Issue 232

August 2026

Ray Klerck discovers why the smartest thing you can take from MMA might have nothing to do with fighting.

When Paddy Pimblett recently submitted Benoît Saint Denis in 52 seconds with a choke he admitted he’d never done before, it wasn’t because there was a page in his game plan telling him what came next. He found himself in a position, accessed the know-how in his memory’s back blocks and invented an answer while his opponent was trying to do the same. That ability to solve problems on the fly is why Alexander Volkanovski has long been held up as one of MMA’s great Fight IQ merchants. More recently, Dricus Du Plessis showed another facet of this brand of intellect when he comprehensively outpointed Kamaru Usman. None of these brains would necessarily trouble Einstein at a pub quiz, but when the gloves are on, MMA athletes are performing some seriously complicated mental gymnastics. “What coaches often call Fight IQ is really a combination of executive functions, perception, decision-making, and emotional regulation working together under pressure,” explains Paul McCarthy, a trained sports psychologist with 25 years of experience.  

And according to a July 2026 review, training in martial arts may develop everything from attention and working memory to self-discipline, emotional control and academic performance. “In a martial arts setting, children are constantly scanning for relevant information, predicting what might happen next, inhibiting impulsive reactions and choosing the most effective response.” Here are six remarkable ways Fight IQ could pack a punch for your grey matter. And it might be something every scholar should do as a study aid. 

YOU LEARN TO IGNORE THE IDIOT IN THE ROOM

Every classroom has one. The pest clicking his pen like he’s Morse coding and slowly dismantling a BIC until the spring becomes ammunition. Being able to decide what deserves your attention and what gets sent to the brain’s junk folder is a skill martial arts may be particularly good at developing. Researchers describe martial arts as an “open-skill activity” because the information keeps changing and your brain has to continually update what it does next. That demands working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control, which is science-speak for knowing which information deserves a response, and which bit of bait should be left alone. The news 2026 review links martial arts training to improvements in these executive functions and cites research showing that children who regularly practice martial arts perform strongly in areas such as visual selective attention, verbal working memory, and reaction time. What do the classroom numbers look like in this respect? Well, a separate multi-country trial involving 721 seven- and eight-year-oldsacross 20 schools in five European countries had kids swap their regular PE lessons for a Karate Mind and Movement program. The results were that they had higher overall academic achievement and significantly fewer conduct problems. It wasn’t a Hogwarts spell that suddenly made every student smarter, but it suggests Fight IQ isn’t quite a superpower gifted to Volkanovski and more like years of sweaty lessons designed to train these mental skills. “Martial arts constantly asks you to ignore distractions, remember instructions and react to changing situations,” explains McCarthy. “Can training those skills improve attention, working memory and cognitive flexibility outside the gym? Potentially yes, although the picture is more nuanced than some people assume.” 

Every feint you refuse to pay attention to asks you to ignore useless information. You probably won’t need to spot a disguised head kick during a math class, but learning not to react to every distraction in front of you seems like a very useful place to start.

YOUR BRAIN LEARNS TO CHANGE PLANS

Some students react to Plan A failing by trying Plan A again, only harder. MMA has a knack for beating that fixed mindset out of you pretty quickly. If an opponent decides they know exactly what you’re cooking, your brain realizes quick smart that it needs to draw from a new menu. Researchers call the ability to switch strategies “cognitive flexibility”, and the 2026 review says it is one of the executive functions martial arts may help develop. That makes sense when you consider the job description. Martial arts and other open-skill sports force you to operate in environments where the problem refuses to sit still. The review explains that experienced karate athletes need to update and monitor information in memory, shift their attention between tasks, and suppress their automatic responses as situations change. 

“Learning martial arts is essentially a structured experience of struggle and improvement,” says McCarthy. “Children regularly experience not getting a technique right, receiving feedback, practicing repeatedly, then eventually achieving success. These experiences help children learn that ability is not fixed, and that improvement comes through effort and persistence. Over time, this can build resilience and can help them learn to recover from setbacks.” 

In the combat sports game, that’s the difference between repeatedly shooting a takedown that isn’t there and noticing the uppercut that suddenly is. At school, it might mean abandoning the math solution that keeps giving you the wrong answer rather than spending the next 20 minutes proving you can be extremely persistent at being wrong.

