Patrick Wyman at Bloody Elbow has been very busy recently. He’s split the top 25 ranking fighters from each weight category into two broad style sets: Muay Thai and Boxers.
As part of his ongoing quest looking into the statistics of MMA, he put together an article for the Bloody Elbow looking into the amount of strikes that fighters in each category hit/miss and comparing the two.
The first thing that jumps out at you when looking at the data, is that fighters who fall more into the Muay Thai category tend to attempt a lot less strikes than their boxing equivalents. This said however, there does not seem to be that much difference between the amounts of hits landed per minute (3.46 Muay Thai: 3.88 Boxers).
However, the 0.42 difference does add up though over the course of a match. As Patrick points out, if the match lasts 15 minutes, the boxer will have landed about 6 more hits than the Muay Thai fighter. With this in mind, it is worth mentioning that, during this time, the boxer will have attempted 32 more strikes which means that the Muay Thai fighter has a much higher accuracy (48{317a7769e272dec17b69bda26c6a5a4c5e6799efcd8a85f72cb552b76862c2b9} as opposed to the 42{317a7769e272dec17b69bda26c6a5a4c5e6799efcd8a85f72cb552b76862c2b9} of the boxer).
So what is the reason for the Muay Thai fighter attempting and landing less shots than the boxer (on average)? Patrick argues that this is down to the fact that a kick takes a lot more energy to throw than a jab and hence Muay Thai fighters spend longer between their strikes.
For a more in depth analysis, see Patrick’s article on the Bloody Elbow here.
