prop up the latter’s surging career. Fluffy didn’t get the memo.

After a hellacious first round, Vieira was out out of gas, tapping out to a modified guillotine. Fluffy parlayed that win into three more and they all had three things in common; straightforward wrestling, unbelievable cardio, and some of the most creative, opportunistic integration of chokes and strikes you’ll ever see.

UFC Career

Fluffy is an all-out action fighter propped up by pace. He can get hit a lot early in fights, but, if you give him an inch he’ll take two miles.

This might sound crazy but Fluffy fights like Khabib. I’m not claiming he’s as technical a grappler as Khabib, nor am I saying he will be as successful. What I’m saying is Khabib and Fluffy employ similar tactics.

Fluffy will take you down, pull out your wrists so you can’t build a base, and then he’ll start hitting. The only time he stops hitting is when he wants a cross face, head lock, or to break you down again with wrist rides and ankle grips.

If you do manage to stand up, he’ll threaten chokes and knees to the body to distract you from the next takedown he’s setting up. Then he puts you on your ass to start the cycle again. Then he wins.

Fluffy’s fights tend to snowball. His offense goes attritive to downright overwhelming in less than a few minutes.

Let’s look at exactly how Fluffy’s style has evolved over his career.

Park Jun-yong

After dropping his first UFC fight, Fluffy was matched with. Park Jun-yong in an overanxious performance.

Fluffy spent the first part of the fight running forward reaching for his opponent, regularly losing all points of control. He was clipped a lot and got hurt badly, but, ultimately, he was less tired than Park. Midway through the second round Fluffy found his groove and showed us what his style would evolve into.

He trades strikes and changes up targets until you go defensive. The second you start defending strikes he starts grappling to advance his position, in this case shooting a takedown to get on top. After another minute of this Fluffy was able to score his finish.

Pressure, pace, and posture control. Fluffy uses these to exhaust opponent before putting them away.

Rodolfo Vieira

After a couple of minutes hitting on the breaks, Vieira was completely exhausted.

You’ll also hear the seated arm triangle called the arm across guillotine and people often confuse it with with the arm in guillotine. The key difference is that the seated arm triangle pins your opponent’s arm between your ribs and their neck, whereas the arm in guillotine has your opponent’s trapped arm and head on opposite sides of your body. This means the arm in guillotine is finished by you sitting up and crunching your opponent’s neck down, while the seated arm triangle is finished primarily by you pulling your arm into the open side of their neck. I’ll include a link to a helpful video in the citations below.

Rodolfo Vieira has won the IBJJF world championships multiple times as well as the ADCC world championships. Calling this one of the least probable upsets is not an understatement, and it all came from Fluffy’s pressure, pace, and posture control.

Josh Fremd

Fluffy’s fight against Fremd showed new wrinkles of his grappling offense. Fluffly doesn’t regularly put both hooks in to secure back mount. Instead he’ll put one hook in to attack from a cross body ride.

When Fluffy. is riding cross body Fluffy he attacks like a wrestler. He pulls on wrists and ankles to prevent his opponent from standing up.

Fluffy’s cross body riding also leaves him in the perfect position to attack arm triangles and arm across guillotines, aka seated arm triangles. We’ll see more on that later.

Around this fight Fluffy started looking straight up mean. Watch how he deals with Frem'd’s stand-up.

The knee to the midsection is a surprisingly underused technique. Years ago, Georges St-Pierre broke Matt Serra in two with them, but fighters have largely failed to adopt the strike. As Fluffy shows, the knee to the midsection pairs perfectly with front head locks and go behinds, particularly against fighters that turtle to stand up.

Marc-André Barriault

In Fluffy’s fight against Barriault he showed how he can really break people, not just tire them out. Midway through the fight Barriault was complaining that his ribs were injured. Undoubtedly this didn’t help him out.

By the third round Fluffy put Barriault out of his misery.

Edmen Shahbazyan

Shahbazyan came into the UFC as a highly regard prospect. He lived up to his hype by stopping his first three UFC opponents in less than five minutes of combined fight time. The dude can crack.

Unfortunately Shabazyn dropped his next three, largely due to a lack of endurance. After a stoppage win snapped his losing streak, Shahbazyan was scheduled to fight Fluffy.

For the first few minutes Shahbazyan was game. He was hitting and hanging in there. Midway into the second round Fluffy was flowing and crashing into an exhausted Shahbazyn.

In the third round, the referee decided enough was enough.

The most interesting part of this fight to me was Fluffy’s coaching. Throughout the fight you heard them calling out, “Cook ‘em! Cook ‘em!” and “Three strikes, re-wrestle!” They know exactly what their fighter is good at, and how to get the most out of him. Going into this fight, my question is if his skills can hide what appears to be his weakness.

Summary And What’s Next

Let’s put a bow on this. How do you flow like Fluffy?

Broadly speaking martial arts are about self-defense. Combat sports are about dealing damage while preventing your opponent from doing the same to you, and the simplest way to achieve that is by getting to an angle where you can hit your opponent but they can’t return the favor.

You’ll hear buzzword based analysts throw out the phrase “MMA angles” when discussing the differences between boxing and mixed martial arts. I have no fucking clue what that means, but I do recognize that MMA allows you to accentuate the extreme effectiveness of certain angles because of the grappling in the sport.

In boxing, I can get to your side and hit you before you step to a safer angle, but in MMA I can get behind you, hold you down, and hit you a lot. That’s exactly what Fluffy’s style is designed to do.

Fluffy pressures forward behind punches so he can take you down and get off to the side. This gives him a clear line to hit your head and body, while threatening front head lock and choke variations. It doesn’t matter how much Fluffy’s strikes hurt individually. He uses his striking variety to get his opponents tired faster than him.

Fluffy prioritizes keeping his head above his opponent’s at all times so he can use a headlock to threaten a choke, or get to a more dominant position. After cycling through takedowns, head locks, and constant strikes a few times, his opponents are begging him to get off of them.

This is probably the best example of everything he mixes in.

Fluffy’s fights weren’t always so cut and dry. In his two UFC losses, he got hurt badly by body shots. This is particularly troubling for his next match-up.

Fluffy is taking on Roman Kopylov at UFC 298. While Kopylov isn’t the best grappler, he is fast, accurate, and highly dangerous. His last four fights were striking stoppage victories. Notably, Kopylov can fight southpaw and has stopped fighters with body shots before. This is just a huge liability for Fluffy, a fighter that dropped his first two fights because of body shots.

Who can get their game going first? Can Fluffy flow and crash into Kopylov for the draining victory? Or will Kopylov pick him off and stop him before he starts to fight with flow.

I’ll be watching UFC 298 to see how it turns out. Come back here next week to see the best action from this weekend.

Citations & Further Viewing

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