1. Preparing for a fight.
a. I want to fight. How do I get there?
First of all, a person needs to understand what being a fighter involves. Once the person is okay with the general idea of it, then the person needs to understand aspects of the sport. This first comes from falling in love with the sport, because if a person doesn’t have passion for it or if they’re doing it because of the wrong reasons, they won’t be successful. Explaining that straight away to someone who comes into a gym and says they want to fight is the right way. There’s no point in lying to each other if you want to do things the right way. I don’t want to sign someone up just to get a fee from them, I want to sign them up because I want to get results out of them. You need to set people right mentally so you’ll have the right material to work with. Some people come in and they ask, ‘I just want to fight’, not even understanding what is involved. They need to understand that. Verbally, they need to have it explained fully. Physically, they need to understand the commitment in increments, bit by bit – you don’t want to put unbearable stress on a person. Once they start getting decent pressure on them, they will understand if they can do it or cannot do it. Before someone experiences pressure, you still don’t know what you’re working with. That’s why you have old school gyms where they pretty much test the fighter at an early stage and they know if they should spend time on him or not. There are certain people who simply have issues in their life that is not setting them on the right path to become successful fighters, and so they usually fail. It’s better in that case focusing on something else that will help them to overcome their problems or issues rather than trying to fix that up in the wrong way. It’s very important to get people to learn technique first. Once a person understands what fighting involves, the next thing is technique. Technique is something that stays over a period of time, whereas pushing fitness as a primary thing is not important. That approach is simply sentenced to fail because fitness is something that just comes and goes. If you don’t train yourself and prepare yourself for a fight, you won’t be fit but even when you sit, a decent fighter who sits down for one month and does nothing, he still has a good level of technique. I believe that a person should first learn technique, if he’s physically capable of it, if they’re built for the sport, so first you learn technique, then gradually start getting the physical load on him or her so they can get into it and understand the physical aspects of it, and then those things will go together.