Archive for August, 2013

As we have a little break before the next lot of fight training starts it is time to look at your game and deconstruct it, find all the holes and weak areas in your game and work on them until they are no longer a weakness.

This is going to be about what I am going to do to my own personal skills and what I will be working for the next few weeks.

BJJ – With my wrestling I usually get top position and work from there and as the instructor I don’t go hunting for submissions as I like to see how my students will react. So in BJJ I will be working with people who are my size or bigger off my back and working escapes and sweeps. Then when the situation is there I will go for the submission and look to finish as many people as I can. When I am up against people who are either a lot smaller or less skilled then I will start in bad positions, (either position wise or deep in a submission) and see if I can work out of it.

Wrestling – It all comes down to timing and set ups, and this is the one area that I will not change that much. There will be a fair bit of time spent on the set ups for the single and double leg, as well as the defence for both. I will increasing the work rate when drilling the situations, this will be 100% and from varied positions to test my offence and defence. Then when we are live wrestling I am going to be working the scramble, that is the takedown is not over until it’s over, and I am just going to keep moving until I am back on my feet.

Striking – The areas I am focusing on are accuracy, sharpness, foot work and balance. This is due to the fact that when the sparring picks up I notice that my shots are not as accurate as I once was. This is not about landing every shot, more about each shot going where I want and not hitting shoulders or hips. Once the accuracy is there then it’s about the sharpness which just comes from training, and focusing on a fast, crisp shots and good solid defence. Foot work is all about keeping on balance while moving in to attack and moving away for defence, as good balance keeps you in good positions more often than not.

MMA – This is where the fun begins – as you can see I have plenty to work on in all areas and now it is time to put it all together. MMA for me is all about controlling the transitions, and I must control where the fight goes. The transitions are the key, if you control when and how the fight goes from standing to the ground and vice versa then your opponent has to fight your game. In a fight making sure that you are fighting your fight is the most important thing. This means if I am against a wrestler I will play sprawl and brawl against them and then test my takedowns out – out-wrestle the wrestler. Against good strikers I will work my striking against them as I love that challenge. With BJJ guys I will go to tap them out or make their life hell with ground and pound. I noticed that I had not thrown GnP with any intensity for a while now, so GnP is going to be a real focus for me. My GnP focus will be to set up through position, making the person defend instead of escape with the intensity and going for the shots during the scramble. Basically my aim is to be able to go head on against the specialists and match them.

This all came about from me sitting back after a session where one of the guys at Lockdown asked how would I beat me. That made me look at where I needed work, as I always have things I need to work on, but this gave me a more indepth look.

Gareth Lewis
Head MMA Instructor
http://www.Lockdown.co.nz/

This is answering a question posted on the Lockdown Facebook page: ‘Trusting yourself. How important it is and where/how does it affect training, fight prep etc’.

Having belief in yourself is the most important thing, not just with fighting but with everything. Over the years I have seen many people come and go through all the fight gyms that I have trained at, but there are two people that really stand out to me. One guy had all the ability in the world, was fast, hit hard, great timing and picked things up really fast but he had no confidence in himself at all. Even with all this talent if you told him that you were going to smash him he would believe it and go ‘shy’ in sparring. Then there was another guy that had all the belief in the world but had no natural ability, no pop on his punches and no real danger in any part of his game but he thought he was the baddest man on the planet. If you could only combine these guys, the physical side of one and the mental side of the other, you would have a world champ.

When I was training in Vegas I spent some time with one of the best fighters on the planet and he had no concept at all that anyone could beat him. To put this in context, he had just got his ass whooped in a fight. I asked him, very delicately, and his reply was “I thought his reach was a little shorter so my range was out, if we fought tomorrow I would knock him out.” This amazed me as he got destroyed in that fight and he still thought he was better and was better than anyone else. The self belief that top level people have is where they get a lot of their success from.

When you are training for a fight keeping positive is very important. If you focus on the bad parts of training you will just destroy yourself. There are always going to be bad sessions, to deal with them it helps to think that it is better to get the mistakes out in training than in the fight, which turns it into a positive. This goes up to the day of the fight, everything you say on that day is positive – you are too fast, too strong, too fit, too powerfu, etc. Your brain can’t get away from anything so you must be positive – if you say you can’t forget my keys you brain thinks ‘forget keys’. This is the same in fighting, if you are saying words like weak, slow and unfit that is what you are planting in your brain and that is seriously going to affect your performance.

This is what my trainer said to me, “Do you trust me? Then believe in the people that believe in you.” That helped me, if someone I trusted thought I had the ability then who am I to argue. One other thing that helped me as well was the thought that if I didn’t believe in myself I was giving my opponent an advantage and there was no way I was going to help them. That belief can come from your training partners (as your opponent will not be as good as them), your training itself and that you have trained harder than you opponent. Whatever it takes, get the belief in yourself because it is so important, especially in fighting because in the ring all you have is yourself.

