“So I got another man question for you this week.

“Last night Connor McGregor won the UFC featherweight title with a massive 13 second knock out and during his post fight interview he stated ‘Precision beats power and timing beats speed.’

“Thoughts? Which is more important or should all be taught in equal measure?”

Sorry for taking so long on this Sean.

Note that McGregor is extending his lead open hand almost the entire time, which lets you know that he is waiting for this ape he is fighting to charge in. This is the extended measuring hand I had you guys practice in the pre-jabbing touch drill. Against a fighter without high level movement this would not be necessary. Aldo is made to look like a fool here, but could have pulled off this rush against most fighters due to his freakish athleticism and acceleration.

Part of this victory was Conner’s correct southpaw form, while Aldo broke form for fighting the southpaw by leading with the lead.

Two of the very best heavyweight boxers of all time, Jack Johnson and Mohamed Ali, did this a lot.

Clutch time is the 24th second of this video. Freeze frame it.

Precision beats power because of striking the correct target [Aldo’s chin while he was striking McGregor’s skull] amplifies effect. There is also weapon precision, which goes beyond targeting. McGregor hits with the large knuckles of the fist as Aldo swats with his balled fingers. They literally hit each other at the same time. In an axe fight this would be like Aldo slapping with the flat of the blade while Conner cleaved him through.

That brings us to timing, which is the rhythmic aspect of precision, or precision in time.

Aldo, the stronger, faster-moving man, hurls himself into Conner’s strike zone, already mapped in Conner’s mind and intuited in this brief dance. Aldo’s main force powers the motion of his target into the strike zone on a collision course with Conner’s fist. Aldo’s punch is ancillary to his body motion and windmills out and over as a sloppy looping left hook.

Conner, the southpaw, leads with the rear hand, choosing the correct weapon, whereas Aldo choose the wrong type of punch thrown from the wrong side of his advancing body. Therefore, Conner need only throw the correct technique at the correct time and Aldo has already provided sufficient of his own energy to knock himself out.

Note that Conner’s rear left leg is stationary as he shift-steps back with the lead right leg which was just there to support the “timing” hand and has been withdrawn, shifting weight to the left side, which Conner immediately channels into punching power by engaging his leg and hip. Conner has invited Aldo in, has timed the attack, and is in the process of resisting with a stiff punch drawn up from his legs and delivered on target.

Precision beats power because of amplification of force and also the focus of a correctly selected weapon imparting more force, so there are two aspects to it. In this case “power” is the potential wasted power of Aldo.

Timing beats speed because a correctly timed cut-off punch or stop hit—which Bruce Lee made the center of his art of the Intercepting Fist—uses the opponent’s speed to generate power. If Aldo had been dragging his leg like Ken Norton this punch would not have dropped him. So timing is precision and speed is power in the forms that force takes in motion.

Boxing—indeed, any striking art—is a broken dance, with the fighters falling in and out of rhythm and one trying to lull his opponent into a rhythm that may be predicted so that he can be the one to break that rhythm. Andre Crouche, commented that this was the art of Jack Johnson, that a fight was like an impromptu jazz arrangement in which Jack enlisted the opponent as an unwilling rhythm section, in which capacity he assisting his more rhythmically astute opponent “in whooping his own ass.”

Power and speed should be developed to the fighter's capacity ceiling.

Power and speed should not be relied upon.

Power and speed should be subordinate to precision and timing.

In fact, with striking, much of power and speed are dependent on precision and timing to begin with. I prefer to regard power and speed as raw potentialities, and timing and precision as the art of amplifying and applying this potential.

Basically a belief in power and sped over skill is the belief of the crude fight fan who has limited experience fighting, the fan of Ali who marveled at his speed and saw that one natural talent as the end all be all of fighting. His counterpart in obtuse fight analysis would be the Mike Tyson fan who marveled at the power of the man and saw power as the only aspect of boxing that mattered. Believing in power and speed over skill is like believing that I—a terrible marksman and clumsy firearms handler—would have the advantage in a gunfight against the old fellow who does pistol demos for an ammunition company, just because I could move faster and you gave me a larger caliber handgun. As with the axe and the gun, the more deadly the type of combat, the more ridiculous it is to choose power and speed over skill.

The complete fighter realizes that his power and speed are slaves to his skill, the material that was used to make the tools in the toolkit that is his art.

They are one, and the more separation there is between them the less effective they are.