MMA Walkouts Explained: What Really Happens on the Walk to the Cage

By the Rising Fighter team · Published September 1, 2026 · Viewer's Guide

Everything else on fight night belongs to someone else. The matchmaker picked the opponent, the commission set the rules, the referee owns the cage and three judges own the result. The ninety seconds between the locker-room door and the cage steps are the only part a fighter controls completely — the song, the flag, the pace, the face. That's why fighters obsess over it, why promotions fight over it, and why a good walkout can tell you more about the next fifteen minutes than any stat graphic. Here's how it works.

What actually happens during a walkout?

On the broadcast it looks like one continuous shot: music hits, fighter appears, fighter walks, fighter is in the cage. Backstage it's a checklist run by people with radios, and the fighter is the least in charge of the timing.

It starts before the previous fight has ended. A production runner gives the corner a countdown while the fighter finishes warming up — the goal is to be sweating and loose at the exact minute the cue comes, not five minutes early with the heart rate dropping. The hands are already wrapped and the gloves already on and signed off by a commission inspector, who has been in the room since the wraps went on. When the cue comes, the fighter and corner move to the top of the tunnel and wait in the dark for the music.

Then the walk itself, which in a big arena is longer than it looks — a full lap of the floor in some layouts — with security on both sides and a camera walking backwards in front. At the cage steps the fighter meets two more people. The cutman applies a thin layer of petroleum jelly to the brow and cheekbones so gloves slide instead of tearing skin. The inspector does the final check: gloves, mouthguard, cup, nothing in the trunks, and in most jurisdictions a pat-down of the corner's kit. Only then does the cage door open, and the fighter is usually inside for a minute or more before the opponent even appears, pacing a cage that is very suddenly very small.

Champions walk second. That's tradition rather than rulebook, but it holds across nearly every promotion: the challenger enters first and waits, the champion makes them wait. Fighters notice. A challenger who has spent ninety seconds in the cage watching a champion take a slow walk has already been told something about who is in charge.

Who picks the walkout song — and what are the rules?

The fighter, almost always. Promotions ask for song choices during fight week, sometimes earlier, and a fighter with a long-established entrance rarely changes it. The promotion keeps a veto. A track can be refused for explicit content on a broadcast with standards to meet, for length — a seven-minute build-up doesn't fit a television window — or because the rights simply can't be cleared in time. Fighters who care get their selection in early and have a backup.

This is also the answer to a question every fan eventually asks: why does the walkout music on the replay sound nothing like it did live? Music rights are licensed by use. A promotion can hold the right to play a song in the arena and on the live broadcast without holding the right to include it in an on-demand archive, a highlight package or a physical release. When the replay rights aren't there, the archived version is dubbed over with generic library music. The practice goes back to the DVD era, when entire entrances were quietly replaced, and it survives on streaming platforms today. If a walkout is legendary, the live broadcast is the only place it truly exists.

Why do fighters walk out with flags — and why were they banned?

Because for a huge share of the roster, the flag is the entire story. A fighter from a country with no MMA tradition, or one whose parents came from somewhere else, walks out carrying the one thing the arena will recognise instantly. It's also the cheapest and most effective branding available: a flag reads from the back row and from the cheapest camera.

Which is why the UFC's decision to remove them landed the way it did. The promotion stopped fighters carrying national flags to the cage in 2022, after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and for about eighteen months every walkout was flag-free regardless of nationality. The reversal came at the UFC Vegas 80 post-fight press conference on October 7, 2023, when Dana White said the Noche UFC card celebrating Mexican Independence Day had changed his mind and that flags were back — with a blunt message for anyone offended by them. He confirmed the reinstatement applied to Russian athletes as well.

The rule now is effectively "flags allowed, subject to the host." Venues and local hosts can still impose their own restrictions on what is carried into the arena, and fighters have found out at short notice that a flag permitted in Las Vegas is not permitted somewhere else. If you see a fighter walk out empty-handed who normally carries one, the venue is usually the reason, not the fighter.

Which walkouts became legendary — and why?

