I've been teaching martial arts for a long time, and I think one of the hardest things about getting started has very little to do with fighting. It's walking through the door for that first class. People spend weeks, months, sometimes years thinking about trying MMA before they actually do it. They watch fights, look up local gyms, read about different martial arts, and imagine what training might be like. They might even fill out a trial-class form and then hesitate when it

One of the questions I think every martial artist should ask themselves from time to time is a simple one: Am I actually getting better? Not am I attending class regularly, learning new techniques, or getting tired during training, but am I becoming a more capable martial artist? Can I do things today that I couldn't do six months ago? Can I solve problems that used to give me trouble? Can I perform under pressure with greater consistency? These questions matter because it's

Walk into a sporting goods store, scroll through social media, or listen to almost any fitness podcast and you will eventually hear about electrolytes. Apparently, we're all one workout away from a sodium deficiency, and the solution is usually a brightly colored drink, an expensive powder, or a packet of salts that promises to transform our performance. At the same time, some dieticians have started pushing back against the idea that everyone needs electrolyte supplements. T

A few months ago, I wrote an article about David Epstein's book Range and its implications for developing MMA fighters. One of the central ideas I took from that book was that complex, unpredictable activities often reward breadth of experience rather than narrow specialization. MMA is an obvious example. A fighter needs to understand striking, wrestling, clinch work, and ground grappling, and more importantly, how those areas interact. A specialist who develops tremendous sk

I've always thought we should be careful about the claims we make in combat sports, particularly when those claims involve safety. We spend a lot of time discussing technique, training methods, conditioning, and equipment, but sometimes we accept an idea because it sounds reasonable rather than asking whether it actually produces the outcome we want. Protective headgear is a good example. It seems obvious that putting more padding around the head should make getting hit in t

I've heard the same thing about judo for years: it takes a long time to learn, the learning curve is steep, and you should expect to spend years working on the basics before you can make much of it work against someone who is actually resisting you. There's truth to those statements. Judo is a difficult martial art, and becoming proficient at throwing another person who doesn't want to be thrown is a serious undertaking. But I think there's a question worth asking: "How much

How much does diet actually matter for MMA performance? A lot. But probably not in the way people sometimes think it does. Sports nutrition has become another area where athletes can get trapped trying to optimize everything. We have macros, meal timing, supplements, hydration strategies, recovery drinks, different kinds of carbohydrates, different kinds of protein, pre-workout nutrition, post-workout nutrition and an endless supply of people on the internet willing to explai

One of the questions I get from athletes is some variation of, “How strong do I need to be for MMA?” It's a reasonable question, but I don't think there is a single number that answers it. There isn't a squat number, bench press number or deadlift number that suddenly makes someone strong enough to be an MMA athlete. Strength matters, and for some athletes it matters a lot, but MMA requires much more than strength. The more useful question is not how strong you can become. It

I've been thinking about how martial artists talk about risk. There is a lot of discussion these days about concussions, CTE, injuries, hard sparring, training partners, getting older and whether combat sports are worth the physical cost. I understand why. If you're going to spend years participating in something that involves physical conflict, you should understand what you're getting yourself into. But I think we sometimes ask the wrong question. We ask, "How can I make co

Walk into almost any MMA gym and ask what an athlete needs to get better physically and you're going to get a lot of different answers. Get stronger Get faster Build your cardio Do sprints Lift weights Jump rope Get more explosive Improve your mobility Build your conditioning The funny thing is that almost all of those answers can be correct while still missing the bigger question. What does an MMA athlete actually need to be good at physically? I think this is an important q

“Let's roll light.” Five minutes later, somebody is fighting for their life over a half guard underhook. I've seen this happen more times than I can count. Two people agree before the round that they're going to take it easy. Maybe they're both tired. Maybe they're trying to get some technical work in. Maybe one of them is coming back from an injury. Maybe the coach specifically told the class that the goal of the round is to work rather than compete. Everybody agrees that t

I don't know how wrestling for BJJ should be taught. I can tell you how I teach it. I'm a former Division I collegiate wrestler and a judo black belt, so it probably isn't surprising that I teach a lot of takedowns. In fact, nearly half of what I teach in grappling is takedown-oriented, and I teach both gi and no-gi. But the longer I've coached, the more I've changed how I teach wrestling to BJJ students. The biggest change has been realizing that teaching takedowns to a new

The longer I coach, the more I learn about coaching. That probably sounds obvious, but it has changed the way I think about what we do. When I first started coaching, I thought good coaching was mostly about knowing the techniques, being able to demonstrate them, and having enough experience to help someone fix their mistakes. Over the years, that idea has become much more complicated. I've studied different approaches to learning. I've learned about deliberate practice, spac

I've spent a lot of time over the years studying marketing, and one of the ideas that keeps coming up is the power of building a "cult" around a brand. These marketers are very direct about this. They talk about creating a devoted following around an authority figure, building a community around that person, and turning customers into people who identify with the brand rather than simply buying from it. The funny thing is that martial arts had been doing versions of this for

I tell my students that ukemi, aka breakfall,—the art of falling safely— is the most valuable martial arts technique I know. That probably sounds strange when you consider that I've spent most of my life training in wrestling, judo, BJJ and MMA. We spend an enormous amount of time learning how to do things to another person: punch them, kick them, throw them, take them down, pass their guard, submit them. We spend years developing increasingly sophisticated ways to control an

I've spent a lot of years building martial arts curricula. My first real attempt was back in 2007, and since then I've written, rewritten, expanded, condensed, reorganized and completely rebuilt programs more times than I can remember. For a long time, I thought the hardest part was figuring out what people needed to learn and putting it in the right order. What techniques should come first? What positions should follow? When should we introduce submissions? How much should w

“Fight IQ” is one of those terms we throw around in MMA all the time. We say a fighter has great fight IQ when they seem to make good decisions, adapt to their opponent and consistently find the right answers. But I think the term is often misunderstood. People sometimes equate fight IQ with being creative, unpredictable or having a huge technical vocabulary. I don't think that's what it really is. To me, fight IQ is the ability to recognize what is happening, understand what

MMA might have the biggest technical menu of any combat sport. You can punch, kick, knee, elbow, wrestle, clinch, throw, trip, sweep, submit, scramble, fight against the cage, fight off the cage, attack from the bottom, attack from the top, strike on the ground and transition between all of those phases. And within each of those areas are hundreds of techniques, variations, counters, combinations and positions. You could spend a lifetime learning MMA techniques and still have

MMA is a competitive sport, so competitiveness is a good thing. I want athletes who want to win. I want people who push themselves, who don't want to lose, and who are willing to work hard to become better than they were yesterday. I don't think we should try to remove that competitive nature from a fight team. The problem comes when the desire to win becomes more important than the purpose of training. The best training environments I've been part of have people who are doin

John Wooden was a basketball coach, but I've always thought that some of the most important things he taught had very little to do with basketball. I've spent most of my life around combat sports, and I've had a lot of coaches and mentors over the years. I've learned something from almost all of them, both from the things they did well and from the things I eventually decided I wanted to do differently. But if I had to name the coach whose philosophy has had the greatest infl