Are you crippled by first fight fears? Here’s how you can beat the butterflies so you can sting like a bee in the cage.
It’s your first fight and you feel sick to your stomach but you need to focus. Forget the fact that you’re surrounded by eight walls of chain-link fencing and the only way out just shut behind you.
Forget standing across the mat is a guy with nothing but an inch of padding between his fist and your face. Try to remember that this guy is just as nervous, scared, pumped-up or jacked-up as you are, and the one thing that will make a difference whether you win is if you can keep yourself calm.
For any combat sports athlete, one of the basic tenets of competition is to control one’s emotions and energy. As the brain prepares the body for impending pain or danger the body goes through a chain reaction of physiological changes – changes that can either make or break a fight and render 12 weeks of hard training useless.
For many coaches and fighters the mental preparation is as important as the physical preparation.
Come Prepared
It seems like eons ago, but there was a time UFC welterweight Jon Fitch, who is renowned for his work ethic and preparation, completely fell apart in the run-up to his first MMA fight.
“Seriously, I totally forgot everything,” says Fitch. “It was a disaster.
I wasn’t prepared at all. I had never sparred before; I did maybe about a week’s worth of mitts with Gary Goodridge. I even forgot to bring a cup.”
That fight was against another fledgling MMA fighter, fellow future UFC welterweight Mike Pyle, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioner and current Xtreme Couture mainstay.
“I just froze,” says the 33-year-old Fitch, who served as the captain of the Purdue University wrestling team from 1997–2002.
“He took me down somehow and choked me out in two minutes.
It wasn’t really fear, though. I was just unprepared, physically and mentally.”
Fitch actually lasted two minutes and 35 seconds against Pyle. However, the message is clear – without one’s head screwed on straight, in the Octagon, you’re, well, screwed.
And it doesn’t have to be your first fight either. Fitch, now a UFC veteran with a record of 32-7-1, also found himself frozen after the first round of his headlining bout with BJ Penn at UFC 127.
Expecting Penn to stand up and trade punches, Penn surprised Fitch by coming out grappling, a tactic for which Fitch’s camp had not prepared their fighter.
“Even though I am a wrestler by nature, it took me off guard that BJ would wrestle,” Fitch admits. “So my brain froze and I couldn’t get out of that until my coach [‘Crazy’ Bob Cook] snapped me out of it late in the second round.” The fighters dueled to a majority draw, but Fitch’s paralysis changed what could have been a win.
“You have to have confidence going into the Octagon,” adds Fitch.
“If you don’t have that confidence, you’ll end up waiting for things to happen, you’ll freeze up.”
The nuts and bolts
In 1929, American physiologist William Bradford Cannon, MD, coined the term ‘fight-or-flight response’ to describe the human body’s instinctive physical reaction to danger or fear.
In his book, Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage, Cannon detailed the activation of the sympathetic nervous system, which initiates the secretion of catecholamine hormones. These hormones can include adrenaline.
For combat sports athletes, this can mean a sudden surge in their breaths per minute, increased heart rate and muscular tension.
It makes sense, as stepping into harm’s way is not instinctive for any animal, man or beast.
The body is simply preparing itself for battle or to escape. Sure, fighters fight, but that doesn’t mean they enjoy getting hit in the face.
“In the ring, it’s go time,” says current Bellator heavyweight champion Cole Konrad. “For me, before my first fight, there was some fear of the unknown because I had never done it before. I was more anxious than anything. But when they close that cage door, you’re thinking ‘Holy shit, this is really going down.’”
After that first shot or punch, instincts take over and that’s where all the training and preparation pays off.
“Your body starts to react,” Konrad recalls. “We had sort of a gameplan, but the guy came right at me so I had no time to execute that gameplan.” Konrad didn’t need it, as he dispatched Gary Hamen at just 1:13.
“It’s important in MMA, or any combat sport, that you control your breathing and emotions,” adds Konrad, who defeated current UFC heavyweight champ Cain Velasquez en route to an NCAA title in 2006. “In a street fight, your adrenaline starts pumping, but it lasts what, 30 seconds?
We have to be able to control that to last a possible 25 minutes.”
He and his coaches practice breathing techniques and visualization techniques that help train his mind to feel what is an extraordinary occurrence, really is ordinary, at least in perception.
This de-escalates the possibility of panic and typifies the term ‘grace under pressure.’
If adrenaline surges in reaction to the emotion and danger, a fighter can experience a letdown in energy after the initial surge wanes: the dreaded “adrenaline dump.”