Two entrances come up in every conversation about this, and they're useful because they were legendary for opposite reasons.

Conor McGregor, UFC 189, July 11, 2015. McGregor's entrance has always been a two-song mix: the Irish rebel ballad "The Foggy Dew," recorded by Sinéad O'Connor with The Chieftains, breaking into The Notorious B.I.G.'s "Hypnotize." At the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, for his interim featherweight title fight with Chad Mendes, O'Connor performed the song live from a platform above the fighter tunnel while the arena held up Irish flags and McGregor pointed up at her on his way to the cage. He stopped Mendes in the second round. The walkout worked because it was an escalation of something the audience already knew — the same song, but the singer was in the room.

Israel Adesanya, UFC 243, October 5, 2019. At Marvel Stadium in Melbourne, in front of a crowd on the scale of sixty thousand, Adesanya came to the tunnel with three friends and performed a choreographed dance routine inspired by the anime Naruto before walking out to challenge Robert Whittaker for the undisputed middleweight title. Plenty of people hated it — he had to defend it afterwards, calling the reaction "tall poppy syndrome" and saying he wouldn't dim his shine to make others comfortable. Then he knocked Whittaker out in the second round. That walkout worked for the opposite reason to McGregor's: it was something nobody had seen, done by a fighter who had decided the pressure of the biggest crowd of his life was best handled by treating it as a stage.

What the two have in common is that neither was improvised. Both were planned weeks ahead, rehearsed, and built on an entrance the fighter had already used many times. The spectacular walkouts that go wrong are almost always the ones a fighter tried for the first time on the biggest night.

Does the walkout affect the fight?

Physically, yes, and coaches take it seriously. The walk is the last stage of the warm-up and the first stage of the adrenaline spike, and those two things pull in different directions. A fighter needs the body warm and the heart rate elevated when the bell rings; a fighter does not need the flood of adrenaline that a screaming arena produces, because that flood is followed by a crash. Fighters call it the adrenaline dump — heavy arms and empty lungs two minutes into the first round, in a body that was in perfect shape an hour earlier. Much of what a corner does on the walk is managing that: a hand on the shoulder, a slow pace, a reminder to breathe out.

This is why the big-entrance question doesn't have a single answer. Some fighters are sharpened by the spectacle. Adesanya danced to the cage and fought the best round of his career. Others are emptied by it, and their corners deliberately keep the entrance flat: eyes down, no crowd interaction, same song, same walk, cage. Neither approach is right. The right one is the one the fighter has practised.

There's a tactical layer too. The fighter who enters first has spent longer under the lights and longer looking at the cage. That is either an advantage — they've settled, the opponent hasn't — or a cost, depending on who is doing the waiting. Champions have been walking second for decades because most of them believe the second is the better one.

What does the walkout tell you as a viewer?

More than the tale of the tape. The walk is the only time you see a fighter unguarded before the fight, and experienced viewers read it the way a corner does.

• The breathing. A fighter breathing through the nose with the mouth closed has managed the spike. A fighter mouth-breathing at the top of the tunnel has already started the fight in their head.
• The eyes. Watch where they go. Down at the floor or fixed on the cage usually means a fighter in routine. Scanning the crowd, finding the camera, reacting to the noise — that fighter is feeding on the moment, which is good until it isn't.
• The corner. A calm corner walking in step, one hand on the fighter, says the room was calm. A corner shouting, jostling, separating from the fighter, says the last twenty minutes backstage weren't.
• The pace. A fighter who slows the walk down is claiming the night. A fighter hurrying to the cage — especially one who normally doesn't — wants it over with.
• The last thirty seconds. Inside the cage, before the opponent enters. Bouncing and shadowboxing is normal; standing dead still against the fence with the corner talking is a fighter being talked into it.

None of it is a prediction. Nervous fighters win all the time, and the coolest walk in the building has been followed by a first-round loss more often than anyone would like. But the walkout is the one moment of honesty in a heavily produced evening, and once you've learned to watch it, the first bell stops being the start of the story.