Issue 233

September 2026

MMA will give you the best years of your life, but what you build while chasing the dream may decide what happens when it ends.

Bella Mir was supposed to be MMA’s next great nepo star. At 23, the NCAA Division I wrestling champion was unbeaten, charging towards the UFC and coached by a legend who already had a heavyweight belt draped over the family mantelpiece. Then Alex Apodaca ruined the script as Mir suffered a shock loss on Dana White’s Contender Series. The zero in her record disappeared, and an MMA community who had already started measuring her for bigger things suddenly had something else to talk about. Then Frank Mir stepped away from his daughter’s corner, saying she had “gone as far as she could go” with him. All of that made Bella the headline, but Frank is the more interesting story beneath it. He has already reached the place his daughter is trying to get, spending 18 years fighting professionally and becoming a UFC heavyweight champion. He also knows what can be waiting at the other end. Bella has spoken candidly about a father whose body is “so beat up” after multiple major surgeries and whose “brain is not good today.” And he may not be alone. Last month, a review of 23 studies added some awkward arithmetic, with reported MMA injury rates ranging from 23.6 to 54.5 injuries per 100 athlete-exposures, while research following fighters deep into retirement remains surprisingly scarce. None of this makes MMA dreams any less worthwhile because those are the accepted price of admission. Despite this, so many fighters still choose to walk that road. Former professional fighter Jakob Sverre Lovstad describes his own 30 years in MMA as life-changing and positive in countless ways. His advice is that if fighting is Plan A, what exactly happens when there are no more fights to plan for?

THE DREAM NEEDS A DAY JOB

There is something wonderfully unreasonable about deciding you are going to become a pro fighter. The sensible career adviser at school probably never had a box marked get-good-at-strangling-then-become-famous-then-buy-mum-a-house. The problem starts when believing completely in Plan A requires pretending Plans B through Z do not exist, but that is seldom the case. A 2025 study looked at the professional careers of 88 MMA fighters and found most of them navigated dual careers that combined their sporting ambitions with education. Retirement from the sport was typically approached strategically rather than simply waiting for the body, promoter, or bank account to make the decision. After three decades in MMA, Lovstad wishes more young fighters would learn that being exceptionally good at MMA and being exceptionally well paid for it are two very different achievements.

“To my surprise, there are still many young fighters who put all their eggs in one basket,” he says. “So many young prospects are convinced they were heading for the UFC’s top 10 while doing little beyond eating, sleeping and training.” 

That confidence isn't entirely ridiculous to him because he remembers having it himself.

“When you’re an active fighter, you do things with your body that very few people can even relate to. And with that often comes an exalted mental state which is further strengthened, at least most often, by coaches, teammates and fans cheering you on, by media attention and by an unlimited access to sexual partners if you wish to partake.”

There probably aren't many university prospectuses competing with that sales pitch. But Lovstad's point isn't that fighters should swap sparring for spreadsheets. It is that preparing for another life doesn't have to interfere with this one. 

“Unless you insist on spending all your spare time on the couch, you can get it all done and have a good life should you fail to be the next ultra-rich champion.”

Perhaps that is the distinction worth making. A Plan B isn't an admission that Plan A will fail. For a fighter, it might simply be another form of preparation. It might be why Dana White recently said that he’d convinced Bella Mir to go to college before trying to turn pro. You can spend your twenties trying to become a UFC champion without requiring the rest of your life to depend on succeeding.

WHEN FIGHTER BECOMES YOUR FIRST NAME

Being a fighter is a strange job because after a while it stops sounding like a job and starts to feel more like a personality trait. And this is brilliant, until somebody takes the job away. A review of almost 54,000 retired professional athletes from high-contact team sports found that having a strong athletic identity was also linked to feelings of abandonment, rejection, insecurity, and a sudden lack of future objectives. Being forced into retirement tended to make matters worse, while athletes who had actually planned for the day, maintained relationships outside sport, and built another identity generally handled the transition better. The good news is that retirement wasn't a guaranteed express train to misery, even though it might seem that way if you look at how fighters like Dustin Poirier handled their exit strategy. The depression, anxiety, and sleep scores of these retired athletes were broadly similar to the average Joe. It was the landing that mattered, and having somewhere else to put your feet appeared to help. Lovstad can now see why that landing can be so difficult, even if the younger version of himself probably wouldn't have wasted much time worrying about it.

