Issue 043
November 2008
Some MMA fighters get in the cage and look terrible. Racked with nerves, bereft of technique, seemingly running on autopilot and oblivious to the advice of their cornermen, they are so bad that you often ask yourself ‘Why is that person even in there?’
Talk to the fighter’s teammates or coaches and you often hear the same song. “I don’t know what happened, he’s never normally like that”, “He’s way better than what you saw tonight”, and the old favourite, “He’s a monster in the gym”. When you hear those magic words, that they are better in the gym than they are in the cage, you’re usually dealing with a gym fighter.
Most fans won’t be too familiar with this phenomenon. Unless you’ve spent a considerable amount of time around a real, working, professional fight gym, the term might not mean anything to you, so allow me to elaborate.
The gym fighter is a member of the mixed martial arts family, but can also be found in boxing and Muay Thai. Its natural habitat is the cosy confines of the home gym, where familiarity with its surroundings allow it to grow confident in its abilities and develop high-level techniques, which it combines with no small amount of talent. Usually a high-ranking member of the pack, the gym fighter is characterised by glowing recommendations from others but a habitual inability to live up to expectations.
Forgive the David Attenborough interlude there, but that’s it in a nutshell. A gym fighter is someone who is, as I said, a ‘monster’ in the gym, but just can’t carry that same level of performance into a competitive environment. They exist at all levels across the board, and have left fans scratching their heads in confusion for time immemorial.
Exactly why some fighters are better in the gym than they are in the cage is subject to debate, but a few factors can usually be expected. The gym fighter might simply lack the competitive spirit required to get in there and do the business. Stepping into a cage isn’t difficult, any fool with a pair of four-ounce gloves and a groin guard can do it. The real test comes when the bell rings and you find yourself locked in a cage with someone intent on causing you real physical damage. Faced with this prospect, a fighter’s psyche can crumble, and with it goes all the fancy technique they use day in day out in the gym.
Some might suffer from nerves prior to the fight. Unable to cope with the slow release of adrenaline that occurs over the days and weeks before fight time, they lose focus and enter the cage feeling drained before a single punch has even been thrown. They appear sluggish, their technique lacks precision and they struggle to defend their opponent’s attacks, often giving up without even having fully fought back. The monster appears without any fangs.
So how does a gym fighter deal with their problems? What is it they can do to overcome the barriers that are stopping them from achieving their full potential?
One answer is sports psychology. An often-misunderstood science, sports psychology is best described as ‘strength and conditioning for the mind’. Many of the sport’s top fighters and athletes from across the board benefit from working with sports psychologists. Contrary to popular belief, sports psychology is not psychotherapy. A fighter’s success or failure in the cage will not be traced back to the loss of their favourite stuffed toy as a child. Instead, sports psychology provides a set of tools that helps a fighter focus their attention, deal with nerves and cope with things that don’t go their way.
For all the things that can be done, some fighters are destined to be gym fighters. No matter what, some guys just can’t pull it together in the ring. These fighters are often tremendously useful to have around though, as they provide quality sparring for other members of their team. Sometimes gym fighters channel their talents into coaching, and achieve a kind of success by proxy instead.
In this universe of black and white, rich and poor, happy and sad, there is always an exact opposite. Fans of the sport might be completely unaware of this, but sometimes even the greatest of fighters can flat-out suck in the gym. They get smashed up, knocked about, tapped out and beat down. If you saw them training, you might wonder how on earth they ever made it as a professional fighter. But when they step into the cage, something magical happens: the fighter channels their energy and entire focus on the task before them and performs to levels you would never expect had you seen them only a few weeks before.
What you see in the cage is only a fraction of reality, a slice of truth presented to you in an often-deceptive way. Bear this in mind next time a fighter fails to live up to expectations – they might be a gym fighter.
