How much can one person change in a fight gym? Depends on the person

You hear it all the time in MMA. Such-and-such team brought so-and-so in as a training partner or a coach, and now everything is better.

Not that they ever admitted that anything was bad before. Not that anyone has ever had anything less than the best training camp ever, which whipped them into the best shape of their lives.

It’s just that, thanks to this one person, night has become day. Everything is different now, and every change is for the better. It makes you wonder just how much of an effect one person can really have on an entire team of fighters, especially in a sport that’s ultimately about two people alone in a cage on a Saturday night.

Take Duane Ludwig‘s move to Team Alpha Male, which is probably the most well-known recent example. Ever since the prolific kickboxer and MMA fighter took a full-time coaching job with the Sacramento-based squad, we’ve been hearing about the effect he’s had on the collection of the mostly wrestling-based team. After his last two UFC victories, Team Alpha Male’s T.J. Dillashaw has credited Ludwig with improving his striking and his overall confidence.

As he told MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com) after UFC 158, it makes a “huge difference” to have a coach like Ludwig, “who’s working as hard at his job as I am at mine.”

That’s a viewpoint seconded by Alpha Male teammate Joseph Benavidez, who specified that it’s not just a matter of gaining a qualified coach, but one who brings something new to the table.

“For us, as a team of mostly smaller wrestlers, it’s so nice to have a coach who can give us something that we didn’t have,” Benavidez said. “We’ve all benefited from that, I think.”

Diversity of skills seems especially important in MMA, where it often seems like there’s more stuff to learn than there are hours in the day. Consider the intricacies of the ground game alone, the different things you could learn from an Olympic wrestler as opposed to a world champion jiu-jitsu expert. Think of how much time you could spend just perfecting your jab.

It makes sense that a team of wrestlers would benefit from a kickboxer, or that a room full of strikers could use a coach with some cauliflower ear. But sometimes what a fighter needs varies depending on what type of opponent he’s facing next, or what challenges he’s facing in his career at that very moment.

“That’s what’s happening to me right now,” said former Bellator featherweight champion and “Fight Master” coach Joe Warren.

He’s gearing up for a return to the cage in September, he said, and for that he gets plenty of grappling work in when he’s at home in Colorado. But recently he’s been making the trip to Albuquerque, N.M., to work with Greg Jackson – a rival coach on the Spike TV reality show – to get something different than what he sees in the gym every other day.

“It’s very specific training,” Warren said. “When I go into Greg’s, they work all footwork and striking with me. When I’m here, it’s mostly muscle-memory stuff with a different coach. I think it really helps, because this sport is so many different sports rolled into one.”

There’s also a psychological benefit to adding a new coach to his training regimen, according to Warren. His prior run-ins with Jackson led him to believe they might share some similar philosophies, but it wasn’t until they got to know each other better on the set of “Fight Master” that he finally decided to commit to working with him.

“He’s always been a really relaxed and just funny cat,” Warren said of Jackson. “I really came to like him. He always said he’d love to work with me, and we just never got around to it. But on the show we were able to spend a lot of time together to get to know each other, and I think that really sparked it. He’s an analyst of the sport and a guy who really thinks about what each fight will become. In my career, I’ve kind of been thrown to the wolves and it’s just me trying to pull wins out. Now I’m starting to understand the sport more, so to have a professor of the game like Greg Jackson work with me is priceless.”

From Jackson’s perspective, bringing in new fighters presents a completely different problem. Though the conventional wisdom says that anyone fighting a lanky striker should find other lanky strikers to spar with in the weeks before the bout, that doesn’t always work as well as many people think, he said.

“So much of fighting is person-to-person, that trying to lock down something that’s true in all scenarios is so hard to do,” Jackson said. “You have to know your fighter to be able to say, ‘We should bring these guys in to do this,’ or ‘We need to look somewhere else to do that.’ That’s what makes a difference, is understanding who you need and why.”

Then again, there’s also something to be said for understanding who you don’t need, and how to get rid of them.

“A lot of times people come in and it doesn’t work at all,” Jackson said. “I won’t name names, but it’s happened several times. A lot of times you get the cross-pollination of people coming in, and everybody’s an expert, right? You get an actor trying to show you kicks. You have someone with no experience with fighting, maybe they’re a physical therapist or something, trying to tell you about some wacky theory they have. It’s because most people’s relationship to violence is so distant. They watch movies or play around on a bag and they think that’s fighting. Of course, it isn’t. Playing with your friends in some make-believe world isn’t fighting at all. A lot of the negative experiences that we’ve had is from people coming in and trying to give advice that they aren’t qualified to give.”

When that happens, Jackson said, he tries to be polite. He nods and smiles, thanks them for their advice, then hopes they’re willing to let it go at that. And if they aren’t?

“We have different ways of dealing with it,” he said.

(Pictured: Greg Jackson)