UFC Fighter Ronda Rousey Has Physics-Based Superpowers

Ronda Rousey is an impressive fighter, but how impressive? Are all of her fights short? How much energy in each punch? Here is an estimate.
Ronda Rousey punches Bethe Correia in their bantamweight title fight on August 1 2015 in Rio de Janeiro Brazil.
Buda Mendes/Zuffa LLC/Zuffa LLC/Getty Images

On August 1, Ronda Rousey defeated Bethe Corriea in a UFC bantamweight match in a scathing, fleeting 34 seconds. But how awesome is Rousey, really?

Was 34 Seconds Too Short?

If you watched the Rousey-Corriea fight on pay per view, then you might think 34 seconds was too short. I mean $49.99 isn’t exactly cheap, is it? That would be $1.32 per second. If Avengers: Age of Ultron cost that much per second, you would be paying $11,167 to stream it. OK, to be fair, you would have this as pay per view so you could have your whole family there. I think maybe you could get 20 people in one room to watch it. Still, that would be $558 per person. Bam.

But if you paid for a ticket, you should have known what to expect, frankly. Here is a histogram showing the times for both her professional and amateur matches, with  Corriea’s times and Jessica Andrade (she seems to be pretty awesome, too) added for comparison. I only included match times for wins (not losses).

UFC Women's Fight Times

Rousey has an average fight time of just 69 seconds compared to 277 for Corriea and 212 for Andrade. It’s not too many data points, but it seems clear that Rousey’s fights are quicker than these other two fighters.

How Many Strikes?

If you look for it, you can find data on the number of strikes per match. From this I can make a plot of the number of strikes vs. the length of a fight. Ok, let me go ahead and say that I cheated. There were two very long matches with very few strikes. I haven’t watched these, but I suspect there was lots of grappling—so I didn’t include those two data points. Using the other fights, this is what I get.

Strikes vs. Match Length It’s not perfectly linear, but I can still get a function that relates the number of strikes to the length of the fight. The slope of this line is 0.306 strikes per second. That means that on average Rousey has one strike every 3.27 seconds. If she kept this rate up for a whole 5 minute match, that would be 91.8 strikes. Of course that’s a lot of hits, but not crazy high.  If you need even more UFC data to show that Rousey is indeed different, check out this awesome post at FiveThirtyEight.

It’s not easy to punch and kick that many times. Let’s make a quick estimate. Suppose that for a punch, Ronda has to bring her forearm and fist up to some speed, and the mass of that forearm/fist combination is around 2 kg. But how fast is her fist? Here is the plot of her fist position for one of her punches.

Data Tool

This is a speed of about 5 m/s. That means that I can calculate the kinetic energy for each punch.

La te xi t 1

Twenty-five joules! That might not seem like a lot of energy, but just lifting a typical textbook off the floor and onto a table is about 10 Joules. Do this every three seconds. Now weave and dodge at the same time. You will get tired quickly. Or, conversely, imagine getting hit in the face with two textbooks every three seconds. No wonder Rousey’s opponents go down so quickly. You’d want her to stop hitting you as soon as possible, too.

But what do I know about fighting? Really, not much. I’m a blogger, not a fighter.