On my last blog, I shared a little moment in time on one of my fighters’ biggest days. The most important part of that moment is how his brain turned on after my comment.
I have been able to do that with Dominick since he fought Charlie Valencia. I was not able to do that with him prior to that. Having an athlete that is programmable, has to do with an athlete trusting and believing in what his coaches have designed for him.
I’m going to talk about three different fighters that I coach. They are all at different levels of their careers right now, but they are all programmable.
Let me start with Phil “Mr. Wonderful” Davis. Phil is fairly new to the game of MMA. He is an athlete in every sense of the word. This kid has to be challenged in order for his brain to stay focused. Phil has huge accomplishments in wrestling. His last year in college, he was 2008 NCAA National Champion. Phil came to train with me over a year ago and I knew he was going to be a handful, mostly because he had such a huge list of accomplishments already. To my surprise he was very open minded. Just in case he wasn’t, I needed to see how he would react if I took his strongest asset (wrestling) and made it to where he couldn’t use it effectively. So our first training session was “Wrestling Day”. After our warm up drills I had him go three rounds of open mat wrestling with Brandon Vera. As expected, Phil was a beast and had Brandon working his ass off to stop takedowns and mount offense with Phil getting the better of it. After the three rounds we took one round off for a water break. Continuing for the second part of this training session we went in the octagon cage for three more rounds of wrestling. Brandon stuffed 98% of his takedowns and took Phil down a couple of times. Phil was not able to control Brandon at all, not like open mat wrestling.
What I was hoping to accomplish with that training session was to see what would happen when you take a world class wrestler, have him use his best weapon, and have it be shut down completely with the assistance of the cage. What happened was Phil’s mind was again stimulated and he found the challenge that he was looking for.
Fast forward a couple of months and Phil gets his first UFC fight against a very tough and seasoned Brian Stann. For that fight we had a very basic, yet very effective game plan if executed properly. The mental preparation I did for Phil was simple. I already knew the kid knew how to compete. He has been in front of huge audiences before and has felt the huge pressures of competition, but fighting in the UFC brings its own challenges. Phil was now fighting in front of millions and had only been training a year. The last few days before the fight we went over the size of the cage; how flexible the fence is, how slippery the mat is when you go to shoot for a takedown, and where your corner men will be seated so you can focus on our voice. I wanted Phil to have no surprises, I wanted him to feel like he had been there before. The game plan was to keep it standing until Phil found his range and set up takedowns with strikes. Simple right? Well he made it look amazing. Why? Every combination that was thrown with a sequence takedown, was drilled over and over again. He had memorized every combination to takedown or every counter to strike or takedown. He listened to his corner and he was reacting to our every word. You can hear me call the combination and he executes. After the first round his confidence grew more with every minute that went by. His combinations and his takedowns looked sharper every round. Brian Stann is as tough as they come, so he wasn’t able to finish him but at the same time it was great that he got those full 15 minutes in and felt that experience.
As soon as his second fight was booked by UFC, we sat down, looked at his opponent and I said, “You have to finish this fight in the first round. If it goes out of the first round, we are failing as a team.” So what did Phil do? Finished the fight with a few seconds left in the first round. Talk about a programmable athlete. I was able to demand that he finish the second fight only because the first fight had built his confidence in himself and his team.
Having a programmable athlete makes coaching easy!. This is one example of developing the mental connection between fighter and coach. Like I said at the beginning I was able to establish that connection with Dominick in camp before he fought Valencia, and after that fight he believed 100%. We will go over that story next. Last will be Danny Martinez, who has been in my camp a little over a month now. He is fairly new to us so his progress is a lot more complicated, in a good way. I will share some insight as to where I am with his development. He is a seasoned vet that is finding a whole new way of looking at this sport.