“Back then the atmosphere in training was one of having endless possibilities and, much like Angelo Dundee preached, we were only focusing on winning and becoming fighting machines,” he says. “I think a mindset like that, one of imagined invulnerability, can be important in a game where the stakes are so high – paired with a very strong purpose where the sport you do has a near religious vibe to it.”

And there lies MMA's slightly cruel little trick. The sport rewards obsession. Nobody becomes world-class by keeping one eye on fighting and the other on what they might fancy doing in middle age. But there is a difference between giving MMA everything and leaving your future self with nothing. You don't need to spend your twenties preparing for retirement. You just don't want retirement to be the first time you've considered becoming anything else.

WHEN EVERYONE ELSE GREW UP

Fighting has a funny way of messing with the normal timetable of adulthood. While your old schoolmates are collecting degrees, mortgages and suspiciously expensive prams, you’re collecting scar tissue, passport stamps and stories that are considerably better at parties. A study of 102 retired high-performance athletes found that feeling behind their non-sporting peers in other areas of life could make retirement harder. The good news was equally simple. Athletes tended to transition better when they had planned ahead, developed interests and identities outside sport, and had good support around them. The researchers' advice was essentially to start building that life while you're still competing, not when somebody has already turned off your entrance music.

“What fighters should remember, however, is that a) most of them won’t make it to the top and b) what makes you awesome in your twenties can make you kind of a loser in your forties,” says Lovstad. “If we look to evolutionary psychology, for example, the gist is that female partners often buy potential when meeting a young man. They see a fit, strong guy getting a lot of attention, and, of course, that’s attractive. However, later in life they buy results where you see what has actually become of that guy. Did he make it? Is he now well off? Is he still fit? Did he become a leader and a role model?”

While psychology's dating-market theory is it's own, the bigger point travels well. MMA can put you years ahead of everyone else in discipline, confidence and experiences worth remembering, while quietly leaving a few of life's duller boxes unticked. Nobody is suggesting a 25-year-old fighter should swap title ambitions for an exciting evening comparing retirement funds. Just remember that one day the crowd goes home, and being able to tell somebody you once went three rounds with a UFC contender won't convince the bank to give you a mortgage.

WHAT FIGHTING LEAVES BEHIND

Here’s the good news. Fighters spend years practicing for things going wrong. It might be the most transferable skill nobody puts on a resume. A study that followed MMA fighters for 2 years and did 121 interviews with them found that fear was far from absent from the fight game. Fighters worried about getting hurt, losing, and looking terrible in front of fans. What experience gave them wasn't immunity to those feelings, but better ways of handling them. They built game plans to create a sense of control, reframed fights and defeats to make them less threatening, and learned to turn fear into confidence. Losing could even become useful. As one fighter told the researchers, the lessons learned from losing are the kind that stick. Better still, veterans became the ones helping younger fighters through the same process, passing down what the researchers called emotional capital. Lovstad believes plenty of that survives long after anybody cares about your record.

“On the whole, that journey has been life-changing and positive in countless ways,” he says. “And the skills and mindset I learned in the sport have saved my ass more than once. Both when tackling difficult problems in life at the general level and when having had to deal with physical threats.”

Maybe that is the bit fighters should remember when the end eventually arrives. Retirement doesn't erase the thousands of difficult things MMA taught you how to do. The nerves you learned to control, the losses you learned to swallow, and the ability to turn up again on Monday after a Saturday you'd rather forget are still yours. And perhaps that is what is really happening with Frank and Bella Mir. Frank stepping out of his daughter's corner sounds like an ending, but it might actually be the veteran doing what veterans have always done. He has already made the mistakes and discovered what exists on the other side. Bella doesn't need to repeat it all to learn from him. There will always be another generation convinced they're going to be the exception. There probably needs to be. Nobody gets very far in MMA by entering a gym with a sensible five-year exit strategy tucked inside their gumshield. The lesson isn't to dream smaller, train less, or keep one foot permanently outside the sport. Chase the ridiculous dream. Just make sure that, when the fighting stops, everything it taught you gets another fight somewhere else that will serve you.