When I talk about "properly training" I am stating that a once a week strip mall karate class or some biweekly Judo at the YMCA doesn't count. I am talking about the sort of training that is meant to get you in competitive shape for MMA. When I was in my late teens and early 20's this was something I took a great interest in and I am still to this day a bit surprised that I decided to do it because MMA was in its infancy at the time. UFC was still banned in most places in the world and even the few fights that I participated in seemed as though they were illegal. I left the industry after suffering a horrible KO concussion and was advised by doctors to not participate in this anymore because I could have permanent brain damage or even die if i continued.
I "retired" with a professional record of 1-2 and while that isn't super impressive, it is still one more professional fighting wins than anyone else I know in my life and therefore I am pleased with it.
Real training is brutal. This isn't waiting your turn while the sensei has you break boards in front of your parents in order to get a belt that you totally don't deserve, it seems the objective is to turn you into a machine that feels no pain and never runs out of energy.
I didn't really know what to choose as my main focus in MMA so at first I entered a Wing Chun Kung Fu school where they basically kick the crap out of you for 2 hours in a row 3 times a week. This was fun, it made you seriously tough and able to take a punch but I didn't feel as though it had much practical application in competitive MMA. Also, a lot of the guys in the class were fat yet they were the more advanced students. This didn't make sense to me and I realized that this was basically a strip-mall karate class for teenagers and young adults. I talked to some of the other guys and decided to get involved with Muay Thai and kickboxing instead. The difference between this sort of training and Kung Fu, was absolutely immense.
Gotta have endurance before any of your strikes are going to matter
This is what the instructor of my Muay Thai class told me in the morning of my first day of training. Myself and about 11 other people had signed up for the introductory course and these words were said to us in a pleasant way by a stoic but friendly trainer who looked like he could change a tire without tools. We then went on a run that the trainer lead us on and I don't think I had ever run as long as I did that day. We ran just over 15km before we event started training with strikes. At first I thought that maybe this was just to weed out the weaklings and see who was serious and that we wouldn't be doing that on a regular basis but no man, that is how every single session started every single day. Needless to say about half of the guys involved stopped attending after a week or so. For those of us that stuck around though, after about 2 weeks of this the run didn't seem all that difficult anymore and after 2 months most of us didn't really even consider it a high level of exercise.
The basics of Muay Thai at my school was after doing this run, you would line up with a heavy bag and do kicks hundreds of times in a row. We would do this until it seemed like we couldn't possibly lift our legs up again. Then we would rest, get some water, have a pep talk from the trainer, and go and do something similar to that again and again and again. After a while you don't feel as though your legs are capable of feeling pain anymore and they are just numb. You also put on a ton of muscle and just get shredded AF.
Make no mistake here, this is extremely difficult and not many people can hack it. Most people drop out. For a select few, you start to enjoy the fact that you are turning your body into a weapon and you push harder and harder to become as fit as you possibly can. Just like the trainer said on day one, if you don't have endurance, it doesn't matter how good you are at striking. This is especially noticeable in a sport like Muay Thai where almost all strikes are blocked because that is the nature of the game.
I never made it to the level like you can watch on TV, I don't think that even my trainer would have been capable of competing on that level, but if you do watch it you will notice that almost everything is blocked by the other guy, the question is who can continue to throw these punches and kicks the longest? The person with the deepest gas tank almost always wins in any fight of considerable length because it takes a lot of energy to dish out kicks while also blocking them.
Sparring is important, cardio is importanter
It is important but not something that should be done for anyone that is just starting out. You wear a ton of protective gear at first but honestly, there really isn't any reason to be doing this until you have been taught some sort of meaningful level of throwing strikes. Otherwise we just have two goons out there that are wildly throwing punches and kicks with no real plan. That might work in a street fight against someone with no training at all, but it just gets you beat up in a ring.
Sparring wasn't something that my class did with any sort of seriousness until after 3 months of training 4 days a week.
Make no mistake, for anyone that decides to take this on seriously, it will likely be the most difficult thing you ever do in your life. It takes a level of dedication and discipline that I don't think most people possess. Most people drop out or don't take it seriously enough and never even get asked to compete in anything. It took me over a year before I was invited to do any sort of competition and by that point, I was an absolute machine. I was 170 lbs and that was my true fighting weight. However, to give me an edge we still cut weight to 165 and this was a horrible experience as well. That's something I will write about in greater detail later on.
These days I think that MMA is probably more popular in a participation sense than it has ever been before and this is potentially a good thing. However, I do believe that most people that enter real schools and not just some casual program at their local gym will end up quitting before they ever reach any real level of ability. The way that you learn to be good at striking is by doing it so much that it isn't something that you actually even think about - you just react. There is no way to get to that point without extensive training and of course, tremendous cardio.
I can't nail that point home enough. An average fighter with tremendous cardio will defeat a master who is out of shape almost all the time. Just look at Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson for proof of that.