If you’re like most people and have an innate fear of fighting, the best way to get over it is to get into a couple of brawls. You don’t want to go out and slap a guy who’s eating dinner with his family because that’s just fucked up, but you’d be surprised how easy it is to find a willing participant when in the mood to scrap. For example, I was sitting in a bar in Athens, Georgia, not long ago, and this kid comes up and gives me this funny look.
“Man, I would really like to fight you,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Cool,” I said. “Meet me in the bathroom in five minutes.” It probably sounded gay (homosexual gay) to everyone else in the bar.
So after a couple of minutes, I head to the bathroom, and sure enough, he’s in there waiting for me. I walk over to the sinks, take my watch off, put it in my hat, and then set my hat in the sink. I began shaking my arms out, waiting for this kid to back down and say something like, “Oh, I was just messing with you.” After all, he wasn’t a big dude, and he didn’t appear to have much scrap in him. I kept waiting and waiting, and then I saw his hands go up and his feet move. Shit, I thought. This kid has got some basic boxing. He seems to know what he’s doing. Without any hesitation, I rushed him. I hadn’t realized that my friend Vern was at a urinal taking a leak. We crashed into him, causing him to piss everywhere. Not wanting to upset him any further, I pulled the kid into the clinch, he forced me against the wall, and I began dropping body shots as hard as I could with both fists. Eventually, I connected with a good one, he let a murmuring sound go, and then dropped into a heap on the floor. I went back to the sink, put my stuff back on, and then returned to the bar.
I told my friend Rory what had gone down, and he didn’t believe me. “You’re not some dumb-ass who gets into street fights in the bar bathroom,” he said. “You’re smarter than that.”
“No, I’m not,” I returned.
A few minutes later the kid comes up to me and outstretches a beer. “I saw you’re drinking New Castle, and I bought you one.”
“This is the kid I fought,” I said to Rory.
“You just fight him?” Rory asked the kid.
“Yeah.”
It was all so nonchalant. No one got seriously hurt, and no one had any hard feelings. The whole thing went so well that when a drunk college student asked me to wrestle in another bar later that night, I took him up on his offer. The funny part is that when I went back to Athens a year later and paid a visit to the Hardcore MMA gym, I saw both of these guys training. I’m pretty certain that they both had joined after our encounters, and I thought about asking the Hardcore Gym for some type of commission. Anyway, the moral of this story is that street fighting isn’t that big of a deal, so there is no reason to let your fear hinder your going out to the bars with your old lady. If you get whomped on, so what. A black eye will disappear and a broken nose can be mended. Fear is a good thing because it keeps you alive, but if it becomes so great that it hinders you from doing what you want, you need to confront it head-on…. With that said, if you lose or get stabbed, I will tell everyone that I told you street fighting is stupid.
A Self-Defense Tip for the Ladies
(and the Prison Bound)
One of the best experiences of my life was when I taught a self-defense class to a group of freshmen law students at the University of Georgia. There were approximately thirty hot chicks in workout clothes, and I had them simulating raping one another. I kept shouting, “Come on, ladies, get your rape on!” But in all seriousness, it is important for women to learn at least some basic self-defense to protect themselves from the drooling perverts of the world. For the three women who’ve actually purchased this book, I’ve provided the “get up” move in the technique portion of this book that allows you to escape off your back. (If you are a dude who took my advice about getting into street fights to shatter your fear and are now being sent off to prison, you might also want to learn this technique to prevent, or at least delay, the inevitable man love you will receive in the other kind of cage.)
Dude, You Don’t Always Have to Go Jackhammer
If you’re passionate about fighting, you want to do everything in your power to prepare for a big bout. With your career and years of hard work on the line, it can be tempting to go to the gym three or four times a day. Although this can sometimes be beneficial, it is important to recognize when you are overtraining. If you don’t listen to your body and continue to push yourself to the extreme, you’ll do more harm than good.
Some of the Symptoms of Overtraining
1) You’ve never felt this weak.
2) You’re having trouble sleeping.
3) You experience a loss of appetite.
4) Weight loss beyond the norm.
5) Excessive muscle pain and cramping.
6) A noticeable loss in work capacity.
7) An abnormally high resting heart rate first thing in the morning. (In order to know that your heart rate is abnormally high, you must have a standard to judge by, which means monitoring your heart rate prior to your fatigued state.)
8) A curbed sex drive.
If you’ve put a check mark next to all, most, or even some of the above, you’re either admitting to overtraining or your best friends are Samuel Adams, Ben and Jerry, and your favorite watering hole is your couch (which is disgusting). But I don’t know jack balls about Jenny Craig and how she helps fat people get their cottage-cheese thighs off the sofa, so let’s go with “overtraining,” which I know something about because I had this “friend” who found “himself” in this predicament…
Putting a stop to your training altogether is not the answer to restoring your virility, gentlemen. Instead, take a pause and try doing less of the most demanding exercises or drills in your regimen, replacing them with restoration training. For full-body fatigue or soreness, you’ll want to do total-body activities, such as working out on the elliptical climber, an arc trainer, or a versa climber—something that involves both your arms and legs. The goal is to maintain a heart rate between a hundred and a hundred and twenty beats per minute for an extended amount of time to promote restorative blood flow throughout all peripheral links. Intensity is measured by your heart rate, so as long as you don’t go above a hundred and twenty beats per minute, the intensity will place a very small demand on your body. If you get your heart rate too high, the energy demand changes. The next zone up from the restorative one is cardiac efficiency—go above that and you begin to work the aerobic system, and when your heart rate gets really high, it becomes anaerobic exercise. While it is important to routinely push your heart rate up to these levels, you want to remain in the restorative zone until your fatigue dissipates.
