Joshua Van's 8.26 Strikes Per Minute: Why Volume Is Not the Same as Dominance

Joshua Van lands 8.26 significant strikes a minute. Flyweight as a division lands 3.54.

He is connecting at more than twice the rate of the weight class he fights in. Measured that way, as the gap between a fighter and his own division, nobody among 336 active fighters with at least eight bouts since June 2016 is higher. Terrance McKinney is second across fourteen bouts, 3.91 above lightweight against Van's 4.72.

That number deserves the broadcast graphic it will end up on. It is also the easiest striking statistic in the sport to misread, because of what it leaves out.

What the number counts

Significant strikes landed per minute is exactly what it says. Every significant strike a fighter has landed, divided by every minute they have spent in the cage. For Van that is 1,411 strikes across twelve bouts and a little under three hours of total fight time.

What it does not count is anything coming back.

That is not a flaw in the statistic. The statistic is doing the job it was built for. But it means a fighter landing 8 a minute while absorbing 8 produces the same figure as a fighter landing 8 while absorbing 3, and those are not the same fighter.

The other number

Strike differential is what a fighter lands minus what they absorb, over the same minutes. Van's is 2.43 a minute in his favor.

Here is the useful thing about it. A division's differential is always exactly zero, and that is arithmetic rather than a finding. Every significant strike landed inside a weight class is absorbed by somebody else inside that same weight class. The books balance by construction.

Which makes differential unusually clean to compare across divisions. Output is not. The divisions do not all land at the same rate, so the same raw figure means something different depending on where a fighter weighs in, which is why every output comparison here is made against a fighter's own division rather than against the sport. Flyweight's 3.54 is the lowest of the eleven, and that is doing some work in the headline: against a busier division, Van's 8.26 would not read as double anything. Differential needs no such adjustment anywhere. Zero is the natural baseline in every division, for everyone.

The two lists are not the same list

If output and differential measured the same thing, ranking 336 fighters by one would hand you the other.

At the very top, they nearly do. Van leads on output gap and sits 10th on differential. Tom Aspinall leads on differential and sits 3rd on output gap. Elite fighters tend to be good at both, which is why quoting an output figure about an elite fighter usually gets you to the right answer anyway.

It comes apart faster than you would think, though. Billy Quarantillo ranks 9th of 336 on output gap and 127th on differential, across eleven bouts. He is inside the top ten of one list and nowhere near it on the other. Nothing in the first number told you the second.

Across all 336, the two measures correlate at about 0.5. Related, clearly. Interchangeable, no.

Output gap above own division (upper bar)Strike differential (lower bar)

Significant strikes per minute

Output gap above own division and strike differential, six fighters, 18 June 2016 to 17 October 2026

Fighter	Bouts	Output gap per minute	Differential per minute
Joshua Van	12	4.7	2.4
Tom Aspinall	10	3.8	4.0
Billy Quarantillo	11	3.2	0.7
Justin Gaethje	16	2.2	-0.5
Marc-André Barriault	17	1.9	-0.1
Pedro Munhoz	18	1.7	-0.7

Busy, and even on the exchange

Three fighters in the group stand well clear of their division on output while finishing at or below break-even on differential.

Justin Gaethje out-lands lightweight by 2.24 a minute and ends 0.54 a minute in the red, across sixteen bouts. Pedro Munhoz out-lands bantamweight by 1.73 and ends 0.69 in the red, across eighteen. Marc-André Barriault out-lands middleweight by 1.92 and ends 0.14 in the red, across seventeen.

Gaethje's differential is not a flaw in Gaethje. He fights in a way that trades, and he has won a great deal doing it. It is a flaw in reading his output figure as though it told you he was winning those exchanges.

It would be tidy to report that these three lose more often than their output suggests. Three fighters cannot establish that in either direction. Gaethje is 11-5 in this window, a 69 percent win rate against the 60 percent the 336 win across their bouts as a group. Barriault is 6-10. Munhoz is 9-8.

What these three do establish is narrower, and still worth having. The two numbers can disagree sharply about the same fighter. That is not the same thing as one of them predicting wins and the other not.

What makes Van unusual

Van is 1st of 336 on output gap and 10th on differential. For a fighter whose entire profile is volume, the second placement is the part worth noticing. Whatever he is absorbing, he is landing 2.43 a minute more than it.

It is also not one night. Ten of his twelve bouts in the window are above six significant strikes a minute, and his median bout is 7.93. Drop his highest-rate bout and the figure falls to 7.75, still the largest gap of the 336. Drop his lowest and it rises to 8.68. Nothing here is held up by one fight.

The most convincing version of it came in September 2026 against Alexandre Pantoja, where he went the full twenty-five minutes and landed 181. That works out to 7.24 a minute, below his own average, in the longest fight of his UFC career. A rate that survives twenty-five minutes against that level of opposition is a different object from a rate assembled out of short ones.

Aspinall is the other fighter here where both measures point the same way, and he does something Van does not. His differential of 4.01 a minute is larger than his output gap of 3.83. Across ten bouts he lands 7.63 against heavyweight's 3.80 while absorbing roughly 3.62, slightly less than the average heavyweight absorbs. Two measurements of one fighter, pointing the same direction, and they still disagree about how far above his division he sits.

How these numbers were built

Every figure here comes from the UFC's own recorded fight statistics, capped at 17 October 2026, the last completed event before publication. Counts move as events land, so these are a snapshot of that date rather than of today.

The window runs from 18 June 2016 to that cap and contains 5,144 bouts. The population is 336 fighters on the active roster with at least eight bouts inside it, in one of the eleven active divisions. The window opens on that June 2016 date because it is the earliest point at which all eleven current divisions existed, and every fighter here is measured against their own.

Rates are pooled, not averaged. Total strikes over total fight time, rather than the mean of per-fight rates, which weights a twenty-five minute fight more heavily than a thirty second one. A fighter who has moved divisions is compared against a blend weighted by where they actually fought: Quarantillo's eleven bouts are ten at featherweight and one at lightweight, so his comparison figure of 4.06 reflects both. Van's twelve are all at flyweight.

The eleven divisions are read from the rankings published on 20 October 2026 rather than inferred from recent activity, because those two methods disagree about divisions the promotion no longer runs. Developmental series bouts are excluded by event name, which is the only mechanism available and depends on those events being named consistently. Every fighter whose bout count carries a claim above was checked individually.

On chance. Scanning 336 fighters for outliers will produce outliers whether or not anything real is happening, so we compared each fighter against a resampled baseline built from their own divisions and flagged anyone sitting more than three standard deviations clear of it. Twenty-eight of the 336 clear that bar on output, against fewer than two expected by chance alone. Thirteen clear it on differential, against under one expected. Both tails are far larger than chance would produce, which is the result you would expect: fighters genuinely differ in style. The group count is not what makes Van's case, though. His own margin and his bout-by-bout consistency are.

Aspinall's ten bouts are the thinnest sample in the figure above, and every bar there carries its bout count.

Two numbers, not one

The practical version is short. An output figure tells you how busy a fighter is, which is worth knowing. It does not tell you who is winning the exchange. Two questions, two numbers.

Van's 8.26 would be remarkable on its own. What makes it worth something is the 2.43 sitting beside it.

So the next time an output figure gets quoted at you, on our head to head pages or anywhere else, do two things with it. Compare it to that fighter's own division rather than to the sport, the same way you would read a finish rate. Then go and find out what came back.