Gareth Lewis
Head MMA Instructor
http://www.Lockdown.co.nz/

This blog answers a question posted on the Lockdown Facebook page – “As the coach, how do you monitor and gauge intensity of ‘live’ training for a fighter in preparation for a bout? Are there any indicators of when you think ‘live’ training is doing more harm than good in the preparation?”
When we have a guy in fight training, there are three distinct phases.

Phase 1: They have put their name in for a fight but will not be matched for a few weeks. This is when I am happy for sparring to be nice and hard. This is when they should be really picking up their intensity, and this should happen naturally with the pressure of the fight. This usually causes them to throw a little harder at training partners which obviously causes the training partners to throw back a little harder than normal and every now and then it can turn into a rather hard sparring session. When this happens I believe it is good for the fighter to have a good hard session, as that is what is going to happen in the fight. If they get a bit of a hiding that can be good to give them a reality check and gives them some serious incentive to pick up their training.

Phase 2: The fight is confirmed. This is when it gets real. Everything they do in training is under the microscope now. Things that didn’t bother them before now affect them, such as being hit in sparring or getting taken down at wrestling, and they go home and go over the mistakes in their head after training. During this period it is important to keep their confidence up, and if they have a bit of hard round then you put them against someone that they can get on top of for the next round. This phase is all about getting their head ready for the fight – the physical side is happening as well, but the mental game is the most important.

Phase 3: 10 Days before the fight. This is usually when the fighter is thinking that they wish they had more time and they don’t feel ready. This is when you just work the game plan and make them work their strengths so they get confidence in what they have been training.

For live training I have no problem for the intensity to be high, in fact I recommend it for Phases 1 and 2, however it needs to be at the level that the fighter can handle. During Phase 1 it is more about the fighter feeling the reality of a fight through pressure and intensity. They need a bit of a hiding at this stage just to give them a real and tangible reason to train hard as hell. In Phase 2 the intensity will be there and it is making sure that they keep their head up after every round and don’t get down on themselves, as there will be nights where they feel like shit. This is when live training can be a negative, when you see your fighter getting down on themselves that is when you step in. I have been known to get the training partner to drop intensity, change positions and all sorts just to get the fighter to end up on top by the end of the round, as I believe it is very important for the mental prep.

However the juggling act is the best part, and you have to do this on a case by case basis. This is when you decide if the fighter should continue to lose the live training to make them find a way to win, just like in a fight. This would be done in group work, so they have someone else in the group who they can beat and one that they have trouble with and they need to find a way to beat that guy.

Overall with fight training you need to make sure that the fighter is keeping their confidence up, but they need the reality of what happens if they get it wrong without smashing on their confidence. There is no formula for this, and it’s all about knowing your fighter and what they can handle and on the nights where you get it wrong, and you will get it wrong, know how to fix it. Fighters are usually emotional people so you can see when they are down – that is when you need to pull them aside and have a chat with them and put things back in to perspective for them. Confidence is key – confidence in themselves, in the game plan, in you and in their training and you do what you need to do to make that happen.

Gareth Lewis
Head MMA Instructor
http://www.Lockdown.co.nz/

When you are watching two people sparring you have no idea how good they are until you are in there against them. When you get two top level guys sparring they look nothing special as their skills cancel each other out.

My first big lesson in this was when I went to train at Xtreme Couture in Vegas. At the time they had a live feed of the pro training, which I watched. You could tell the guys were good but from the footage I believed I could hang with them. This was based on my fight experience. When I got there I found out that the live feed did not demonstrate their timing or the subtle things that they did. And it is all the little things that separate the top guys from the rest of the pack.
Lesson two: sparring Ray Sefo. To put this in context I have sparred with some big names and have come across people who could beat me, but I have always been able to hang with them. Then I did sparring with Ray, who is someone truly world class – a K1 legend and 6 x World Champ. First round he was taking it easy, and then he picked it up each round until the fifth. In the fifth I was doing everything I could just to hang in there, but his speed and timing seemed to answer the question before I even asked it. It was the most out of my depth I have ever felt in any sport, and this is the one I was meant to be good at.

If someone had watched those sparring sessions, between Ray and I, they would think I was an absolute novice and would be easy to beat. Without question Ray is in a different class to me and made my defence look like Swiss cheese and my offence seem slow and inaccurate. Up against someone of this class every little mistake I made he made me pay, and luckily for me there are very few people of this skill level.

It is very similar to people who watch MMA and say ‘Just stand up’ or ‘Why don’t you just knee him in the head when they go for takedown’. If you haven’t been in there against a skilled opponent it does look easy, until you give it a go against them and find out how good they are.

If you get two BJJ black belts rolling against each other they can look average as they are of equal ability, and if you get those same guys and put them up against a blue belt they will look like killers. It is all relative to who you are up against – if you up against someone better you will look bad, against someone your level you will look average, and against someone worse than you you will look better – it’s all relative.

Gareth Lewis
Head MMA Instructor
http://www.Lockdown.co.nz/