You Can't Train for the UFC

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 a big goal can be incredibly motivating. But I think there is a problem with trying to train for a goal that is so far away. You can't really train for the UFC. You can train to become a better fighter. Those are two very different things.

The UFC is a long-term outcome that is influenced by an enormous number of things you can't completely control. Your job right now is much simpler. You need to become better than you were yesterday, then better again next month, and eventually good enough to move to the next level. That’s where I think one of the ideas from Angela Duckworth’s Grit becomes useful. She talks about goals existing at different levels, with smaller goals supporting larger ones. The big goal provides direction, but the smaller goals are what actually tell you what to do.

If the ultimate goal is to become a UFC fighter, that doesn't tell a 16-year-old what to do at Tuesday night's practice. “Become a UFC fighter” isn't a training objective. “Get better at defending the single leg” is. “Improve my jab” is. “Learn to escape mount” is. “Get stronger” is. “Improve my conditioning” is. “Become harder to take down” is. “Get better at making decisions when I'm tired” is. Those are things you can actually work on.

The Big Goal Still Matters

I’m not suggesting that young athletes shouldn’t have big dreams. Quite the opposite. I think having an ambitious goal can be incredibly valuable. If a kid tells me he wants to become a UFC champion, I’m not going to laugh at him because the odds are difficult. At that age, he doesn’t need me to tell him exactly how likely his dream is. He needs someone to help him understand what becoming that kind of athlete would actually require.

But the dream needs to be broken down into things that can be developed. A sixteen-year-old doesn’t need to know exactly what kind of fighter he’s going to be at twenty-six. He doesn’t even know enough about himself yet to answer that question. He may discover that he’s an exceptional wrestler. He may discover that he’s a natural striker. He may become fascinated with grappling. He may find that competition is what he loves most. He may discover that he hates competing but loves coaching. A lot can change, and that isn’t a problem. That’s development.

The Next Level Is More Important Than the Final Level

This is one of the reasons I like having a development model at BLAST. We’re not trying to tell a beginning student everything he will eventually need to know. We’re trying to identify what he needs to develop next. A beginner needs to build a foundation. Once that foundation is established, the athlete can begin applying those skills against resistance. Eventually the athlete needs to integrate those skills into a functioning MMA game. The process continues from there, and at each stage the athlete has different problems to solve.

That’s much more useful than giving someone a giant checklist called “How to Become a UFC Fighter.” The checklist would be enormous anyway, and it would change as the athlete develops. A beginning athlete doesn’t need to know what a high-level professional fighter’s training looks like. He needs to learn how to train correctly. He needs to become technically competent. He needs to learn how to spar. He needs to develop physically. He needs to become a good training partner. He needs to learn how to handle being bad at something. If he continues developing, the problems eventually become more complicated. That’s how progression works.

Don't Skip Steps Because You're Excited About the Destination

One of the things I see in young athletes is an understandable desire to jump ahead. They want to fight before they’re ready. They want to learn advanced techniques before they’ve developed the fundamentals. They want to train like professional fighters before they’ve learned how to train consistently. They want to worry about weight cutting before they’ve even established what their normal training weight should be.

The ambition isn’t the problem. The problem is trying to live in a developmental stage that you haven’t reached yet. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to become a UFC fighter, but if you’re still getting taken down every time someone grabs a single leg, worrying about what your UFC game plan is probably isn’t the most productive use of your time. Fix the single leg. Then fix the next problem. Then the next one.

Development Changes You

There’s another reason I like thinking about goals this way. The athlete you become may not be the athlete you originally imagined. Maybe you start out wanting to be a striker and discover that you’re an excellent wrestler. Maybe you think you’re going to be a submission specialist and eventually develop an incredible ground-and-pound game. Maybe you discover that you’re much better at coaching than you ever expected.

Your long-term goal can give you direction without dictating every detail of the journey. That’s important because development isn’t supposed to be a straight line. You learn something, which changes what you understand. What you understand changes what you need to work on. What you work on changes your abilities. Those new abilities create new possibilities. The process should change you.

What Should That Kid on Reddit Actually Do?

If that kid asked me what he should do, I’d probably give him a much less exciting answer than he was hoping for.

• Find a good gym

• Train consistently

• Learn the fundamentals

• Train with people who are better than you, people who are at your level, and people who need you

• Get stronger and better conditioned

• Learn how to practice

• Compete when your coach thinks you’re ready

• Learn from getting your ass kicked

• Then come back and do it again

Don’t worry too much about whether what you’re doing today looks like the training of a UFC champion. You’re not supposed to look like one yet. You’re supposed to look like a sixteen-year-old who is becoming a better sixteen-year-old fighter. If you do that for long enough, you’ll eventually become a better seventeen-year-old fighter, then eighteen, then nineteen. At some point, you’ll have enough experience to start making much more sophisticated decisions about your career. But you can’t skip the process.

The Goal Gives You Direction. The Work Gives You Progress.

I think this is where ambitious athletes sometimes get themselves into trouble. They spend so much time thinking about the destination that they lose sight of what they’re supposed to be doing today. There’s nothing wrong with looking ten years down the road. Just don’t let that prevent you from paying attention to Tuesday night.

The UFC is a destination. It’s not a training session. You can’t walk into the gym and train for “the UFC.” You can train wrestling. You can train striking. You can work your conditioning. You can practice escaping bad positions. You can develop your ability to make decisions under pressure. And if you keep doing those things well enough for long enough, they may eventually take you somewhere you couldn’t have predicted when you started.

That’s the strange thing about ambitious goals. You need to know where you’re going, but you still have to take the next step. The big goal gives you direction. The next goal gives you something to do. And that’s what development is really about.