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