Building a Fighter

How can you add value to a performance team? Is this your show or do you play a role in culminating a holistic service? There are times and places for both. You must know your role and be able to nail it on repeat.  At the same time part of nailing it is knowing where you fit in the team and how to effectively communicate with everyone else on the team. Ultimately serving the athlete is the main g...

Lessons from the field. Within this new series we deep dive into our own process in adapting our wrestling skills to mma coaching. With the inclusion of striking, submissions, cage wrestling, and the general mma ruleset. Outlining our journey in coaching helps us to see where our thoughts lie and how we can progress into a more mma dominant mindset. We really focus on the adaptations that wrestler...

We welcome Dr. Brian Gearity of The University of Denver. He is the director of the Masters of the Arts in coaching and sports education. “Dr. G” was Alex’s Graduate advisor and has published multiple works in sports sociology and the study of coaching. Formerly a strength coach Dr. G, has been around sport his entire life and now studies how coaching is developed and works. He shares a plethora o...

Book Club installment number two! Relentless by Tim Grover. This book is very popular as Tim Grover (the author) was the strength coach to many greats in the NBA, including Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and Dwayne Wade. Tim outlines his thoughts on mental performance and the right mentality that takes you to the top. He classifies athletes into Coolers, Closers, and Cleaners. Enjoy our conversation...

Our Zone #2! Austin goes off in the realm of Sports Performance Heatlthcare and return to performance. How do we modify practice, S&C, or movement to completely enable each and every athlete despite any injury/irritation. We talk about how healthcare practitioners can create better relationships and be involved in the training process not just the rehabilitation process. Concussions and other typi...

Back in our zone! We consciously try to explore topics that get us out of our comfort zone both to spread knowledge and awareness as well as grow in our own understanding of those topics. This is not one of those podcasts. We are talking about various training methodologies to accomplish training goals. We go through Triphasic training, Density circuits, and  Contrast training. What are they, why...

Freeeeeeeeee - Style! Video games, going to practice, getting respect from your athletes, cards against humanity, movement patterns. We are back to a more open format for this podcast. Little bit of Ranting on movement patterns, and knowing the sport that you coach, but we keep it light and topical for this episode! Plus a bit of a peek into our very formal planning process of podcasts. We hope yo...

As a coach you have a moral responsibility to your team to lead them. You are an instructor, teacher, shoulder to cry on and often an example of how you want your team to behave. How can we demand more athletes to be “bought in” if we ourselves aren’t operating from a moral place. The little things count in this profession. Being punctual, respectful, empathetic, and authentic all can build credib...

Welcome to our new series! We are starting a book club. This month’s book is It Takes What It Takes by Trevor Moawad. We will be reading a book per month and then reviewing it and talking about our opinions. This book is very popular as Trevor is the mental performance coach for Russel Wilson. Trevor talks about his approach for neutral thinking and the power of controlling your settings. We have...

High School Wrestling. What can the sport do for you and how does it feed into success in mma, school, career, and life. The accountability, work ethic, and narrow focus bred in wrestling helps to instill some foundational behaviors of success. Wrestling has another key aspect that can help in an mma, or elite mindset. That key aspect in domination. In wrestling winning is often not enough, winnin...

Cutting Weight. This is almost an unavoidable aspect of combat sport, today we are talking about the culture and psychological impact of cutting weight. This podcast is rife with personal experiences of cutting weight and improper weight cutting strategies. We work through our own experiences to find some data and diamonds in the rough as to why we act this way in weight cutting. If you have wrest...

This episode gets a bit more philosophical on you! We open it up from our typical elite MMA athlete topics to a more recreational based idea. We tackle the question of “Why do you train and perform at sport?” Typically there are two models of sport in the sociological world: “Pleasure and Participation” or “Power and Performance.” Try saying that 10 times fast! Do you train to enjoy the pursuit of...

A quick hitter for this episode, we touch on coach-athlete relationships. Most coaches do this well, some do it great, and few are horrific. Specifically we tackle this question, “Should you be friends with your athletes?” We agree that getting the work done is essential to any coach-athlete relationship, so creating a friendship cannot hurt your ability to push, pull, or stress the athlete. In so...

