Gym Culture

I've trained at lots of gyms all around the world. I've trained all over Europe, in the USA, Brazil, Japan and Thailand  I have tried to pick up all the best elements of each place i've trained while avoiding the things I felt didn't work.

My dream was to create a gym with high level training in striking, grappling and MMA. I'd been to many places that had excellent BJJ but non existent or very limited striking, or MMA gyms which had fighters but no real technical BJJ or Striking training.

The things that I've tried to do which I believe will lead us to being one of the best teams in the world include the following.

Train Smart

Smart Training methods - Not just everyone smashing each other in every session. Using progressive resistance and trying to learn and improve with each round of sparring or rolling rather than treating every round like a fight.

Fundamentals

Focus on important fundamental techniques - We work on high percentage techniques 99% of the time. If you get those working well then its easy to add the rubber guards, berimbolos and flying heel hooks to your game. If you start with the fancy flavour of the month techniques you'll never get them to work.

Keep Getting Better

Focus on continual improvement - working on getting better every session, improving your game by 1% every day and after a year you'll be 365% better. This is a long slow process but you get better results than just training hard for 4 weeks leading up to a fight and then slacking off.

Team Culture

We have a culture of more experienced members helping the new guys and turning them into better training partners - This benefits everyone, New people get better quicker and experienced people have more quality training partners. The opposite to this is gyms where the people who've been training for 6 months consider themselves too good to waste their time on the new people.

The Right Atmosphere

We have a friendly atmosphere - Theres no need to convince people that you're a tough guy if you actually have the fights, wins and belts to prove it. Toughness is how you train and fight not how you act.

We still maintain the atmosphere of a martial arts academy. Everyone lines up, follows the rules, shows respect to their training partners, keeps the place clean and hygienic.

Respect 

We don't disrespect other gyms or teams. I think if you spend all your time talking about how bad other gyms or teams are it shows insecurity, we focus on making ourselves and our students the best that they can be in every session rather than worrying about what others are doing.

Check out this Documentary about our Team and our BJJ Program:

http://deniskellymmacoaching.blogspot.com.au/2016/09/team-nemesis-documentary.html

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Mental Toughness for Fighters

Here is a short interview which I recently did with one of my clients who is completing a sports science degree regarding mental toughness and mental preparation in combat sports. 

How do you define "mental toughness"? 

I would define mental toughness in sports as ability to reproduce an athletes best performance under adverse & unfavorable conditions such as stress, pain or fear of injury. 

What do you believe contributes to mental toughness (e.g. nature vs. nurture, experiences, environments, upbringing)? 

The main contributing factor in developing mental toughness is gaining experience in overcoming obstacles. When an athlete repeatedly comes up against tough experiences and is able to overcome them he will develop mental toughness & confidence which will help him overcome further challenges & tough experiences in the future. It is important that an athlete is gradually tested against tougher opposition. In terms of combat sports this would mean starting off sparring against opponents who are on a similar or lower level and then gradually increasing the level of sparring partners as the athletes confidence & ability increases. It is important that the athlete is not just continually sparring people who he can beat & don’t present a challenge. This may boost his confidence but will give him a false sense of security & his lack of mental toughness will be exposed when he comes up against tougher opposition. The other side of this is that if the athlete is sparring against opponents who are too experienced for him it may be detrimental and lead to him losing confidence in his abilities and ruin his potential for developing mental toughness. 

How do you try to instil mental toughness in your athletes? 

To help build mental toughness in my athletes I like to use several types of sparring drills & exercises, these may include. 

• Line ups - these involve sparring against a group of fresh opponents one after another. This is tough for the athlete as he is already fatigued from the previous rounds & needs to still perform well against fresh opponents. 
• Fight Simulation Drills / Circuits - This involves placing the athlete in a series of disadvantageous positions for a set period of time which he must escape from or complete a set task before progressing to the next station. 
• Winner Stays On Sparring - This involves a group of sparring partners & an objective such as scoring a take-down or submission, this will result in the winner then having to spar against a new opponent & trying to stay in against new opponents for as long as possible. 
• Conditioning exercises such as sprints or 'burpees' done at the end of the training session when the athlete is already fatigued and trying to get the athlete to keep going & outworking his training partners. 

Do you think there are any downfalls to being mentally tough? 

Athletes who are very mentally tough may be likely to push themselves to extreme lengths and may take excessive risks such as continuing to train or compete in-spite of injury. There is also a risk in combat sports that an athlete may allow himself to take excessive punishment rather than quitting. This is obviously very dangerous and can be fatal in some cases.

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