But Shouldn’t Beginners Learn BJJ, Wrestling, and Striking First?
Updated: Sep 15
One of the most common objections I hear to teaching MMA as an integrated sport from the beginning is pretty reasonable.
"Shouldn't beginners learn the fundamentals of BJJ, wrestling, and striking first? If you try to teach them all at once, aren't you just going to create someone who is mediocre at everything?"
I understand the argument. In fact, I agree with part of it.
Beginners absolutely need fundamentals. They need to learn how to punch, how to move, how to defend takedowns, how to wrestle, how to escape bad positions, how to control positions, and how to submit people. Those skills require repetition and focused practice. You can't just throw a beginner into MMA sparring and expect all of that to magically develop.
Where I disagree is with the idea that the only way to develop those fundamentals is to learn each sport separately for a long period of time before learning MMA. I think that confuses learning the fundamentals of the individual disciplines with learning the fundamentals of MMA.
Those aren't exactly the same thing.
MMA Isn't Just Three Sports Put Together
If you want to become a good boxer, you should box. If you want to become a good wrestler, you should wrestle. If you want to become a good BJJ player, you should train BJJ.
But if you want to become a good MMA fighter, you need to learn MMA.
That sounds obvious, but I think we sometimes forget what that actually means. MMA isn't simply boxing + wrestling + BJJ. The moment those disciplines interact, the problems change.
Your striking stance has to account for the possibility of a takedown. Your wrestling has to account for strikes. Your BJJ has to account for strikes, positional priorities change, and the cage creates situations that don't exist in a traditional BJJ academy. Your opponent's reactions to your punches can create wrestling opportunities, and your wrestling can create striking opportunities. Those aren't advanced concepts. They're part of the sport.
If we're teaching someone MMA, I don't think we should pretend that these interactions don't exist until they've spent years learning the individual pieces.
Integration Is a Skill
This is probably the biggest part of the argument that gets overlooked.
People often assume that if you become good enough at boxing, wrestling, and BJJ, you'll eventually become good at putting them together. I'm not convinced that's true. Integration doesn't happen automatically.
A person can have good boxing mechanics and good wrestling mechanics and still have no idea how to use their jab to create a takedown. They can be a good wrestler and a good grappler but have no understanding of how striking changes the positions they are entering. They can be a very good BJJ player but struggle to make those skills work when someone is trying to punch them or stand back up. The transitions between these areas are skills in their own right. And like every other skill, they need to be practiced.
That's one of the reasons I don't think MMA should be treated as something that begins after you have finished learning BJJ, wrestling, and striking. You don't "finish" those things anyway.
I've been around combat sports long enough to know that there is always another layer of depth to develop. You can spend years improving a jab. You can spend years improving your takedowns. You can spend years improving your ability to escape mount.
The question isn't whether we should develop those skills. (Of course we should). The question is whether we should develop them in isolation first and integration later, or whether we can develop the individual skills while also teaching the athlete how they fit into MMA.
I think we can do both.
Fundamentals Don't Require Isolation
This is where I think the criticism of an MMA-first approach sometimes goes wrong.
If I teach a beginner a jab, that doesn't mean I have to teach them a hundred other techniques at the same time.
We can still spend time on stance, balance, hand position, weight transfer, distance, mechanics, and recovery. We can drill it repeatedly. We can correct mistakes. We can progressively increase resistance. That's fundamental training.
But I can also teach that jab in the context of MMA.
What happens when the opponent backs away? What happens when they try to close distance? What happens when they reach for a takedown? What happens when they shell up? What happens when the jab causes a reaction that gives us another opportunity?
Now we're still developing the fundamentals of striking, but we're also teaching the athlete what those fundamentals are for.
The same thing applies to wrestling. A beginner can learn a double leg with focused attention on stance, level change, penetration, posture, finishing mechanics, and balance. But they can also begin learning why the double leg looks different when it follows a punch, what happens when the opponent is defending with strikes, and what happens when the opponent hits the cage.
