WATCH: Sage Northcutt spin kicks the punch machine

While Sage Northcutt waits to fight men inside the ONE Circle, the punching machine at a local hotel is his worst enemy.

ONE Championship recently posted a video to their Instagram account of the lightweight MMA fighter throwing a perfect spinning kick to a punching machine, showing off his perfect placement and form.

Take a look:

Northcutt’s kicks notched an incredible score of 881 on the punch machine. It’s anyone’s guess what that number stands for, but considering the machine maxes out at scores of 999, it’s probably as good as anyone could achieve, especially when most people who attempt such moves couldn’t lift their foot to the bag, much less while spinning.

Northcutt appeared only slightly impressed with his superhuman accomplishment.

Sage Northcutt (11-3) will look to land such spinning kicks and much more when he fights Pakistan prospect Ahmed Mujtaba (10-2) later this spring.

Mujtaba is on a two-fight win streak, both by first-round stoppage. Both he and Northcutt will make the trip from their adopted homes in Northern California to Colorado on May 5th to fight at ONE Fight Night 10. The event marks ONE Championship’s debut in the United States after holding every event prior in Asia.

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Sage Northcutt explains how trying work around Covid “ran myself down pretty bad”

One huge casualty of the Covid-era of mixed martial arts was a fight between Sage Northcutt and Japanese legend Shinya Aoki. The fight was supposed to take place in April of 2021 in ONE Championship, but was canceled due to lingering health issues from his recovery from Covid-19.

In an appearance on Ariel Helwani’s The MMA Hour show, Northcutt told the story of the cancelation, which delayed his already-lengthy absence from the sport:

"You know, it was super weird. So I caught COVID, being about three weeks out from actually flying out for my fight overseas. I caught it and didn’t even know from the first couple of days. I kept trying to train through and started getting run down. I ended up testing positive for COVID. I’m like, ‘I’m just about two weeks out from flying out overseas to fight’. So I was trying to work around that and trying to do that just ran myself down pretty bad."

Watch the interview below:

The canceled fight would end up giving Northcutt another two years to fully recover his health and prepare for a proper return. He’s settled at Sacramento’s Team Alpha Male and got married in the meantime.

Now with a return date set, he’s in the beginning stages of his first fight camp in years. ONE Fight Night 10 goes down on May 5th from Broomfield, Colorado. The event streams on Amazon Prime for North American subscribers during US prime time.