What I Got Right About MMA Training 15 Years Ago—and What I Got Wrong
About fifteen years ago, I wrote a three-part series about MMA sparring.
At the time, I was coaching in Virginia as Fairfax Jiu-Jitsu, and trying to put into words what I was learning about teaching MMA. I was still relatively early in my coaching career, and like most coaches, I had a lot of strong opinions about how training should work.
I've learned a lot since then.
Some of those ideas have changed. Some have been completely replaced. Some have become even more important as I've gained experience. Looking back at what I wrote in 2011 is actually a pretty interesting exercise because it shows something I think is important about coaching: you should be willing to change your mind when experience gives you a better understanding of what works.
That doesn't mean everything you believed fifteen years ago was wrong. Sometimes you have the right answer before you have the best explanation for it.
That's what I found when I went back and read those articles.
Sparring Isn't Fighting
One of the things I got right was the distinction between sparring and fighting.
Even back then, I was concerned about the tendency to equate good MMA sparring with going as hard as possible. I argued that you could have complete intent to execute your techniques without delivering maximum contact. The purpose of sparring wasn't to see who could hurt the other person more. It was to develop the ability to fight.
I still believe that.
In fact, I probably believe it more strongly now than I did then.
MMA is a combat sport, but training doesn't need to reproduce a real fight every time you step on the mat. If the purpose of a round is to work on a particular skill, then everything about the round should support that objective.
Sometimes that means light contact. Sometimes it means higher resistance. Sometimes it means hard sparring. The important question isn't simply how hard you're going.
The important question is why you're going that hard.
That's something I understood reasonably well in 2011, even though I didn't have nearly as developed a framework for explaining it.
Sparring Is a Laboratory
I also wrote about light sparring as a kind of laboratory where you could experiment, take chances and learn how to succeed and fail without paying a huge price for every mistake.
That idea has held up extremely well.
If every mistake in training has a significant consequence, people become reluctant to make mistakes. They stop experimenting. They retreat to the things they already know they can do.
That's a problem.
If you are trying to develop a new takedown, a new combination or a new way of passing guard, you're probably going to be bad at it before you're good at it. You need an environment where you can attempt it, fail, figure out why it failed and try again.
That is one of the reasons training partners are so important.
Your partner isn't there simply to give you something to beat. They are part of the learning process.
That hasn't changed.
I Was Right About Transitions
One thing from those articles that I'm particularly happy to see survived the test of time is my emphasis on transitions.
Even in 2011, I was frustrated by the idea that you could simply take boxing, wrestling and BJJ and combine them to create MMA. Those individual skills are obviously important, but MMA creates problems that don't exist in exactly the same way in any of those sports individually.
The striker has to deal with the possibility of a takedown. The wrestler has to deal with strikes. The grappler has to deal with someone trying to stand up, strike or disengage. And everyone has to learn how to move from one phase of the fight to another.
Those transitions aren't just the spaces between techniques.
They're skills themselves.
That idea has become even more important to me over the years.
It's one of the reasons I don't think an MMA program can simply be a schedule of BJJ classes, striking classes and wrestling classes with some MMA sparring thrown in once a week. Those classes can produce excellent athletes, but learning how to connect those skills is another problem that has to be deliberately trained.
Looking back, I think I was asking the right question in 2011.
I just understand the answer much better now.
The Cage Really Is a Different Environment
I also wrote about the importance of training against the cage.
That still holds up.
The cage changes the problem. It limits movement, changes the mechanics of takedowns and takedown defense, creates opportunities for control and changes how both people can use space.
A fighter who is excellent in open space can have very different problems when their back is against the fence.
Again, the idea wasn't wrong.
What has changed is how I think about teaching it.
Fifteen years ago, I was more likely to think of cage work as another thing that needed to be included in MMA training. Today, I'm much more interested in breaking those skills down, identifying the specific problems involved and progressively developing them.
That's a broader change in my coaching philosophy.
I've become less interested in simply making sure we "cover" something and much more interested in whether students are actually developing the skill.
Where I Would Change My Thinking: Hard Sparring
This is where I think experience has changed my perspective the most.
In those early articles, I gave hard sparring a fairly important role in developing toughness and preparing serious fighters for competition. I still believe there is a place for hard sparring, particularly for athletes who are preparing for competition, but I don't think about it the same way anymore.
I used to see hard sparring as an important way to find out whether someone was mentally and physically prepared for fighting.
Today, I think that's too simplistic.
