{"id":228240,"date":"2025-10-20T20:09:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-20T20:09:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/228240\/"},"modified":"2025-10-20T20:09:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-20T20:09:09","slug":"javier-mendez-ilia-topuria-has-the-best-boxing-in-mma-outlines-how-to-test-him","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/228240\/","title":{"rendered":"Javier Mendez: Ilia Topuria has \u2018the best boxing in MMA,\u2019 outlines how to test him"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1nfb3k4i _16w9vov1 _16w9vov0 ls9zuh1\">Ilia Topuria has the best boxing in MMA, so says Javier Mendez.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1nfb3k4i _16w9vov1 _16w9vov0 ls9zuh1\">Over the past few years, Topuria has ascended to being one of the top pound-for-pound fighters in MMA, primarily on the back of his exceptional striking game. Last year, Topuria became the first person to stop Max Holloway with strikes, knocking him out in his first (and only) featherweight title defense. Then, earlier this year he stopped Charles Oliveira to claim the vacant lightweight title, becoming the first undefeated fighter to win titles in multiple UFC weight classes. And when talking about possible ways to approach a fight against Topuria, American Kickboxing Academy head coach Javier Mendez, was full of praise for the young champion.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1nfb3k4i _16w9vov1 _16w9vov0 ls9zuh1\">\u201cIlia Topuria, I would say, with him, stay out of boxing range, one million percent,\u201d Mendez the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=sth9cqKcdek\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Know Time YouTube channel<\/a>. \u201cStay out of boxing range. He\u2019s got the best boxing in the business, in MMA. He\u2019s got it so much that he even thinks he can beat [Terence] Crawford. That\u2019s how confident he is in his boxing. His boxing is good. His boxing is real good. Real good. So he\u2019s got the best boxing in MMA.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1nfb3k4i _16w9vov1 _16w9vov0 ls9zuh1\">Before moving up to lightweight, Topuria courted a superfight with then-lightweight champion, and Mendez fighter, Islam Makhachev. Instead, Makhachev also moved up to pursue his own second title, though a potential superfight between the two remains at the forefront of many fans\u2019 minds. And if that does end up happening some day, Mendez has a few ideas for how to approach Topuria.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1nfb3k4i _16w9vov1 _16w9vov0 ls9zuh1\">\u201cYou\u2019d need to work your kicks, angles with him,\u201d Mendez said. \u201cKnees. Muay Thai would be a good specialty. But your big task is to keep him away from you, and he\u2019s got decent wrestling. So he\u2019s also got, from people I\u2019ve spoken to that train with him, he\u2019s got decent jiu-jitsu also. So he\u2019s almost the complete package, but he\u2019s not. He lacks the kicking area.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1nfb3k4i _16w9vov1 _16w9vov0 ls9zuh1\">\u201cSo the weakest link on him would be the kicking area. And then you have to test your grappling on him to see if yours is better than his. We\u2019ve yet to see how great it is. It\u2019s not great, but we\u2019ve yet to see how good it really is.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1nfb3k4i _16w9vov1 _16w9vov0 ls9zuh1\">Topuria has not fought since winning the lightweight title at UFC 317 in July, however, rumors abound that he will make the first defense of his title early next year. Makhachev, meanwhile, will challenge for the welterweight title at UFC 322 next month.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ilia Topuria has the best boxing in MMA, so says Javier Mendez. Over the past few years, Topuria&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":228241,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,786,1347,785,85,787,1396],"class_list":{"0":"post-228240","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mma","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-fighting","11":"tag-latest-news","12":"tag-mma","13":"tag-sports","14":"tag-ufc","15":"tag-ufc-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228240\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/228241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}