Those aren't distractions from the fundamentals. They're part of understanding the fundamentals for MMA.
The Traditional Path Worked for a Reason
I'm not arguing that the traditional path was wrong. For a long time, there wasn't really another option. The early generations of MMA fighters often came from wrestling, boxing, Muay Thai, BJJ, judo, or another established combat sport because dedicated MMA training simply didn't exist in the way it does today. They developed deep skills in one area and then had to expand. And it worked. In fact, it worked extremely well for some of the greatest fighters in the history of the sport.
But they also had to learn integration because MMA forced them to. A wrestler discovered that eventually he was going to have to deal with submissions and striking. A BJJ player discovered that getting someone to the ground wasn't as easy when the other person could punch him. A striker discovered that his stance and footwork had to change when someone could shoot a takedown. They learned MMA by solving those problems.
Today, we have the ability to teach those problems deliberately from the beginning.
That doesn't mean we should throw away the depth that comes from specialization. It means we don't necessarily have to wait years before teaching the athlete how the pieces fit together.
Depth Still Matters
This is where I think the argument gets more nuanced. I don't want an MMA curriculum that teaches a thousand techniques once and then moves on to the next thing.
That's not what I'm advocating. There is a huge difference between breadth and shallowness.
A beginner can be exposed to striking, wrestling, grappling, clinch work, takedowns, takedown defense, and transitions while still spending a significant amount of time developing a relatively small number of important skills. In fact, I think that's one of the advantages of having a structured curriculum. We can decide what actually matters. Instead of teaching whatever technique happens to be interesting that day, we can identify the skills an MMA athlete needs, teach them, revisit them, build on them, and progressively increase the difficulty.
The goal isn't to make someone "good at everything" in a few months. The goal is to build a foundation across the entire sport while giving the athlete enough repetition and resistance to actually develop skill.
Specialization Comes Later
There is also an important distinction between learning MMA and training exclusively as an MMA fighter forever.
As athletes become more advanced, specialization becomes increasingly important.
Maybe an athlete has exceptional wrestling potential and needs more wrestling.
Maybe their striking is holding them back and they need more striking.
Maybe they have a particular weakness in their grappling that needs to be addressed.
Maybe they're preparing for a specific opponent and their training needs to become much more specific.
At higher levels, you are going to spend a tremendous amount of time developing individual components of the sport. But I don't think that means a beginner has to spend years developing those components separately before learning how they interact.
For me, the progression makes more sense as breadth and fundamentals first, followed by increasing depth, integration, and eventually specialization where it is needed.
The individual pieces never stop being important. We simply stop pretending that the pieces exist independently.
What Are We Actually Trying to Produce?
This is ultimately the question I come back to.
If our goal is to produce a good boxer, then let's teach boxing.
If our goal is to produce a good wrestler, let's teach wrestling.
If our goal is to produce a good BJJ player, let's teach BJJ.
But if our goal is to produce an MMA fighter, then I think we have to teach the sport they're actually going to participate in. That means developing excellent fundamentals and teaching the athlete how those fundamentals interact.
It means drilling individual skills.
It means deliberate practice.
It means positional work.
It means resistance.
It means live training.
And it means learning the transitions between striking, wrestling, clinching, grappling, the cage, and the ground.
I don't think the choice is between "fundamentals" and "integration." Integration is one of the fundamentals. The mistake would be trying to teach everything at once without enough depth. But the opposite mistake is spending years learning isolated skills and assuming that the ability to connect them will somehow appear later. It usually doesn't.
That's why we built our MMA curriculum the way we did at BLAST. We're not trying to rush beginners past the fundamentals. We're trying to make sure they learn the right fundamentals for the sport they're actually learning.
And then we keep building on them.
Because ultimately, the goal isn't to create someone who is good at three different martial arts. The goal is to create someone who can actually fight.
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