Who Teaches the Connections in MMA?

There's a reason I think a lot of people believe beginners should learn BJJ, wrestling, and striking separately before they start learning MMA. The argument is pretty reasonable: if you try to learn everything at once, you may never become really good at any of it. Instead, you end up being a jack of all trades and a master of none. The solution seems to be developing a strong foundation in each individual discipline first and then learning how to put them together.

I understand that argument, and I agree with an important part of it. Beginners absolutely need fundamentals. They need to learn how to punch, kick, wrestle, grapple, defend takedowns, escape positions, and control people. Those skills require repetition and focused practice. I don't believe that throwing a beginner into random MMA sparring and expecting them to somehow develop all of those skills is a good way to teach MMA.

Where I disagree is with the idea that the best way to develop those fundamentals is necessarily to learn each sport separately for a long period of time before learning how they interact. I think that idea comes partly from the way MMA coaching itself developed, and from the backgrounds of the people who have traditionally taught it.

My Generation Had to Collect the Pieces

My generation didn't really have MMA coaches. There weren't MMA programs everywhere, and there certainly weren't structured MMA curriculums that a beginner could walk into and follow. If you wanted to learn MMA, you had to collect the skills yourself.

We watched fights. We studied successful fighters. We trained different martial arts. We borrowed ideas from people who were having success and tried them ourselves. Then we took those ideas into training and found out whether they actually worked when someone was resisting. A lot of our development came from experimentation and figuring things out through experience.

There were obvious disadvantages to that. We had to spend a lot of time figuring out things that are much better understood today. But there was also an advantage that I don't think should be overlooked: we were forced to think about the connections between the different parts of fighting.

We couldn't simply assume that becoming good at three separate martial arts would automatically make us good MMA fighters. We had to figure out the MMA part ourselves.

Sanshou Changed the Way I Looked at Those Skills

I was fortunate that one of my early exposures to kickboxing was a format called Sanshou, or Sanda. Before that, I already had boxing and wrestling experience, so I was familiar with punching and wrestling as individual skills. What Sanda added was kicking, but more importantly, it gave me an environment where those skills could be used together.

That was a different experience.

I could punch, kick, and wrestle in the same exchange. A punch could create an opportunity for a takedown. A takedown threat could change how someone reacted to my striking. A kick could affect distance and stance, which could then affect wrestling. Wrestling could change the way someone was willing to stand and exchange.

The individual skills weren't necessarily new to me. What was new was the number of possibilities that appeared when they could interact.

That had a pretty significant effect on how I came to understand MMA. I didn't have the terminology or the complete understanding of those concepts that I have today, but I was getting an early lesson in something that I now think is one of the most important parts of MMA: the individual skills are important, but the relationships between those skills create opportunities that don't exist when you look at them independently.

A punch could become a takedown. A takedown threat could become a striking opportunity. A kick could change the opponent's stance and create a wrestling opportunity. Wrestling could change how the opponent approached the striking exchange. Once you start thinking that way, you stop seeing boxing, wrestling, and kicking as completely separate activities and start seeing them as tools that can influence one another.

That experience probably shaped the way I looked at MMA more than I realized at the time.

Most MMA Coaches Come From Somewhere

This brings me back to how MMA is commonly coached today. Most MMA coaches come from somewhere. They're wrestlers, BJJ players, boxers, Muay Thai fighters, judoka, or some combination of those backgrounds. They developed expertise in a particular discipline and then brought that expertise into MMA.

That's not a bad thing. In fact, it's one of the great strengths of the sport. MMA has benefited tremendously from people who understand their individual disciplines at a very high level.

A great wrestling coach is going to see things that someone without a wrestling background doesn't see. They're going to notice your stance, your level changes, your hand fighting, your entries, your finishing mechanics, and all of the little details that make wrestling work. A great BJJ coach is going to see different things, and a great striking coach is going to see different things.

The problem isn't specialization itself. The problem is assuming that having experts in all of the individual disciplines automatically gives you expertise in MMA. It doesn't necessarily.

Having All the Pieces Isn't the Same as Having a System

Imagine a gym with a great wrestling coach, a great BJJ coach, and a great striking coach. On paper, that sounds like an excellent place to learn MMA. You have experts covering all of the major components.

But who is responsible for teaching the athlete how the striking connects to the wrestling? Who teaches them how the wrestling changes because strikes are involved? Who teaches them how their BJJ changes when their opponent can punch them? Who teaches them how to use the cage? Who teaches them when a grappling position that makes sense in BJJ isn't necessarily the best position in MMA?

Maybe someone does. In a good MMA program, hopefully someone does. But in a lot of programs, those connections are left largely to the athlete to figure out through experience.

That's essentially what my generation had to do.

And it worked for some of us. But I don't think we should confuse the fact that people successfully figured it out with the idea that figuring it out yourself is the best way to learn it. If we understand that these connections are important, we should be able to teach them deliberately.

The Athlete Can Become the Integration System

This is where I think the specialist model can become a problem. The athlete becomes responsible for putting everything together.

The wrestling coach teaches wrestling. The BJJ coach teaches BJJ. The striking coach teaches striking. Then the athlete has to somehow become the person who understands how all of those things interact.

That's a pretty significant responsibility, particularly for a beginner who doesn't yet understand the individual disciplines well enough to recognize how they should influence each other.