For many new fighters, this can be critical. Feeling the economic pressure to win, combined with the instinct to survive and prevail, can all trigger the body just as Dr Cannon described 82 years ago.
Fellow Bellator fighter and current welterweight champion Ben Askren knows all about confidence, having pursued a master’s degree in the subject at the University of Missouri, where he was a two-time NCAA champion.
“My first fight I wasn’t too worried about because I knew the work I had put in as a wrestler,” says Askren. “Wrestlers are the most driven, self-disciplined athletes in MMA. I was confident that training was better than what a guy with a couple of years of MMA training would have.
In the end, I knew I was going to beat him.”
It is a fine line that fighters toe between being confident and cocky. Fellow Mizzou Tiger and Bellator Season 4 lightweight tourney champion Michael Chandler said he’s seen how new fighters can sometimes be overconfident.
“I think wrestlers can be prone to that because they are used to applying pressure, and frankly a lot of us go in there charging in and applying pressure and that can work against you,” says Chandler.
He really didn’t have a lot of time to be nervous, either. “First, I didn’t really have much training,” Chandler laughs. “I wasn’t nervous, but I graduated in May [2009]. Three months later, I was fighting.”
And like Askren, wrestling had prepared Chandler for the mental grind of MMA.
“I think in five years of wrestling, I probably tripled what anyone else in BJJ or any other discipline will do,” says Chandler.
‘Clear the Mechanism’
While the 1999 baseball movie For the Love of the Game contributed little to the actual sports world, there was one aspect that applied directly to sports. In that film, the main character, Detroit Tigers pitcher Billy Chapel, develops a mental tool to help him focus on the batter.
He called it ‘clearing the mechanism.’ At that point, the crowd ceases to cheer and all distractions are eliminated.
Konrad has a moment like that before every fight.
However, it isn’t during the fight. It’s about a month out. “It’s strange, if I have a fight coming up, there’s always this one day that comes up where I’ll just sit and ponder the fight,” says Konrad.
“I’ll take most of the day to think and process the idea that I will be fighting this person, what could happen, all that stuff. I’ll visualize a little bit, process it all. Then that’s it. I don’t think about it again.”
Fitch has been a practitioner of visualization, and the fighters at American Kickboxing Academy have gone so far as to hire a mental coach who helps a lot of the younger fighters get over the hump of low confidence, or helps them develop techniques to keep “the trigger” from going off during a fight.
“Visualization is huge,” stresses Fitch. “Our therapist really talks to the younger guys and sits down with them for weekly meetings to help them sharpen up their mental game.”
Renowned Brazilian jiu-jitsu coach John Danaher has earned a reputation for helping fighters keep their minds and temperaments balanced. He also has offered visualization techniques to help fighters believe that victory is a foregone conclusion.
From there a fighter can nearly follow his own script, so to speak.
During The Ultimate Fighter Season 12, Danaher and Team GSP went so far as to have their fighters act out pre-fight and post-fight mileu, everything from the walkout to having their hands raised in victory right in the middle of the Octagon.
“The mind is a very powerful thing,” says Danaher, an instructor at Renzo Gracie’s Academy who holds a PhD in philosophy from Columbia University.
“Being able to use it to control your body optimally can make the difference between successful martial artists and the unsuccessful.”
MMA’s top fear merchants
While your first fight can be terrifying, intimidating your opponent into a trembling mess can ensure victory.
Here are MMA’s top three scaremongers
Clay ‘The Carpenter’ Guida
If the long hair and excessive chest foliage aren’t enough to evoke fearful images of a raging beast, perhaps the UFC lightweight’s supercharged entrances complete with slapping, screaming and flailing limbs will affirm any doubts that Guida is actually a wild animal with a taste for blood.
Sure to crumble any confident adversary.
Wanderlei ‘The Axe Murderer’ Silva
Few have been able to capture the intensity of Wanderlei’s staredowns. With eyes that hold years of torment and woe from fighting for survival on the unrelenting streets of Brazil, Wanderlei is able to channel this and fire fury right into his opponent’s pupils.
That, combined with his trademark rolling hand clasp, which is like a ball of rage being focused firmly between his palms, means that if you thought The Axe Murderer was scary watching him hack people down on TV, you’re sure to lose bowel function standing toe-to-toe with him.
Jason ‘Mayhem’ Miller
Donning a sick and twisted smile, a white overhaul cape and techno walkout music designed to rot the brain, Mayhem loves to strike fear into his opponent with a persona that suggests he’s just escaped from a mental asylum.
With progressive intimidation combined with lethal jiu-jitsu, it’s his opponent who is sure to feel like they’re wearing a straight jacket when the bell rings.
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