The karate stance (Conor, Wonderboy, MVP) has three main qualities: stand sideways, keep the head tall, and let the hands hang low.
Head higher than every opponent: 17 cm above the shoulders against 12, in all 14 fights.
Hands lower: 23 cm below the shoulders against 18, in 12 of 14.
More bladed until Diaz: about 10° more side-on in 6 of 7 early fights; by 2021 he stood squarer.
His head sat higher than every opponent's
McGregoropponents
His hands hung lower than his opponents'
McGregoropponents
He stood more side-on, until Diaz
McGregoropponents
Did the karate stance go away?
Yes, mostly. By 2021 he stood squarer, leaned in more and moved his feet less.
He squared up
How far the shoulder line is turned toward the opponent: 90° side-on (karate), 0° squared (boxing).
36 → 25° his opponents 27 → 35°
McGregoropponents, same frames
He leaned in
The hip-to-shoulder line against vertical; + leans toward the opponent.
1 → 4° his opponents 4 → 6°
McGregoropponents, same frames
His lead shoulder dropped
Lead shoulder above the rear one.
-0.6 → -3.4 cm his opponents -0.4 → +1.6 cm
McGregoropponents, same frames
His feet slowed
How fast the hips travel across the cage.
39 → 32 cm/s his opponents 43 → 33 cm/s
McGregoropponents, same frames
Everything else held steady
2012–13 vs Holloway · 2014–15 vs Mendes · 2016 vs Alvarez · 2021 vs Poirier · the most typical steady stretch of each era for this measure
Stance width. Ankle to ankle.
McGregorhis opponents, same frames
2012–13 vs Holloway · 2014–15 vs Mendes · 2016 vs Alvarez · 2021 vs Poirier · the most typical steady stretch of each era for this measure
Stance length. How far the lead foot sits ahead of the rear.
McGregorhis opponents, same frames
2012–13 vs Hill · 2014–15 vs Mendes · 2016 vs Alvarez · 2021 vs Poirier · the most typical steady stretch of each era for this measure
Hip height. Hips above the ankles. Lower is a deeper crouch.
McGregorhis opponents, same frames
2012–13 vs Holloway · 2014–15 vs Mendes · 2016 vs Alvarez · 2021 vs Poirier · the most typical steady stretch of each era for this measure
Rear knee. The angle at the back knee; 180° is a straight leg.
McGregorhis opponents, same frames
2012–13 vs Hill · 2014–15 vs Mendes · 2016 vs Alvarez · 2021 vs Poirier · the most typical steady stretch of each era for this measure
Weight on the lead foot. Where the hips sit between the feet: 0 over the rear foot, 1 over the lead.
McGregorhis opponents, same frames
3–4x better at pull and slip counters: after a punch missed him he fired back within 0.6 s 15 % of the time; his opponents, 4 %.
Conor threw the rear straight 3x as often as his opponents
Half his punches came from the back hand, against about a third for his opponents.
"Timing beats speed": his left hand was only average speed.
3–4x better at pull and slip counters
McGregoropponents
Conor threw the rear straight 3x as often
2015 vs Chad Mendes · knockout, round 22016 vs Eddie Alvarez · knockdown, round 1
McGregor's leftopponent's rear straight
70 left hands, overlaid
~50% of all his punches came from the left hand
McGregoropponents
He stayed a counter puncher his whole career
Lefts thrown as counters: 18 % → 47 % (corrected p 0.66).Counter-puncher to head hunter? 70 % → 70 %: no.
His left hand was actually just average speed!
his left, median per fightopponent's rear straight
Screen speed in each fighter's own torso lengths a second.
“Precision beats power, and timing beats speed.”Conor McGregor
Fans have always felt that McGregor fades starting around the 8-minute mark... the data doesn't support that!
The hands go first, and early: about 3 cm lower every five minutes, from minute 2.
Diaz 2 is the exception: from 60 steps a minute to under 30, while Diaz climbed toward 80.
Steps a minute through every fight that went long. Red: McGregor; grey: opponent.
His steps per minute don't fade materially
McGregoropponent
His cardio suffered during Diaz 2.
His hands dropped first, from minute 2
Diaz 2: the one fight he truly faded
McGregorNate Diaz
0 / 0
10 fights · 2012–2021
Which Conor fight is this?
We let a model from behavioural neuroscience (keypoint-MoSeq) split his movement into short, repeated pieces, "syllables", from the joints alone, knowing nothing about fighting.
The same vocabulary in 2012 and 2021, in about the same proportions.
Click a dot to circle it; drag the circle, or its edge. Colour by year to look for the old McGregor.
Colour by
Scroll or pinch to zoom · drag to pan · click a dot to circle it · drag the circle to move it, its edge to size it
Click a dot, or pick a syllable.
Every movement in the circle, stacked and moving in step; bold is their median.
The long stance
Share of his time on his feet spent in this syllable, fight by fight. Lines are the averages before and after 2016.
The footage
Fifteen fights, 2012 to 2021: three Cage Warriors title fights and twelve UFC fights, from official UFC, Fight Pass and broadcaster uploads (two fan uploads where no official one exists). Only live action counts: the fight clock is detected on screen in every frame, so walkouts, replays, slow motion and breaks drop out. The Aldo fight survives only as a replay package and is left out.
Finding the fighters
A YOLOv8 detector fine-tuned on UFC footage finds both men in each frame, ignoring the referee and crowd. Who is who comes from the colour of their shorts, held through clinches by following each body from frame to frame.
The skeletons
RTMW-x, a whole-body pose model (via rtmlib), places 133 points on each fighter: body, feet, hands and face. It runs every frame at the broadcast's own rate (30 a second). Points near the frame edge or below a confidence threshold are treated as unseen; nothing is drawn or measured that the model didn't see.
Units
Centimetres come from McGregor's height (175 cm): his leg is about 49 % of it, which sets his torso at about 47 cm. Speeds are screen speeds: the fist's peak speed in the broadcast picture, in each fighter's own torso lengths a second. They are not real-world speeds, but both men are measured the same way.
Punches, steps and counters
A punch is the arm opening fast toward the opponent; straight or hook from the shape of the fist's path (about three in four detections confirmed as committed punches by eye). A step is one foot moving against the other, so camera pans can't fake one. A pull or slip is the head moving back or down at least 5 cm against the hips while a punch comes in; a counter is a punch of his own within 0.6 s.
The comparison and the bar
Every number is McGregor against the man in front of him, in the same frames and under the same camera, with zoom, viewing angle and distance regressed out. Each fight counts once. A finding must survive Holm correction across everything tested in its family and be at least 0.4 of the normal moment-to-moment spread; others are labelled as patterns.
The fade
Every half-minute of standing footage in his long fights, placed on the fight clock, fitted with a flat-then-declining line whose starting minute the data chooses. Whole fights are resampled 2,000 times to see how stable that minute is.
Syllables
keypoint-MoSeq (Weinreb et al., 2024), a model from behavioural neuroscience, fitted to 17 body points on side-on footage only. The map is a t-SNE of each occurrence's model state; names were given by watching the clips.
Limits
Fifteen fights is not many, and a broadcast is a flat picture: movement toward the camera is invisible and whether a punch landed can't be measured. Everything was checked by eye on samples, not hand-labelled. Full rules and every test are in the code.