Success in sports is always relative. As a high school athlete, I was relatively successful. I was a national champion wrestler, an all-state football player, and Icould bench press 400 pounds. I traveled the world competing internationally, I set high school records, and I earned a scholarship to wrestle at Purdue University. As a student athlete, I was the team captain of the wrestling team, and I earned two degrees in kinesiology, Movement and Sports Science, as well as Health and Fitness. Despite my relative success, Iwas relatively unskilled. Wrestling isn’t a sport where you can get by without skill, but I was usually much stronger than most of the competition. I often bullied my opponents with my strength, using poor technique to blast through the opponent. If I wasn’t so strong and fit, I wouldn’t have won so many tournaments or scored as many touchdowns. However, when I started wrestling in college, my strength had begun to peak, and my mobility had taken a nosedive. I had actually become too strong, and too inflexible, as my competition caught up to me physically. My big, strong muscles had actually become a detriment to my success, as it became more difficult to move fluidly and dynamically. Not only that, but I had also begun to suffer from a string of injuries. After college, I became a professional mixed martial arts fighter at the American Kickboxing Academy for nine years. I had fought for Strikeforce, which was eventually bought by the UFC. I trained with the likes of Kabib Nurmagomedov, Daniel Cormier, Cain Velasquez, Luke Rockhold, Jon Fitch, Herschel Walker, and many more. During my career, Ilearned a great deal about how to create movement that is powerful, balanced, and efficient, because functional movement is so necessary in MMA. No other sport is as unforgiving and punishing, and it eventually broke my body in many ways. MMA exposes your weak chain links like no other, and it had shown me that I needed to change the way I think, live, and train. Since then, I have been focused on recreating particular strength training exercises, to better fit my needs as a mixed martial artist. I put down the heavy barbell, and began moving lighter weight around my body, instead of pushing away or pulling towards my body. Ifocused on core rotation and functional movement patterns, instead of size and strength. I learned how to move again, by performing movements that are more appropriate to human biology. Building muscle mass and lifting heavy weights can be very beneficial to your health and ability to perform as an athlete. However, it can easily be over done, leading to decreased performance, pain, and injury. Becoming big and strong isn’t that difficult, but moving with power, balance, and efficiency is. This course is a quick overview of my training philosophy, followed by demonstration of my favorite, most unique movements. This course is is for people that want to learn something completely new. I guarantee that you will learn something new and begin to see things in a different way!