If you feel fatigued or overly sore in one particular muscle, you’ll want to pick an exercise that replicates the particular movement that made you sore in the first place and perform excessive repetitions (this does not apply to beating off, for all you mad whackers). Just as with overall fatigue, you want to keep your heart rate between a hundred and a hundred and twenty beats per minute. When you do this exercise at a low intensity for an extended amount of time, you promote local blood flow to those specific tissues. For example, if your chest and arms are sore, you can get on the bench press and execute repetitions with just the weight of the bar. Of course how much weight you use is relative to how strong you are. At most, you want to do repetitions with 30 percent of the maximum weight you can press. The load should be heavy enough to stimulate the muscles, but light enough not to yield an excessive demand. When done properly, the local blood flow will restore your muscles and you’ll be back to hard-core training in no time.
In addition to restoration exercises, it is also important to pamper your body when it’s been overtrained. Personally, I follow the RICE recovery method, which is an acronym for rest, ice, compression, and elevation. Football trainers live by RICE. If you go to them with a broken ankle, all they’ll say is, “Rice it, baby!” When my joints are sor
e, I’ll frequently take ice baths because they cause the muscles to contract and squeeze out the lactic acid. Climbing into water that contains three twenty-pound bags of ice will undoubtedly shrink your cock ’n balls (or in my case, cock ’n ball—yes, I only have one nut) into a tightly constricted wad of cold turkey meat, but you always feel fresher coming out. I’ll also do contrast baths, where I go back and forth between a cold tub of water and a hot shower.
Whether you’ve made the decision to become a professional fighter, an amateur fighter, or simply want to chisel your abs, which are now covered by a mound of cookie dough and lard, you have to take care of your body. It can be time-consuming and often inconvenient, but it’s absolutely mandatory. For you pro-fighter wannabes, if you get into hand-to-hand combat with visions of fame and glory at the forefront of your half brain, you’re in the wrong business, brother.
Training Is Like a Threesome—
(It’s Best to Be in the Middle)
I like the idea of two chicks and one Forrest just as much as you do, Abner, Al, Billy Bob, and Butch. (Wondering how I knew your names? ’Cause if you’re reading this, chances are your parents could only afford one page out of the baby-naming book, so the pickin’s are slim.) But this section ain’t about anything remotely sexual. And if that doesn’t come across, chances are you screwed up the porn-mag section and the how-to book aisle again.
Training with the right group of guys is extremely important to becoming a successful mixed martial artist. You don’t want to be the best guy in the room, nor do you want to be the worst. If you’re the best, no one will push you, and you won’t grow nearly as fast as you could. In some cases, you won’t grow at all. On the flip side, you also don’t want to be the worst guy in the gym because you’ll only experience constant ass kickings. It’s discouraging and your game will be built solely on defense. To get the most out of your training, you want to be the guy right in the middle. At Xtreme Couture, I’m that guy. I’ll train with some of the less experienced guys to work positioning and my submissions, but then I’ll roll with Robert Drysdale, a world-champion jujitsu practitioner, and work on my ability to survive against a superior grappler. I get my taste of victory, which keeps me motivated, and I also experience defeat, which pisses me off enough to push myself harder.
At some point, you may become the top dog in the gym, and it is important to be able to spot this changing of the guard. When it happens, you want to bring better people in to train with. This is what Randy Couture does—when training for a fight, he brings in people who are better than him in specific areas of fighting. If you don’t have the luxury of doing this, the next best thing is to do rounds where you constantly rotate in fresh fighters. When you’re gassed, a fresh fighter with half your skill has the ability to beat you, which in turn continues to promote growth. I know that becoming the best fighter in your camp is rewarding because it signifies all the hard work you’ve invested, but if you’re a professional fighter, winning only counts in the cage. Practice is the time for learning and growing. It’s time to push yourself beyond your limits and train your mind not to quit, and the only way you can accomplish this is to receive your fair share of beat-downs.
Filling the Holes…in Your Game, Spanky
Training the weakest part of your game requires the most willpower. For me, wrestling is undoubtedly the thing I suck at most when it comes to MMA. Unlike a lot of fighters, I haven’t wrestled since I was two. My muscles aren’t conditioned for the movements, and as a result I get dog-ass tired every time I do it. For the longest time, I ignored wrestling as though it were a nasty case of the crabs.
