Issue 015

July 2006

People often say to me “You’re so lucky to have the job you do. You get to travel around the UK, get into shows for free and meet all of the top fighters, and you keep your own hours. You’ve got it made!” I suppose this is all true, I am pretty lucky, but this month’s column isn’t about me bragging about how much I love my job (and I do love it, every single day). 

No, I write this column because from my privileged position I get to see a lot of what goes on in the business, both good and bad, and it pays to record these observations, let alone share them with you. Sometimes though, inspiration for these little ‘brain dumps’ comes from the strangest of places. Like in the case of this article, which came to me while I was looking in the mirror. How on earth did that inspire me to write an article? Well, it’s quite simple. I’m overweight! 

Now before you start thinking you’ve accidentally picked up your missus’ ‘Cosmo’, don’t get me wrong- I’m not bleating on like I’ve got a complex (far from it, I’m a lean mean hunk of a man, honest). As I said, I’m overweight- but don’t think this means I’m a blubbering mess with more curves than a Formula One race track, I’m just a little porky right now. 

I’m sitting around about 76kgs and the moment- that’s just short of 170lbs, or twelve stone. That doesn’t exactly sound a lot, but it is when you’re a natural lightweight like me. What a lot of readers may not realise is that I have actually been involved in MMA since way before I took this job. I began training MMA before I even knew it existed in this country, and I still train a fair bit. 

The problem facing me is that I, like a lot of the adult population in Britain, spend about 40 hours a week sitting on my ass. In my case, it is in front of a computer screen typing up articles just like this one. That’s not so good when you realise that you only spend around 4-6 hours in the gym each week! My other problem is that my lifestyle doesn’t exactly lend itself to being particularly healthy. Late nights, lots of travelling and plenty of drinks while ‘networking’ aren’t conducive to staying in shape. And while I was looking in the mirror at my expanding waistline, I started questioning why exactly I was getting so porky.  

MMA is one of the best kinds of overall fitness training you can do. That is a fact. If you break it down, a fighter must have the strength of a weight lifter, the explosiveness of a sprinter, the co-ordination of a ballet dancer and the balance and flexibility of a gymnast. When technical levels are closely matched, the athlete with the superior physical attributes is the one who will come out on top. 

You only have to look at the physiques of the top fighters to appreciate exactly how hard these guys train, and the level of fitness they are at. If you’re a MMA fighter, there are all sorts of conditioning exercises you must do, including strength work, cardiovascular training, stretching and plyometrics, not to mention the countless hours of technical work, drilling and rounds of sparring!

So if things like ‘Boxercise’ style classes and even aerobics classes based on kickboxing can make it into mainstream, can MMA do something similar? Think about it- in ten or twenty years time, could we see flabby housewives and out-of-shape office workers in an aerobics studio in an expensive gym, sat in mount on their designer pink brand-name floor bags, throwing out combinations as a rashguard clad fitness instructor shouts out.encouragement?

In all seriousness, training in MMA provides all the benefits of ‘normal’ gym work. The high aerobic demand means there is plenty of potential for burning off fat, the resistance training offered by trying to shift around a fully resisting human being beats picking up cold lumps of metal any day. Add to that the confidence you get from knowing that if it does kick off down the pub, you’ve got a far better chance of handling yourself than your mate who stills thinks Jacky Chan is the main man, means getting into MMA beats joining a fancy spa-type gym hands down.