Issue 216
April 2025
Ray Klerck unpacks the new science proving that fighters can train creativity and why it wins the fights and earns the fans that get the title shots.
There’s a reason some fighters get fast-tracked to the headliners and others get fast-tracked to the back of the ESPN+ scroll section no one clicks unless they’ve run out of baking shows. It’s not always about scoring the W. It’s about how you get it. A guy like Belal Muhammad is an elite talent. There’s absolutely no question. But when fans would rather water their Peace Lilly than watch you grind out a decision fight, there might be a problem. It’s one of the reasons weapons like Jack Della Maddelena claim the UFC has put their trust in him to save the welterweight division. While you can wrestle your way to the top of the rankings, it’s hard to wrestle your way into people’s hearts. Thanks to a new review in Ido Movement for Culture: Journal of Martial Arts Anthropology, we know why. Fighters need creativity. And better yet, they can train it like muscle. So, if your game plan is more bloated than built because it’s focused entirely on caution or control, this might be the sign to change it before the fans and the UFC cut you from the attention span.
THE ART IN MIXED MARTIAL ARTS
Creativity isn’t all about easels and finger painting. In the fight game, it is what turns a combo into a Picasso, a fake into a finish, and a game plan into something your opponent didn’t study for. The review pulled together research from eight studies. It came away with two beautiful truths: martial artists need this thing called creativity to succeed, and traditional training styles actually help develop it. The key psychological ingredient here is something the study called: openness to experience. This is one of the big five traits used to describe personality, and it includes the likes of imagination, flexibility, curiosity, and emotional range. In fighting terms, that’s the secret sauce behind greats like Jones, Oliveira, and Adesanya. It’s what helps a fighter break a stalemate mid-fight with a flying knee instead of a sigh. Fortunately, the research is real clear that creativity is not something you’re born with, like freak genetics or an iron chin. It’s built. Trained. Sharpened. But most fighters ignore that part of the gym. The ones who don’t? They flow instead of freeze. They invent mid-combo. They figure things out while their opponent is still buffering on bad Wi-Fi. It’s a skill that separates the must-watch from the barely tolerated. And the good news is that you can build it the same way you build a fast jab - through reps.
REWIRE YOUR BRAIN
Some elite fighters are boring, not because they lack the ability to dazzle. The bore is because they’ve duct-taped themselves to the same playbook, and they never color outside the lines. Same drills. Same pad work. Same combos. That’s all fine for sharpening tools but terrible for building a better toolkit because you can’t fix every problem with the same spanner. The brain, like the body, thrives on variety. That means ditching the factory-line training approach and adding in sessions that actually require you to think. The book The Constraints-Led Approach: Principles for Sports Coaching and Practice Design discusses how limiting an athlete’s normal options forces adaptive creativity, pushing them to find new solutions. To apply this, start by changing the structure of your sparring. Instead of always working toward a finish, do flow rounds with no set outcome. Transition freely between ranges, switch positions, and explore. The goal isn’t to win the round. It’s to force your brain to problem-solve in real-time. It’s the sporting equivalent of locking yourself out of your house and discovering you’re a part-time locksmith. You’ll find new patterns, unearth weird setups, and break out of your lazy default habits. This can trick your nervous system into evolving through constraint-based training. Force yourself into southpaw-only striking, clinch work off the fence, or submission hunting with your non-dominant hand. These restrictions act like creativity incubators. You’re blocked from doing what’s comfortable, so your brain scrambles to adapt and gets sharper in the process.
WATCH BACKWARD AND LEARN
Film study can help, too. It’s a mandatory part of the sport, and a paper in the Journal of Sports Media suggests that fans love MMA because of the competition and technical chess match under the violence. Nobody understands that better than Jon Jones, who calls himself a film-study obsessive. But if you’re searching for a creativity boost, it’s worth flipping the script and watching fights in reverse. It forces your mind to figure out the sequence backward, helping you connect setups with finishes in a whole new way, as if you’re rewinding a crime scene. You stop looking at fights as highlight reels and start seeing them as problem chains. This may open your mind to unfamiliar styles, a key trait that the study calls openness to experience.
Once you’re open to that type of thinking, you’re primed for the next level, where you step into the strange and unfamiliar. Take something wild like ballet. No, you’re not auditioning for Swan Lake, but you are hijacking your own movement system and feeding it new rhythms and patterns. A study in the journal Research in Sports Medicine found the intensity of martial arts like Taekwondo is only fractionally higher than ballet because MMA works more of your smaller supporting muscles. The researchers suggest MMA is, in fact, the ideal cross-training tool for ballet dancers to strengthen these supporting muscles and reduce their injury rate. You can imagine this works both ways when you consider NFL greats like Herschelle Walker even performed with the world-renowned Fort Worth Ballet Company. Trading tackles for twirls isn’t insanity. It’s intelligence. This is a strategy that gets you comfortable in discomfort. That awkwardness you feel? That’s just progress with a limp.
TEACHING BUILDS TACTICS
Creativity isn’t just about movement. It’s about mindset. If you want to level up, start teaching and working with others. People exposed to other people’s ideas after sharing their own enhances creativity, says a paper in the journal Learning and Instruction. Breaking down your techniques for someone else and having them do the same for you scrapes away the autopilot you didn’t know was running and forces you to rethink your approach. You’ll find out quickly if your go-to setups are adaptable or just rehearsed choreography. Coaching others is like stacking plates on your mental barbell. It adds clarity to places where there might be confusion and reveals gaps you didn’t know you had. You’ll also notice how stiff and clunky some fighters become under pressure. Creativity shines when things go wrong and your plan A is in pieces. Fighters who’ve trained their minds can improvise without losing control. They pivot. They invent. They adapt. That’s what wins late rounds, comeback fights, and title belts while opponents run through checklists and wonder why none of their plan B’s are working.
THE REAL MENTAL EDGE
The study didn’t stop at fight performance. It also found that creative fighters are mentally stronger outside the cage. Martial arts training improves emotional regulation, lowers anxiety, and builds resilience. Fortunately, those are the traits you want to have because being stressed tanks your creativity says a paper in Thinking Skills and Creativity. That’s because the same openness to experience that helps you throw a switch kick instead of a jab may also help you bounce back from a bad round, a bad camp, or a stretch of life that feels like one long weight cut. In the research mentioned at the start of this piece, fighters with high creativity scores were also more likely to dodge burnout, stay motivated longer, and maintain a clear head when pressure wants to smother them. That’s no small thing in a sport where one lousy night can nuke your momentum. Building creativity is like building fight insurance. It gives you more tools, more ways to win, and more ways to keep your head on straight when everything’s falling apart.
BUILD IT OR BLOW IT
Fortunately, the researchers found that creativity builds over time, often requiring more than ten years of consistent martial arts training. Ten years sounds like forever, but you’re already on the grind. It’s just about doing it differently. Chase novelty. Play with strategy. Explore instead of executing. If your training partner never makes you uncomfortable or confused, then you’re probably not learning. You’re just rehearsing. You don’t have to become a capoeira wizard overnight. But you do need to break your patterns. If every camp feels like déjà vu, you miss a chance to grow. Add some chaos. Surprise yourself in training. Use your non-dominant side. Visualize five different finishes from the same position, then invent the sixth. Study your opponents, then imagine the exact opposite game plan and run that scenario instead. Make your mind as sharp as your mitts because predictability doesn’t sell, and creativity is the real currency of MMA. It’s not about abandoning the fundamentals. It’s about expanding them because those who operate outside the box are the ones who get remembered after the last round ends.