Mental toughness isn't simply the ability to get hit hard and keep going. You can develop mental toughness by deliberately putting yourself in uncomfortable situations, starting from bad positions, training while fatigued, recovering after mistakes and learning to stay composed when things aren't going your way.
You can train those qualities without turning every sparring session into a war.
Hard sparring can provide useful experience. It can also provide a lot of unnecessary damage if it becomes the default method of proving toughness.
I've become much more interested in purposeful adversity than simply making training harder.
That's an important distinction.
I Wouldn't Use Percentages Anymore
I also tried to create a system for describing sparring intensity using percentages.
Light was approximately 50 percent. Medium was around 75 percent. Hard was essentially full intensity.
At the time, I was trying to solve a legitimate problem. I wanted everyone in the gym to have a common understanding of what "light" or "hard" sparring meant.
But the more I think about it now, the less useful I find those numbers.
What does 75 percent actually mean?
Seventy-five percent of what? Power? Speed? Effort? Intent? Contact? Resistance?
Those things aren't necessarily the same.
A student can move at full speed while throwing controlled strikes. They can have full intent to complete a takedown while controlling the finish. They can provide significant resistance without trying to overwhelm their partner.
So today I'm much more interested in describing the purpose and constraints of the round than assigning it a percentage.
The question should be, "What are we trying to accomplish?" not "Are we going 70 or 80 percent?"
I Thought Sparring Was More of the Answer Than It Actually Is
This is probably the biggest thing I would change if I could go back and talk to myself in 2011.
I understood that sparring was important, but I placed too much responsibility on sparring as the mechanism for developing skill.
I've learned since then that sparring is not the same thing as practice.
You can spar for years and get very good at the things you already know how to do. You can repeatedly use your favorite techniques against the same kinds of reactions and become extremely comfortable without addressing your weaknesses.
Sparring is an incredible testing environment. It gives you timing, reactions, decision-making and experience dealing with resistance.
But it isn't always the best environment for learning a specific skill.
Sometimes the best thing you can do is start in the exact position where you're having trouble and work on that problem repeatedly. Sometimes you need to slow something down. Sometimes you need a cooperative partner. Sometimes you need increasingly difficult resistance. Sometimes you need to restrict your options so you're forced to develop a particular skill.
That's deliberate practice.
My understanding of this has changed dramatically over the years.
I no longer see the path as simply:
Learn the technique → spar → become good at it.
It's more like:
Learn → practice → get feedback → adjust → increase resistance → apply → identify weaknesses → practice again.
Sparring is part of that process.
It isn't the entire process.
I Understand Curriculum Differently Now
This is probably the biggest change of all.
In 2011, I was primarily thinking about how to make MMA training and sparring better.
Today, I'm thinking about how to develop a martial artist.
Those are different questions.
That shift is one of the reasons we built structured curricula at BLAST. I don't want students simply exposed to a huge collection of techniques. I want important skills introduced in a logical progression, practiced repeatedly, revisited over time and eventually applied against increasing levels of resistance.
The goal isn't to check a technique off a list.
The goal is to develop a skill.
That's also why review matters. That's why repetition matters. That's why positional training matters. That's why deliberate practice matters.
The more I've coached, the more convinced I've become that good training isn't simply about having good techniques.
It's about creating a system that gives people enough opportunity to actually develop those techniques into usable skills.
What I'm Most Glad I Didn't Change
Looking back, I don't think the biggest lesson is that 2011, I was wrong about some things and right about others.
The bigger lesson is that the fundamental philosophy was pretty solid.
I believed that MMA training should be purposeful. I believed sparring needed structure. I believed training partners needed to cooperate rather than constantly try to hurt each other. I believed MMA had skills that couldn't be developed simply by training the individual component arts separately. I believed resistance was necessary for learning how to actually fight.
All of those ideas are still part of what we do today.
What changed was my understanding of how to develop those things.
I've learned that sparring isn't the only way to develop skill. I've learned that intensity isn't the same thing as quality. I've learned that mental toughness can be trained deliberately. I've learned that technique exposure isn't the same thing as skill development. I've learned that a curriculum needs to do more than organize techniques—it needs to create a progression of learning.
And I've learned that sometimes the best thing a coach can do is admit that an idea they had fifteen years ago can be improved.
That's probably the most important lesson.
Good coaching isn't about being right forever. It's about continuing to learn.
The MMA coach I was in 2011 had fewer years of experience than the coach I am today. I know more now because I've had fifteen more years of students, training partners, mistakes, successes, injuries, competitions and coaching decisions to learn from.
Some of the things I believed back then survived.
Some didn't.
And that's exactly how it should be.
Comments