The Benefits of Training MMA

For those of us who train MMA, the main focus is to upskill and become more practiced in making fewer mistakes. You are constantly trying to beat the people you train with. However, for those less competitively inclined, there are many more benefits than getting better at MMA.

MMA is physically hard – wrestling being the one of the hardest physical sports to participate in. The more you train, the stronger and fitter you get. Strength is an interesting part though. You can train with someone who can lift bigger weights but that does not mean that they are stronger on the mat. For example, people are hard to pick up (in a wrestling context) as they don’t want to be picked up, unlike a barbell.

The fitness aspect is great as well. When you just train cardio, like going for a run or having a specific workout, you have to be in the right mindset to really push (or at least I do). But the beautiful thing about MMA is that trying to avoid a bad position (or losing) is all the motivation to make you move. Then there is the best motivator of all: pain. There is nothing like pain to make you change what you’re doing. The fitness in MMA is very multifaceted, making for a difficult experience. You’re required to change levels, perform fast powerful movements, work on your timing and use fast and slow twitch fibres. While all this is happening, you’re also trying to use your brain to keep one step ahead of your opponent. Who, I might add, has no intention of taking it easy if you get tired. After all is said and done, MMA is one of my favourite and effective workouts.

Technique: You have can have all the physical gifts in the world but without technique, you will find that your MMA ceiling is very low. There is nothing more motivating than getting your ass whooped by a smaller and less athletic training partner. It makes you ask the question, what are they doing that I am missing? (a question that I still ask to this day). What you find is that the less athletic people pick up the technique quicker as they don’t have the athleticism to fall back on. Of course, there are athletic people who pick up the technique quickly and vice versa, but in general athletic people rely on their athleticism. The thing with technique when you start is that you don’t know it’s getting better until someone new turns up. This is because everyone else has been training longer and have an advantage over you so often you feel like you’re not getting anywhere. Then someone new turns up and you notice that they are doing all the dumb things you’ve done. As you get more experienced, the improvements still happen but the increases get smaller and smaller over time. But it still feels good when you get something new no matter how long you have been training.

One thing that MMA does better than any other martial art is humble you. I’ve trained in a few martial arts and nothing has brought me down to earth like this sport. In MMA you’re constantly getting beaten. In training there are people who you can beat in one area, then they kick your ass in another. Then you start training the individual sports by themselves (BJJ, Wrestling, Kickboxing) and even though you can put up a fight against most of them, you still get your ass kicked. Then there are people like me who seek out people that are better to learn from them. This makes a weird little spiral where you want to train with people that are better as it is motivating, but you also hate losing. In MMA you are getting taken down, tapped out and punched all the time. There is nothing like it to keep you humble.

One of the obvious benefits when training MMA is the self-defence aspect. We all know that a real-life situation is different from training. However, we also know that you will go a lot better in the real situation if you have some training. One of the biggest advantages you gain through training, is that you’ve been hit before. The idea of being hit (despite it being out of the controlled environment) is that it is no longer a radical idea; some of the surprise is taken away. Also, in MMA there are not many situations that you have not experienced so this means if it does happen for real, you should be able to react as you have been there before. You also have nothing to prove, you have had your ass kicked more times that you can count and you know that it hurts. None of us want to get into a scrap, but if we do, thank goodness that we have been training MMA as we will be a lot better off with it than without it.

The best part of MMA for me is meeting the people, you get all the stereotypes you can think of, of course. Then you get the people that do not fit the stereotype at all, and they surprise the hell out of you – this goes both ways of course. The relationships you build through training and especially fighting become very strong. You get to meet a lot of great people from many walks of life and almost all are good value. The relationships that I have built in MMA have easily been the highlight of all the years of training. Let’s face it, people that want to do this sport are unique and we are all a bit weird in the best way possible.

MMA has a lot of great things about it. The sport is not for everyone (just like anything else). Those that get involved though, tend to find it very addictive and enjoyable and it also really pisses us off (just like any good relationship).      

Gareth Lewis

Head MMA Instructor