Boxing teaches you how to solve boxing problems. Wrestling teaches you how to solve wrestling problems. BJJ teaches you how to solve BJJ problems. MMA requires you to solve problems that move between those categories.

The transition from striking to wrestling is a skill. Using a striking threat to create a wrestling opportunity is a skill. Using a wrestling threat to create a striking opportunity is a skill. Recognizing when the fight is changing phases and deciding what to do next is a skill.

Those things don't automatically appear because someone has accumulated enough hours in the individual disciplines.

They have to be learned too.

This Doesn't Mean Specialists Are Bad

I want to be careful about this because I don't think the answer is to eliminate specialists. Quite the opposite. Specialists are incredibly valuable, particularly as an athlete becomes more advanced.

If an MMA fighter needs to improve their wrestling, I want someone who understands wrestling deeply. If they have a particular grappling problem, I want someone who can help solve it. If their striking needs work, I want someone who understands striking at a high level.

There are things that require depth, and there are times when an athlete should spend a tremendous amount of time developing a particular area.

The distinction I'm making is between using specialists to make an MMA fighter better and making the athlete responsible for assembling MMA from a collection of specialists.

Those aren't the same thing.

At a high level, a fighter who already understands MMA can get tremendous value from a specialist. They know where the skill fits, they understand why they're working on it, and they can immediately start looking for ways to apply that new information to their overall game.

A beginner doesn't necessarily have that framework yet.

MMA Has Become Its Own Discipline

Early MMA had no choice but to borrow heavily from existing martial arts. There wasn't an established body of MMA knowledge, so fighters came from wrestling, boxing, Muay Thai, BJJ, judo, and other disciplines and brought those skills with them.

Then they discovered the limitations of those skills under MMA rules.

The wrestler had to learn submissions and striking. The BJJ player had to deal with punches and takedowns. The striker had to learn what happened when someone could change levels and take the fight to the ground. Everyone had to figure out how the different phases of the fight affected one another.

That's how MMA developed.

But we've now had decades of competition to learn from. We know that the cage changes wrestling. We know that strikes change grappling. We know that takedown threats change striking. We know that transitions between phases are critical. We know that being technically excellent in one ruleset doesn't automatically make someone technically excellent when the rules change.

MMA has developed its own problems, tactics, positions, and transitions. At some point, we have to recognize that MMA is its own discipline. It uses skills from other disciplines, but that doesn't mean the sport itself is simply a collection of those disciplines.

Fundamentals and Integration Aren't Opposites

This is why I don't completely buy the argument that beginners should learn the fundamentals first and integrate them later.

I agree with the first half of that sentence. They absolutely should learn the fundamentals. What I question is the assumption that those fundamentals have to be learned independently of MMA.

If I'm teaching a beginner a jab, I want to teach the jab properly. I want to work on stance, balance, mechanics, distance, recovery, and all of the details that make the technique useful. I want them to repeat it enough that it becomes a real skill rather than something they can demonstrate once when a coach is watching.

But I also want them to understand what the jab is doing inside an MMA fight. What happens when the opponent backs away? What happens when they close distance? What happens when they react by changing levels? What happens when the jab creates an opening for something else?

The same thing applies to wrestling. We can teach a double leg properly. We can spend time on stance, level change, penetration, posture, finishing, and balance. But we can also teach the athlete how that double leg relates to striking and how the opponent's reaction to the striking can create the wrestling opportunity.

That's not skipping the fundamentals.

That's teaching MMA fundamentals.

We Don't Have to Make Beginners Figure It Out

My generation didn't have much choice. We collected skills because that's what was available. We studied fighters because there wasn't a comprehensive body of MMA coaching knowledge to follow. We experimented because nobody could give us all of the answers.

I'm actually grateful for some of that experience. It taught me to be curious, to question whether something actually worked instead of simply accepting that it should work, and to appreciate how important the relationships between different skills are.

But I don't think we need to recreate the limitations of that era for today's beginners.

We have an opportunity to take what was learned through decades of competition, experimentation, and coaching and build it into the training system. We can teach excellent wrestling, excellent striking, and excellent BJJ while also teaching the athlete how those skills interact.

That doesn't mean rushing through fundamentals. It doesn't mean teaching a hundred techniques at once. It doesn't mean throwing beginners into chaotic MMA sparring.

It means recognizing that the ability to connect these skills is itself something that has to be developed.

The Goal Is to Develop an MMA Fighter

I don't think MMA needs fewer experts. I think it needs better integration of expertise.

A great wrestling coach can make an MMA fighter much better at wrestling. A great BJJ coach can make an MMA fighter much better on the ground. A great striking coach can dramatically improve their ability to fight on the feet.

But somebody still has to connect those things.

Someone has to look at the athlete as an MMA fighter rather than as a wrestler who also does BJJ and striking. Someone has to understand that improving one area can change the way another area works. Someone has to deliberately teach the transitions and make sure the athlete is developing the ability to use the individual skills together.

That's the difference between having all the pieces and having a system.

I've spent a lot of my life collecting those pieces, experimenting with them, studying fighters, and trying to understand how they fit together. One of the advantages I have now that I didn't have when I started is that I don't think we have to make every new athlete go through that same process alone.

We can teach the individual skills. We can develop them deeply. We can use specialists when specialization is valuable. But we can also teach the connections from the beginning.

Because those connections aren't some advanced part of MMA that we eventually get around to teaching.

They're part of the "Mixing" of Mixed Martial Arts.