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

I've met plenty of people who want to fight. They love MMA, they enjoy learning techniques, and they'll happily spend hours drilling, hitting pads, wrestling, and sparring. They want to compete, they want to get better, and they want to see how far they can take the sport. But there's a difference between wanting to fight and being willing to prepare yourself to fight. The interesting thing is that most of these people aren't lazy. They'll show up to the gym after a full day

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

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

One of the most important abilities a fighter can develop is the ability to remain composed under pressure. We spend a lot of time talking about strength, speed, power, conditioning, and technical skill, and for good reason. These qualities matter. But there's another factor that influences nearly everything a fighter does, and it's easy to overlook because it isn't as straightforward to measure. How well can you think when someone is trying to hurt you? A fighter needs to do

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

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

My father is a farmer. He also taught me how to box. One of the expressions I heard from him growing up was, “Make hay while the sun is shining.” It is good advice for a farmer because there are things you simply cannot do whenever you feel like doing them. When the weather is right and the hay is ready, you have a window. If you spend that window waiting for a better opportunity, you may not get another one. Eventually the weather changes, the field changes, and the opportun

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

Someone recently asked me whether wrestling against the cage is an advanced MMA tactic that isn't really as applicable to amateurs, or whether it should be learned right alongside the basics of grappling. To me, the answer is pretty clearly the second one. I don't think fence wrestling is some advanced skill that you learn after you've mastered wrestling, BJJ and striking. I think it's one of the fundamental skills of MMA. That doesn't mean I think a brand-new student needs t

I've spent a lot of time teaching both grappling and striking, and there is something I've come to appreciate more as a coach: Grappling is easier to teach. That doesn't mean grappling is easier to learn. It certainly doesn't mean grappling is easier to become good at. It means that the nature of grappling gives a coach more control over the learning environment. Striking doesn't give you that luxury. And I think that difference explains a lot about why striking can be so dif

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

A question came up recently: "What do you guys do in the days before your fight to get into the right headspace?" I've competed in wrestling for most of my life, and I think that prepared me pretty well for the mental side of competition. I've always been able to get relatively relaxed before competing. I'm not someone who needs to spend the entire day pacing around the room, psyching myself up for what's about to happen. But there is one question I've always asked myself bef

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

One of the things I've always found fascinating about martial arts is that they are constantly changing. Techniques that were once common become less common. New techniques develop. Old ones get modified, discarded or sometimes rediscovered. We tend to think of this as a natural evolution of martial arts, but there is another force that has a tremendous influence on what gets passed down: the rules. I've been thinking about this because of the recent discussion surrounding Mu

Every once in a while I'll see a young guy on Reddit asking some version of the same question: “I want to be in the UFC someday. How do I get started? What should I train? Should I wrestle? Should I do BJJ? Should I box? How many days a week should I train? When should I have my first fight?” It’s a completely reasonable question. If you're 15 or 16 years old and you've fallen in love with MMA, there’s nothing wrong with dreaming about becoming a professional fighter. Having

One of the things I think we sometimes lose sight of in MMA training is that the person standing across from you is the most important part of the equation. We spend a lot of time hitting bags, working pads, drilling combinations and practicing techniques. All of those things have value. I've used all of them for a very long time and I wouldn't want to coach without them. A heavy bag doesn't move away when you jab it. It doesn't parry your cross. It doesn't change levels when