YOU GET BETTER AT THE THINGS YOU HATE

Your motivation might be all in at 9 pm, when you promise yourself that you’ll train tomorrow, and then it is mysteriously absent when your alarm pings. Fortunately, the 2026 review links martial arts with self-discipline, responsibility, and goal-directed behavior. Everyone knows MMA bangs the discipline drum, but it’s believed these mental skills can echo into how you manage study schedules, meet deadlines, and resist distractions. That’s because MMA rolls with an unusually effective reward system. You learn something, repeatedly get it wrong, improve it, then eventually make it work against someone who doesn’t want you to. Research discussed in the 2026 review suggests that this progressive mastery can build self-efficacy, the belief that putting in the work can change the outcome. MMA also gives you a constant procession of new techniques, so the reward usually arrives after the work rather than before it. 

“Martial arts creates manageable levels of challenge and pressure,” explains McCarthy. “Whether sparring, performing in front of others or preparing for grading assessments, children learn to function despite experiencing anxiety, uncertainty and self-doubt.”

That’s handy when studying because you stop needing every difficult task to be enjoyable before you’re willing to attack it. You probably won’t celebrate finishing your chemistry homework by having your hand raised, but MMA can teach you that occasionally the smartest thing you can do is shut up, bank the boring reps and collect the satisfaction of a win later.

YOUR MEMORY LEARNS TO FIGHT TOO

Remembering pad combos is easy enough. Doing that while someone has just introduced their shin to your liver is a slightly more aggressive test of what information your brain can hold onto. MMA demands that you remember information while simultaneously doing something with it, which is where working memory and self-regulation earn their keep. The 2026 review identifies working memory as one of the executive functions that martial arts may help develop, as described by an earlier school experiment. Researchers studied 207 children from kindergarten through Grade 5, with their classrooms assigned to either martial arts training or traditional PE. After three months, the martial arts kids showed greater improvements in cognitive self-regulation, classroom conduct, and even performance on a mental math task. That doesn’t mean memorizing a five-punch combo will suddenly make Pythagoras your bi***. However, MMA teaches your brain to get used to that juggling act. 

YOU GET REALLY GOOD AT BEING BAD AT THINGS

MMA is a rare hobby where you can spend an entire evening failing and still drive home convinced it was productive. Then you come back tomorrow and discover several exciting new ways to get it wrong. That cycle matters because the 2026 review repeatedly connects martial arts with persistence, resilience and self-efficacy, which is essentially the belief that your own mental efforts can change what happens next. MMA offers a productive way to learn these skills because progress comes in tiny installments. Master something, encounter the next problem, and start sucking all over again. It’s the accumulation of these small victories that can build confidence and encourage people to approach challenges as opportunities for improvement rather than evidence they should quit.

YOU LEARN NOT TO LOSE YOUR HEAD

A school exam can be stressful, but at least nobody is allowed to sit on your chest while you complete it. In 2026, researchers put some of those mental skills into a more controlled test with 66 adults aged 18 to 25. They split them into three equal groups doing martial arts training, conventional exercise, or no training, with the martial artists training for 60 minutes, three times a week, for eight weeks. They measured emotional regulation, attentional control, and perceived stress and found that the martial arts intervention produced significant improvements across all three compared with the other groups. That fits neatly with the broader 2026 review, which links martial arts with emotional regulation, mindfulness, impulse control and stress management. 

“Compared with general PE, martial arts often provides a clearer long-term framework for goal-setting, deliberate practice and personal development,” says McCarthy. “What matters most, however, is not the activity itself but the quality of the environment. A well-coached martial arts program that emphasizes respect, self-control, perseverance and reflection may offer substantial developmental benefits. Equally, an outstanding coach in football, rugby, swimming or athletics can foster many of the same psychological skills. From a sport psychology perspective, MMA is less a magic solution and more a particularly rich environment for learning attention, self-regulation, resilience and decision-making under pressure. When delivered well, those lessons can extend far beyond the gym.” 

There appears to be something useful about repeatedly exposing your brain to pressure while demanding that it stays dialed in. Real life is stuffed with exams and deadlines where your first emotional response probably isn’t your smartest one. You might never need to shrimp out from underneath your chemistry teacher, but knowing how to keep your head when everything goes to shit could be the most useful Fight IQ of all.