issue 220
August 2025
Ray Klerck breaks down how lifting weights reshapes the fighter’s brain, showing that strength training and creatine can build the muscle that keeps you calm under pressure.
Georges St-Pierre once said that he didn’t lift weights for his MMA game, claiming he only got jacked to look good. To be fair, he was one of the first to bring a bodybuilder’s frame to a UFC belt. It was a move that paid off for him in both results and endorsements. But while many fighters do lift weights to stay in shape and injury-proof their bodies, many are doing it to keep their head in the game. In a first-of-its-kind study on MMA fighters in the journal Scientific Reports, they found that lifting weights does a lot more than build muscle. Instead, it’s been found to rewire the way fighters respond to all kinds of stress. Resting deep in the brain’s control centres, neural resilience is forged that bleeds into more controlled emotions, and it’s all thanks to bread-and-butter weight-lifting moves like heavy barbell squats. If you expect that more muscle meant more emotion-based aggression, you’d be dead wrong. Instead, quite the opposite was happening in the skulls of MMA fighters.
STRONG MINDS LIFT HEAVY
These scientists weren’t interested in breaking down the exact sets and reps that the fighters were doing. All they wanted was a regular lifting routine done by MMA fighters. To get their results, they plugged them into wired skull caps to tap into the inner machinations of a fighter’s brain to see how structured and consistent strength training switched things up in their grey matter. Getting to grips with the iron changed these fighters’ upstairs circuitry because they showed lowered activity in the parts of their brains that would typically light up when someone was under threat. These included parts like the amygdala and insula. Conversely, there was increased activation in the regions responsible for executive control and emotional regulation. Take-home message? Straining under the barbells didn’t just add muscle; it also subtracted stress. Their cortisol was lower. Their biomarkers were healthier. And the more they squatted, pressed, and pulled, the calmer they got. It was a neurological composure born from progressive overload.
BRAIN GAINS
These findings flip the big-muscle-short-fuse stereotype on its cauliflowered ear. The fighters who regularly hit the iron weren’t acting like juiced-to-the-gills rage machines. They were more like an emotional accountant, carefully divvying debits and credits into all the appropriate places so that aggression became expertly stored for when it might be needed. The researchers suggest it’s because structured strength training exposes a fighter to repeated, high-intensity stress in a controlled environment. That stress, extrapolated over time, reshapes the brain’s chemistry and strengthens the areas needed to control emotions and feel less panic or threat. It tells the brain to chill and conditions it not to overreact. The more the body can grind through reps that push muscles to their limits, the more the mind will follow, building a firewalled buffer between stress and response.
BARBELL THERAPY
While it pays for a fighter to keep calm, this wasn’t the only study to link brain caps and bicep curls. A 2024 review out of the University of Limerick and Iowa State discovered resistance training kicks anxiety and depression square in the gnashers. They flagged a cocktail of mechanisms behind the mental boost. These included the likes of IGF-1, which improved brain function and heightened blood flow to the brain, and there were even neural changes created by the slow, controlled breathing that’s baked into heavy lifting protocols. Neither study handed out a gold rep-scheme for optimal results, but the takeaways were ultra-clear: structured and progressive weight training amplifies mental composure. Think of it as mood regulation forged in grunts and 1 rep maximums that transfers into both life and MMA performance.
BRAINS, BRAWN, AND A SCOOP OF WHITE POWDER
Lifting and emotional health aren’t the only gym buddies. Stepping into the corner to illustrate this further is the new scoop on creatine. The recommendations used to be 3-5g per day, but what if you push the envelope? Well, a Scientific Reports study gave this old-school supplement a rebrand by showing that when people took up to 20g per day, it improved brain function under pressure. While gym crew have long used it to upgrade their ATP supplies, which helped them push out more reps, this research says that higher doses sharpened focus, stabilized mood, and protected against cognitive crashes in high-stress situations. It’s like a backup generator for your grey matter when the lights start to flicker, even in the face of low sleep. It’s highly researched, affordable, and likely already in your supplement drawer, as it’s approved by WADA. It’s another hand-in-hand example of how dumbbells and all that goes with them might be the smartest thing you can do as a fighter.
STRONG YOU GET THE LESS YOU FLINCH
So maybe GSP didn’t just lift for improved fight performance, but he definitely got some benefits, whether he acknowledged it or not. He never lost his cool and had an intellectual confidence few could match. That championship mindset is now backed by science. We understand that heavy reps load both the body and the mind. Regular strength training dials down your stress response by training the brain to stay put when everything else wants to run. The good news is that there are no magic sets and rep protocols to follow, just consistent and structured workouts. Couple them with creatine, the most old-school, legal, and overlooked powder in your supplement drawer, and you get a serious mental edge in situations when your brain might be under fire. In the fight game, staying calm is the ultimate edge. And it’s a chill that’s best forged under the barbell.
