Good day vs bad day

What determines a good day or a bad day at training? Is it caused by your day at work? An argument with your partner or how you slept? What you ate, or didn’t eat? What is the cause of a good or bad session? Since MMA comprises largely of three different disciplines, all of which can be practiced individually, it is easy to have a good or bad session within these disciplines which make up MMA.

Striking
A good night of striking usually involves avoiding your opponent’s strikes, reading them well and generally just enjoying yourself. When you get hit you don’t really notice as everything else is going so well. Mostly, you are relaxed and not forcing anything – just going through the process with success. In opposition to this, however, is a bad night; everything you try just does not seem to work. Your head movement seems to be letting you down as you find yourself moving into more punches than avoiding, you have a metal head and they have magnets in their gloves. You see a jab coming so you move your head to the right, the jab is actually a left hook and you move right into it. At some point you get angry and try to force things and throw harder, but all that happens is you get tired and get hit more often.

Wrestling
On a good night, you are moving well, your feet feel light, your hips are heavy, and your timing is on point. When you go for a move it doesn’t seem to matter if you get it or not as you automatically move on to the second phase and eventually get the takedown. Or at worst, end up in a stalemate position where you can start again. On a bad night, your feet are stuck in mud, when your opponent attacks, you see it, but your feet don’t seem to move. When you defend a move, you go for a transition and get caught and get caught in moves that you never get caught with. When attacking, you slide off the leg when going for a single legs, slide off arms with under hooks and hit your head on their shoulder when they do a fake double leg.

BJJ
On a good night, you roll, and your opponent just falls into submissions. If you don’t get a submission, you win most of your transitions – it is easy to get a high percentage of your sweeps. When rolling, you just seem to be doing the right move at the right time and end up in good positions. On a bad night you are tapping more than Fred Astaire. You are being controlled by people you usually beat then when you do escape, they do something that puts you back in another bad spot. Then you get tapped out by that person on the mat who you just hate tapping to.

MMA
On a good night your level changes are on point, you’re dictating where the fight goes while getting takedowns at will and defending takedown attempts well. You control the rounds while dictating the positions and distance that you want; nothing is forced. On a bad night however, you are getting hit with small gloves by people you usually beat, so you go for the takedown and they defend it. This makes you a little confused and angry, so you force the takedown and try something different which does not go well. You lose position and you start over again, just with more frustration.

Over the years I have had many good nights and even more bad nights. There doesn’t seem to be a common factor that causes it either. I have been in a great mood with good energy and had a shocker, I have been in a bad mood with energy as flat as a pancake which turned out to be a good session. Therefore, energy and mood, in my experience, haven’t affected my sessions dramatically, so other factors play into this. From a technical point of view, how do you go from one night picking up transitions, avoiding attacks, getting a lot of success to a night where you are missing transitions, getting caught and getting owned against the same people that you were against 24hrs earlier? Is it simply the fact that your opponent is having the opposite to you (your good night against their bad night and vice versa?). To get some kind of control over good and bad sessions, I try to set the tone and get a good warm up round. For example, one thing that can work for me is going against someone I can trust in the first round, whether that be in wrestling, striking or BJJ. This allows me to warm up and work things without the worry of the other person being a dick. I find if I go against a beginner for a first round in sparring, sometimes they feel they have something to prove and because I am just getting into things, I usually get hit a lot then get angry and frustrated. As they are a beginner you can’t just fire back as that is a dick move on my part. On the flip side, if I go against one of the good guys that wants to go hard, I get hit and try to fire back but as I am not warmed up (sparring mentality wise) this fails as well. Both of these will get me in a bad mood. Therefore I am looking for my first round guy to just get the work in, then after that I am fine. Lately there has been a change in my mentality with bad nights, they used to really get to me down and I would ruminate on what I did wrong (to put it politely). Now, after a bad session I look back on what I did and what I can change. The most important thing when you are having a bad session is to understand what it is – a bad night. A bad session is nothing other than a bad session, it just happens sometimes, so when it does, look at what you can control and place your effort there. Anyone can keep pushing when things are going well, but think how much you will improve when you give it everything for every round when you are having a bad session rather than sit out rounds. On the flip side, think about a good night, make the most of it and work your skills as much as you can. If you are really dominating against people then back off a little and let them have some good positions and work your defence/escapes as on a good night you are not going to have many problems, and if you do have problems, they don’t seem to bother you as much on a good night. These thoughts are all doubled when training for a fight, the highs are higher (I am the champion of the world) and the lows are lower (I am the worst fighter in the world). Keep your head level and your effort up no matter how the session is going.

Gareth Lewis
Head MMA Instructor