Sherdog’s Top 10: Most Durable Fighters

4. Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira

Former Pride and interim Ultimate Fighting Championship heavyweight titleholder Nogueira is one of the toughest and most durable men to ever compete in mixed martial arts. His chin’s more recent failings against the likes of Frank Mir, Cain Velasquez and Roy Nelson should not overshadow the kind of resilience he demonstrated over and over again earlier in his career.

Especially in his early Pride outings, Nogueira relied on that tremendous durability to win fights. He wanted fights on the ground, but he lacked the kind of high-level wrestling game that would have allowed him to consistently get opponents to the mat. His solution was to pull guard and then eat as many shots as he had to before locking up a submission from his back or working a sweep so that he ended up on top. It was essentially a given that his opponents would hit him more than he hit them.

The toughness Nogueira displayed against Bob Sapp and Fedor Emelianenko is legendary, but that also carried through to bouts with Enson Inoue, Ricco Rodriguez, Mirko Filipovic and Tim Sylvia, all of whom out-landed the Brazilian by a substantial margin. The formidable combination of Nogueira’s durability and his venomous guard game placed him in good stead for a very long time indeed; as long as he could withstand his opponents’ shots from top position, he could eventually finish the fight or put himself in position to finish it, as practically every opponent aside from the great Emelianenko discovered.

Many other guard players have tried Nogueira’s strategy, but nobody has done it as consistently, with as much success or demonstrated that level of durability for that long.

Number 3 » Toughness was his defining quality, and it allowed him to put his thunderous right hand on target more often than not. If not for the inevitable lapses at the tail end of his career, he might be the top entry on this list, and he still has a better claim than most.