MMA Escalation

On one hand MMA is one of the best combat sports to train in to gain fighting skills related to self defense because of the well rounded range of techniques practiced in free sparring, BUT on the other hand MMA's basic strategy for winning and protecting yourself is generally not viable for real self defense situations. We have 4 "Self Defense Situation Roles" and 4 "MMA phases of escalation" to understand, so we can look at what happens with each role in each phase.

Self Defense Situation Roles:

1. Attacker: this is the person initiating the violent confrontation.
2. Friend: most of the time my attackers have had at least one friend with them, and sometimes it wasn't clear who the friend was until AFTER I was already being attacked.
3. Bystander: besides the hostile Friend there is often another witness, OR video footage, OR a cop who deduces what happened after the fact. The bystander is rarely knowledgeable about martial arts, self defense, or trying to remain unbiased in their observations.
4. Defender: this is the person whom the violent confrontation is being initiated upon. (People training MMA are usually not soldiers, law enforcement or security, so they usually have no mandate to retain someone who attacks them.)

MMA Phases of Escalation:

1. Level Change: the plan A in MMA for when someone is trying to attack is to take the attacker down and control them. This is what makes MMA not boxing. The usual first step to take someone down is for the Defender to bend their knees, to get their head out of the way of the Attacker's punch and to spring forward to take down the attacker. 
2. Throw: Typically this goes from the Defender with his head low and his knees bent to shooting forward to grab the Attackers legs, tackling the Attacker to the ground. There are lots of other throws but they usually start from a lower center of gravity.
3. Ground and Pound: once the Defender has the Attacker on the ground, the Defender uses positioning and strikes to get into "mount" on top of his attacker. From here the Defender can beat Attacker unconscious or open the Attacker up for a submission hold.
4. Submission: the most common and effective submissions are potentially lethal chokes, but there are plenty of arm bars and leg locks that can cripple the Attacker.

Now let us go through the encounter phase by phase and see what happens with each role. You will notice that the MMA strategy works well at first but becomes more problematic as we move to later phases.

In Phase 1, verbal deescalation has failed, and the fight begins.

ATTACKER: throws a big right hook at the Defender.

FRIEND: "Yeah, get him!"

BYSTANDER: hears a commotion and looks over to see what is going on.

DEFENDER: changes level to duck the punch and set up a throw.

In phase 2 the fight escalates so that both defender and attacker are now mutual combatants.

DEFENDER: plows into the legs of the Attacker, smashing the Attacker into the ground.

ATTACKER: gasps for air after feeling his back ribs crash into the floor.

FRIEND: realizes he may need to jump in to help the Attacker.

BYSTANDER: realizes there is a hostile fight going on between two people.

In phase 3 the Defender becomes the aggressor and the hunter (Attacker) becomes the hunted.

DEFENDER: passes from side control to mount with elbows and punches to the Attacker's face.

ATTACKER: squirms and bleeds.

FRIEND: positions himself to kick the Defender in the head.

BYSTANDER: concludes this brutal assault is clearly the fault of the Defender.

In phase 4 the Defender loses the confrontation in every possible way.

ATTACKER: desperately turns over onto his stomach to try to crawl away from the barrage of strikes disfiguring his face.

DEFENDER: locks in a choke as the Attacker turns his back.

BYSTANDER: calls 911 to try to stop an attempted murder in progress.

FRIEND: kicks Defender in the head as Defender's arms are occupied choking the Attacker.

I have ran through this scenario a few different times when training with friends, and each time it has come out like my description above. Almost any martial art has a preferable strategy for self defense to MMA, because MMA's strategy is legally problematic and is poorly suited for multiple opponents. I am glad I learned to fight in a kickboxing ring rather than an MMA cage, or the situations where I was attacked on the street would have turned out differently for me.

A Kick By Any Other Name

There is a whole lot of back kicking going on in the name of side kicking these days. First let's start with the definition of a back kick:

Now let us define the side kick; you connect with the heel of your foot, your foot turned sideways or with the toes turned slightly towards the floor, and your shoulders NOT facing more than 90 degrees from your opponent, so that you can maintain your stance:

From Royce Gracie to Jon Jones, the vast majority of the time a side kick will do very little to the fighter's stance and they will basically remain in their fighting stance as they would with any other strike, as is seen most often with side kicks in Muay Thai. In other words:

The issue at hand is almost every YouTube video presenting side kicks seem to actually be doing back kicks. One of the best kicking experts on YouTube is Kwon Kicker, but his "side kick" looks like a back kick:

Bruce Lee prided himself in his stepping side kick above all other techniques, but that was a back kick as well. In Bruce Lee's defense in some of the different Kung Fu styles Lee was exposed to, kicks are put into more general categories, so that round kicks and crescent kicks might be called the same thing, front kicks, oblique kicks and low Jon Jones style side kicks might be considered generally the same thing, and highly chambered side kicks and back kicks might be considered "tiger tail kicks":

Here Ramsey Dewey can only can show significant difference between side kick and back kick by keeping his nose pointed 180 degrees away from his opponent when he presents his mythical back kick. But he always looks at his opponents when he back kicks in free sparring, proving that contrary to his presentation here there is no difference between the two kicks:

Here Sensei Seth gets together with a respected TKD instructor to accidentally demonstrate absolutely no meaningful difference between a spinning side kick and a spinning back kick whatsoever:

And back to Wonderboy, in the following video we can see that he chambers his lead leg side kick almost identically to how most strikers chamber their back kicks, to exactly the same effect:

My conclusion is that as a side-stance hater I see little difference between the side stance and turning your back to your opponent anyways, so there isn't any meaningful difference to me between "side kick" and "back kick." However it seems that the vast majority of side kicks on YouTube are actually back kicks!