What's Your Fighting Style? A Fun Southpaw Quiz

By the Rising Fighter team · Updated September 2, 2026 · Fun Quiz

Everyone who's watched enough fights has quietly wondered which one they'd be: the pressure monster marching forward, the ice-cold counter striker, the wrestler who turns a kickboxing match into a long bad night. And underneath all of it, one more question — would you stand orthodox like most of the room, or southpaw like the fighters nobody wants to face? Nine questions. No wrong answers. One slightly-too-honest result.

What does southpaw actually mean?

A southpaw stands with the right foot and right hand forward and keeps the left hand loaded in the back — the mirror image of the orthodox stance that most of the room is taught on day one. The word describes the stance, not the hand. Most southpaws are left-handed, because putting your dominant hand in the rear turns it into the power side, but plenty of fighters break that rule on purpose, and we'll get to why.

When an orthodox fighter and a southpaw square off, the geometry of the whole fight changes. Both lead feet land in the same lane, both jabs travel down the same corridor, and a new target opens up that same-stance fights mostly hide: the open side, the centerline path that a southpaw's straight left and an orthodox fighter's straight right travel to find each other's chin. Open-stance matchups become a running battle for lead-foot position, because whoever gets their front foot outside the opponent's owns the straight down the middle.

Why do southpaws cause so many problems?

Mostly arithmetic. Orthodox fighters are the overwhelming majority of any gym, which means everybody — orthodox and southpaw alike — spends most of their sparring rounds looking at an orthodox stance. The southpaw gets a lifetime of practice against the look they'll actually face on fight night. The orthodox fighter gets occasional, grudging rounds against the awkward lefty, and it shows: angles are reversed, the jab keeps colliding with the opponent's lead hand instead of slipping past it, and kicks that normally thud into a guard now sail into an open ribcage.

That's the familiarity gap, and it's why the short list of fighters who made careers out of the stance reads the way it does — Conor McGregor's left hand, Dustin Poirier's boxing, Valentina Shevchenko's precision, Holly Holm's kicks. Different eras, different divisions, same repeated scene: an orthodox opponent spending round one relearning where everything is.

What are the four styles in this quiz?

Real fighters are blends, but almost every blend is built from four base ingredients, and the quiz sorts you by which one you'd reach for first:

• The Pressure Fighter. Walks forward, cuts the cage, and makes the other person fight every second of every round. Wins by volume, pace, and the slow disappearance of the opponent's ideas. The style asks one question, over and over: can you keep this up?
• The Counter Striker. Gives ground on purpose, studies the rhythm, and punishes the first mistake. Looks passive to people who don't watch much; looks terrifying to people who do. Patience is the weapon — the counter is just the receipt.
• The Wrestler. Doesn't argue with the striking exchanges — cancels them. Level change, takedown, top control, and suddenly the fight is happening in a world where only one person knows the rules. Round by round, the scorecard quietly fills up.
• The Submission Artist. Wants the fight on the mat for a different reason: to end it. Every scramble is a doorway, every lazy arm an invitation. The style trades safety for finality — you don't out-point a triangle choke.

If you want to see how these ingredients read on an actual broadcast — what the commentators mean by underhooks, cage control, or a 10-8 round while these styles collide — our MMA terms glossary and the guide to octagon control are the companion reading.

Does being left-handed make you a southpaw?

Less than you'd think. Stance is set by coaching, comfort, and balance at least as much as by which hand signs your name. Plenty of left-handers were simply taught orthodox by an orthodox coach and never looked back — which quietly puts their power hand in front, a build boxing has always had a soft spot for. Some right-handers deliberately train southpaw for the same reason, or because their strongest kick comes off the right leg and southpaw puts that leg in the rear, where kicks earn full rotation.

That's why the quiz asks about your feet and your instincts, not just your pen hand. Which foot you'd plant to kick a ball, which shoulder turns forward when you brace a heavy door, which way you drift when you back away from trouble — those reveal your natural lead better than handwriting does. And if the quiz calls you a switch-hitter, that's not indecision: fighters who move fluently between both stances change which weapons sit on the open side mid-exchange, and they are famously irritating to prepare for.

Can you change your fighting style?

Styles aren't birth certificates. They're habits with mileage on them — and habits retrain. The pressure fighter who learns patience becomes something scarier; the counter striker who adds a takedown stops being predictable on the back foot. What the quiz measures is your default setting: the thing you'd do at 2 a.m. with no coach shouting instructions. Where you take it from there is the actual sport.

It's also, not coincidentally, the whole loop of a fighter career: pick a base, discover its ceiling, and spend camps deciding what to bolt on next — while your division figures you out in real time. If you'd rather live that decision than read about it, that's precisely the game we built. And if the quiz has you wondering what division you'd do all this in, the weight class calculator answers that one in two numbers.

This quiz is for fun. It is not a training assessment, and no stance or style is "better" — ask any orthodox fighter who's just spent five rounds with a southpaw, or any southpaw who's just met a good wrestler.