Super Special Guest this episode, we have with us Corey Beasley from Fight Camp Conditioning, what is now GetPhysical.com  Corey is a wealth of knowledge in the MMA strength and conditioning field. He has done an awesome job of platforming and spreading the good word of knowledgeable, and reasonable S&C to mixed martial arts. Corey shares so much great information on his come up into mma, some inn...

Science! Its real! Exercise Science: a passion of both Alex and Austin’s. How do we approach a practical method of exercise science within our training context. AKA: How do you write an exercise program. We talk about this and much more in this episode. Running through scenarios we define our thought process and how we get there. What should or shouldn’t be in a program? How many days per week sho...

Orthopedic Cost, what does that mean? Is it a real thing? We riff on a trending tweet in the strength and conditioning world. We argue that exercise selection matters, and all exercise is not good exercise. We dive a bit into pain science, and how to correctly orchestrate exercise selection, load, volume and stress management. We contend that every variable in an exercise program needs to be weigh...

Shout out to Coach Augie from Landow Performance for the inspiration for this podcast. We are talking about finding and exploiting your athlete’s superpowers! Should you raise the ceilings aka train into your superpower, or should we focus on the weaknesses? The answer, as always, it depends. One key we highlight in this podcast is the awareness of your superpower and the awareness to utilize it....

We talk about genetic potential and what percentage of success or performance comes from genetics. We play around with the idea of talent vs. hard work vs skill vs innate ability. Genetics predispose us to be better or worse at certain athletic qualities. As coaches we need to be able to recognize and plan for this.  The better we can match our training to utilize this advantage the more success t...

This week we are joined by Alex’s fellow performance coaches at Landow Performance. We dive into strength and conditioning for mma. Augie Agyei and Eric Telly have been training fighters for 10+ years amongst other athletes. We primarily work with the Factory X professional fight team. These guys drop so many knowledge bombs in this short hour. I am insanely grateful to work alongside them everyda...

On this episode of BAF we did a recap of 2021 for Alex and Austin Personally as well as Building A fighter as a business. Alex Came, Saw, and Conquered 2021. With his switch over to Landow Performance, joining up with Factory X Team, and Working with Queens City Rugby club. Austin also had a solid 2021! With Warrior Sports Wellness growing, getting married, and getting his first UFC cornering expe...

This episode covers a ton of various topics! We start by reviewing a BJJ tournament Alex competed in over the weekend. Then we talk about a technical model for aggression. From there we talk about how athletic styles lead to coaching styles and the life experience that everyone brings to their professional or athletic approaches. This then leads to a great discussion on the training of coaches and...

What does professionalism look like for you? As a coach, athlete, manager, administrator, or physician. Austin and Alex debate amongst themselves on what professionalism should look like in the combat sports realm and in sports performance in general. I like to boil it down to two very unprofessional mantras. 1. Do your fucking job. Make them better, provide a top level service. 2. Don’t be a dick...

IT’S OK TO BE SORE!!! In recent years it’s popular to want to work smarter, not harder. While it's amazing that sentiment has seeped into combat sports, recently I have seen the training pendulum swing too far to the left. Under-dosing your exercise is also a huge problem and this whole “you should never be sore” idea is bullshit. It’s all about finding the Goldilocks principle, “not too much, not...

Halloween Freestyle. We have been letting these episodes flow recently and finding the topics along the way. Within this episode we get to scary training methods, 10x10 german volume training, burpees, and 100 push up challenges, what is the scariest training you have ever done? We then segue into scary injuries we have seen and how to handle scary injuries and coach them up or just logistically h...

Episode 78 and we’re back freestylin Welcome to a more free flowing format of Building a Fighter. We talk about life as married peoples, mma training, and scheduling out your training! Let us know if you like this change of pace! Let us know what you think of our opinions, banter, and information. We want to hear from you! Leave a review or message us. Until next time, this is Building a Fighter....