When the sport became my career, I quickly learned the importance of training the weakest part of your game, and I began forcing myself to wrestle on a regular basis. Over the past three years, I’ve noticed a sizable improvement. However, I probably would have made much larger gains had I not found escapes from this positive process of fixing holes in my game. The escape in question came in the form of injuries. If my elbow was acting up, the first thing I would skip was wrestling practice. You can bet your ass I suffered through striking and jujitsu practice, but when it came time to wrestle, my elbow would somehow suddenly hurt worse. Fuck it, I’d think, I got to rest this injury. I’ll pick wrestling back up when it gets better.
The problem is that when you’re a professional MMA fighter, you’re injured all the time, and those injuries become an excuse to skip the parts of training you enjoy least. I’m not the only one who does it—I see it all the time with fighters. When Kale Yarbrough was on the Ultimate Fighter TV show, his knee was all jacked up. He is primarily a striker, and on the days we trained stand-up, he was right there in the mix, suffering through the pain. On the days we trained jujitsu, he’d sit out and nurse his injury.
If you don’t have a fight coming up for four or five months, this is the wrong approach. The off-season should be spent on improving your weaknesses. Your time is actually very limited because a month or two before the battle, you should put your weaknesses aside and focus instead on fight-specific techniques. For example, if I have a fight coming up with a wrestler, two months before the bout I will spend my days perfecting the art of sprawling and escaping back to my feet should I get taken down. I’ll spar with wrestlers and work on throwing punches as they come forward and kicks as they backpedal, but I won’t spend nearly as much time actually wrestling because it’s the last thing I want to do in the fight.
In order to continue to improve while injured, you’ve got to make sacrifices. If you’re like me and wrestling is your primary weakness, go to wrestling practice but sit out when it’s time to do striking. If you’re a lousy kickboxer, go to striking practice and spar, but take a break when it comes time to wrestle. I have recently adopted this strategy, and although at times it’s very difficult, I have noticed much larger gains in the areas of my game that need fixing.
BOOK 2
THE MENTAL
We are dying from overthinking
—ANTHONY HOPKINS
He who hesitates, masturbates
—STOLEN BY FORREST FROM SOMEONE HE BEAT UP (HE’S PRETTY SURE)
If you overthink something long enough, you’re almost guaranteed to suck at it big-time. For example, let’s say the chick you’ve had a crush on since the second grade staggers up to you at a party and whispers in your ear, “I want you to screw my lights out.” What do you do? You lead her to the nearest empty space and proceed to knock that ass out of the park. She experiences the best you can give, and you walk away feeling like a king. Now, let’s say that same girl comes up to you on a Monday afternoon and says, “This weekend at the Christmas party, I want you to bang me stupid.” If you’re like most males, you smile, tap her confidently on one butt cheek, and immediately begin plotting all the nasty ways you will pleasure her. The problem is, nine times out of ten you don’t come up with a solid game plan and then leave it, secure that your first effort is the right one. No, that would be far too simple. You play the scenario over and over again, perhaps even draw up a few diagrams. Come Friday afternoon, you’ve re-created the scene so many times that you’re all fucked up in the head. You begin to doubt your ability to pleasure her at all. When it actually comes time to do the deed, performance anxiety has made you its bitch. That ass becomes a dark, alien world, and you stumble blindly through it searching for the G-spot. She goes away having experienced your absolute worst, and you go home feeling like a pissant, piece of shit, limp-dick motherfucker.
Overthinking a fight can be just as detrimental. When I was a kid, I won the first fight I ever got into because there was no time for analytical thought. The Billy badass of the school came up to me and socked me in the face, and I reacted by tackling him to the ground. I had no clue what the mount position was back then, but that’s where I ended up. I delivered several stiff head butts to his face, busting him up and immediately causing him to break into tears. The teachers yanked me off him, but they didn’t seem mad. They were too stunned.
I was a quiet, nonviolent kid, yet I had just slapped a major beat-down on the school terror. Even the principal was shocked; all she could say was, “Don’t do that again.”
I didn’t do that again, but it wasn’t because I thought fighting was wrong. I was one of the only white kids in Monosana, an all-black school (I know, sooo cliché. If I ever meet Eminem, I’m going to punch him in the melon for ruining my “only white kid” bit), and if I had been a scrapping machine, I would have saved myself a lot of torment. The reason I didn’t deliver any more ass kickings is that no one else stepped toward me with his fists clenched. They always approached me with trash talk, such as, “I’m gonna punch a hole through your face, bitch.” Instead of analyzing if such an act was even possible, I would automatically believe him. I’d think, Shit, this kid is gonna punch a hole in my face. It didn’t matter if he was half my size and the biggest wimp on the planet. I’d automatically back down. If that same kid had simply charged me, I probably would have turned his face into ground beef, but by talking shit, he gave me time to think about all the possible outcomes. I mean, come on, who wants to get a hole punched in their face? It was even worse when someone called me out early in the day, because then I’d sit there in class and think about it for the next four hours. By the time school got out, performance anxiety had turned me into the biggest bitch on the planet.
Got Fight? Page 7
