Every once in a while I'll see someone ask a question like, "Is it bad to train five days a week?" My honest answer is that I have no idea. I don't mean that I don't know anything about training. I mean that the question doesn't contain enough information for me to give you a meaningful answer. I don't know how long those five sessions are. I don't know what you're doing during them, how hard you're training, how much of the work is technical practice, how much is live sparri

I've always loved looking at the different wrestling traditions around the world because they show us just how much the rules and equipment can shape a grappling style. Change the uniform. Change the grips. Change the rules. Take away one set of grips and give them another. Somehow, people keep finding ways to throw, trip, control and take each other to the ground. You can almost think about them by looking at what the wrestler is wearing. Collars, sleeves, pants — Judo. Coll

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

If you are a young MMA fighter and you feel like you are getting tired too quickly during training, there is a good chance someone has told you to start running sprints. “Do some hill sprints.” “Run 10 × 100 meters.” “Sprint until you can't sprint anymore.” It sounds like good advice. MMA is explosive, right? You need to be able to explode into takedowns, throw hard combinations, scramble, wrestle, and attack submissions. So it seems logical that running as hard as possible w

Why nutrition should be developed progressively—not treated as an all-or-nothing skill If you spend much time on Reddit or other online fitness communities, you've probably seen this happen. Someone asks a relatively simple question about nutrition. Maybe they want to lose some body fat, gain muscle, improve their energy, or simply start eating better. They are looking for somewhere to begin. The answers often go much further than that. Before long, they're being told to calc

There is a strange idea in strength and conditioning that seems to show up everywhere, especially when people start taking their athletic development seriously. Someone decides they want to become stronger, faster, more explosive, and better conditioned for MMA, so they start looking at what high-level fighters are doing. They see heavy strength training, Olympic lifts, jumps and throws, sprinting, aerobic conditioning, intervals, mobility work, recovery strategies, testing,

When people talk about mental toughness in MMA, they usually mean someone who doesn't quit. That's certainly part of it, but I think mental toughness is much more than being willing to suffer. MMA is going to make you uncomfortable. You're going to get tired. You're going to get hit. You're going to get taken down. You're going to get stuck underneath someone who is stronger than you. You're going to make mistakes. Sometimes you're going to be nervous before you train or comp

When I was wrestling, one of my coaches used to say that you needed three different kinds of training partners in the practice room. You needed the person you could beat frequently. You needed the person you could beat about half the time. And finally, you needed the person who could beat you frequently. I've thought about that a lot over the years, and I think it's one of the simplest explanations of what a good training environment should look like. Most people understand t