Obviously there are exceptions, there are people who have a very deep understanding of the technical side of mma without ever having stepped foot in the ring. However, my problem is that mma tends to attract a lot of clowns who manage to trick fighters into hanging around with them and fighting tends to filter these people out.
Do you need to have been a fighter to be a good coach?
When this subject is brought up people will always bring up the examples of high level coaches who never had any fight experience themselves such as Cus damato or Greg Jackson. However I see these coaches as the exception rather than the rule, for every one successful coach who didn’t have fight experience there are many more with no experience and sketchy credentials who somehow convince their students to get into the ring.
There are various reasons for why mma coaches in the past didn’t have fight experience. MMA is a relatively young sport so for many coaches there just wasn’t the opportunity to fight or compete when they were in their prime. When I had my first amateur mma fights in 2000 there were very few coaches who also had fight experience around.
When you look at the vast majority of successful fighters you will see that they are trained by coaches who have legitimate fight experience rather than just theoretical knowledge.
Although it’s obviously possible to coach successfully without fight experience I find that more often than not coaches make up for this lack of experience by creating a mythical background around themselves that convinces the eager young fighter to follow their every word without every questioning the validity of what they are learning.
Another reason is that sometimes the best fighters don’t make the best coaches. I definitely agree with this. The best fighters usually are able to pick up skills and techniques very quickly and therefore often lack the patience to break down and coach these skills to less talented or less experienced novice fighters.
Coaching is a skill that needs to learned and practiced just like any other skill. Often a fighter feels that once he’s had a successful fight career he can just lazily turn up to the gym and show what he knows and that’ll be enough but usually this doesn’t work well.
I can say that there are many things that I wouldn’t understand about fighting if I hadn’t had a lot of fight experience myself.
What it feels like on the weeks leading up, what it feels like to walk into the cage, how you feel between rounds in a tough fight and what you want or need to hear after a win or a loss.
The problem with coaching when you haven’t fought is that you don’t know what you don’t know. There are many hypothetical techniques, tactics and strategies that should work in a fight because they work well in training or sparring but a real fight is a much different thing. If you have real fight experience you will realise this whereas inexperienced coaches usually have to figure it out the hard way.
