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

Of all the sparring equipment I own, my mouthguard is the piece I consider most important, and it's also one of the things I'm willing to spend the most money on. I use a custom-fitted guard made from a dental impression and fabricated in a lab. For me, the difference between that and a bulky, poorly fitting boil-and-bite guard is worth the extra expense. Think about how often the head and jaw are exposed to impact in combat sports. In boxing and MMA, punches can damage teeth

There's a growing movement in Brazilian jiu-jitsu arguing that we're teaching the art incorrectly. Traditional instruction, we're told, relies too heavily on drilling techniques, memorizing movements, and having coaches explain what to do. Instead, students should learn through games designed to encourage them to discover solutions for themselves. Rather than demonstrating an arm drag and having students practice it, we create a game where they compete to get behind one anoth

One of the questions I think about a lot when designing strength and conditioning for MMA is when to stop doing general physical preparation and start making the conditioning more specific to the sport. It sounds like there should be an obvious answer. Build the general qualities first, then move into sport-specific conditioning. But in practice, I don't think it's that simple. MMA training already provides a tremendous amount of sport-specific physical stress, and if we aren

I've been thinking about a question that I don't have a completely satisfying answer to yet. If you don't want to compete, why train combat sports? I don't mean why would someone enjoy it. I understand that part. I love training. I've spent most of my life wrestling, doing boxing, BJJ and MMA. I understand the satisfaction of learning a difficult skill, the camaraderie that comes from training with good people, and the feeling of doing something physically demanding that most

I've been doing martial arts for a long time, and one thing I've noticed about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is that the culture surrounding it has become almost as interesting as the art itself. Sometimes that's a good thing. BJJ has developed an incredible community, and there are a lot of genuinely good people involved in it. But every once in a while I look at something happening in modern BJJ culture and have the same reaction: "Jesus Christ, that's cringey." I don't mean that BJJ

“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

I've always liked the way judo handles rank promotion. I trained judo for years, and one thing that always stood out to me was the way the promotion system recognized that there are different ways to demonstrate development in the art. There was a pathway for competitors and a pathway for non-competitors. The competitor could use competition as part of the evidence that he had developed, while the non-competitor had a different set of requirements, including more time in grad

I've spent more than forty years grappling. I wrestled Division I. I've trained and competed in judo, BJJ and MMA. I've spent enough time in different grappling rooms to realize that every style has things it does exceptionally well, and every style has things that it doesn't spend nearly as much time solving. That has led to one of my favorite grappling mantras: "Judo the wrestlers. Wrestle the judoka." It's not meant to be clever. It's a reminder to look for the gap. When y

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

There's a question in online discussions about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu that gets argued about constantly: "Is BJJ a fight?" I think the answer depends on what we're actually talking about. If someone attacks me on the street and I take them down, establish an armbar and break their arm because they won't stop attacking me, that's obviously a fight. I'm using physical force against another person to stop a violent confrontation. There is no referee, no agreed competition rules and

I first started training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in the summer of 2001. I've told this story to a lot of friends and students over the years, and I've probably told it differently every time, but after 25 years it seems appropriate to write it down here. Especially because the BJJ world I walked into in 2001 was very, very different from the one that exists today. At the time, I was already an experienced combat athlete. I had wrestled at the Division I level, had boxing experien

One of the interesting things that happens as someone gets better at Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is that they can actually become worse at making decisions. That sounds strange, but I've seen it happen plenty of times. A beginner doesn't have many options. If they get mounted, they know they need to escape. If someone passes their guard, they try to recover it. Their problem is usually a lack of knowledge. A few years later, that same student is now a blue belt and they know ten diff

One of the most common pieces of advice in combat sports is, “Work on your weaknesses.” It's good advice, but like a lot of simple advice, it leaves out an important question: How much attention should your weaknesses get? I've seen athletes become so focused on fixing what they're bad at that they gradually stop developing the things that made them good in the first place. A fighter has excellent boxing but mediocre wrestling, so they spend months trying to become a better w

I've spent a lot of years training in combat sports, and I've learned that having good training partners is one of the most valuable things you can have. The right person can push you, teach you something, expose a weakness and make you better without ever needing to say much. The wrong person can turn a perfectly good night of training into an experience that makes you question why you decided to take up grappling in the first place. Most of these people aren't bad people. T

If you've never trained Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu before, walking into a BJJ gym for the first time can be intimidating. You probably don't know what you're supposed to wear, you don't know anyone, you don't know what half the words mean, and you may have absolutely no idea what is going to happen once class starts. That's pretty normal. Every experienced BJJ practitioner was once the person standing outside the room wondering what they had gotten themselves into. You don't need to

There is a particular kind of athlete we see all the time at BLAST. They aren't professional fighters. They have jobs, families, responsibilities and a life outside the gym. They wake up in the morning, go to work, spend eight or nine hours at their job, and then head straight to the gym after work. By 6:00 or 6:30 PM, they're expected to switch gears and spend the next two hours learning techniques, drilling, wrestling, grappling, striking and sparring. And they want to trai

Living in Central Florida, it would be pretty easy to decide that the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu program should just be no-gi. No-gi has exploded in popularity, and for good reason. I enjoy training and teaching no-gi. Modern no-gi BJJ has developed into a very interesting grappling sport, and I think the influence of wrestling, scrambling, and modern leg attacks has made it a much broader game than it was when I first started training. But at BLAST, our BJJ program still trains in

Recovery has become one of the most talked-about subjects in strength and conditioning. And I think that's a good thing. For a long time, athletes tended to think about training as the important part and everything else as secondary. Now we understand much better that the training stimulus is only one part of the adaptation process. What happens between training sessions matters. Sleep matters. Nutrition matters. Hydration matters. Training load matters. Stress matters. But a