If you’re looking for a competitive edge for your next fight or for some guidance in your strength and conditioning to compliment your sport, this is the team for you! Your coaches are Buck Grant and Matt Owen. They have 40 combined years of experience coaching amateur and professional fighters, and they’re ready to take you to the next level on the mat and in the gym. We talked to them about what they want to accomplish as coaches and what you can expect from this team!

Tell us a little bit about your coaching history and what you’re hoping to accomplish with this team.

Buck Grant: 

I’ve been coaching combat sports for 25 years now. I was a professional mixed martial arts fighter, I fought amateur Muay Thai, and I have a first degree black belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I’ve coached a lot of professional and amateur athletes, a UFC, StrikeForce and Belator level, you know. At one point we had one of the largest mixed martial arts teams on the East Coast. 

We really pride ourselves on our conditioning, because since the time when I started competing, there’s been a really big change in martial arts. It’s now viewed as a sport that athletes are competing in, rather than an art. Things really shifted when–and I’m going to date myself here–all of a sudden we were competing with wrestlers, and we realized, to be competitive we needed to have an engine, be very strong, and be technically proficient. And all technical things being equal, the better athlete is going to win the fight. So it was a big deal for us to change the way we trained to accommodate the combat athlete vs. just the mixed martial artist. 

The biggest challenge with strength and conditioning for a fighter is training in a way that isn’t going to hinder their performance on the mat. Because if I send an MMA fighter to a random Crossfit gym to work out, that coach is going to have no idea what we’re doing in that athlete’s sport-specific training, so they’re going to really hammer them and that athlete’s going to come back to us too tired (best case) or too injured (worst case) to spar and train for a fight. 

So if an athlete doesn’t have that connection between their sport and their strength and conditioning, they’re going to run into a lot of problems. So my job as a coach is to carefully implement strength and conditioning work that is specific to each athlete and allows the sport to remain the main thing in their training. My experience on the fighting side of things, you know, actually being in the ring and then coaching guys corner side, helps me to work closely with the strength and conditioning guys to identify what strength and conditioning gaps need to be prioritized and what aspects of the sport need to be protected in each athletes training. 

Matt Owen:

My experience with some of these fighters began about 15 years ago, doing the strength and conditioning for Lindenwood University Wrestling as work study for my degree. It was really neat to get such a solid foundation of coaching these guys starting at this collegiate level. They won three national championships back to back while I was working there, so when I opened my own gym nearby, I kind of just naturally started getting some of these same types of guys as clients. Eventually transitioned into other types of fighters and started training them for the mixed martial arts stuff, not just wrestling.

As more and more guys came on board, I saw an opportunity to put a team together, so in 2018 we really started building this MMA team. The whole structure of our programming was based around the specific and individual needs of each fighter. So like Buck said, you do have to target what each guy needs individually, but when you’re working with a team you have to identify the common weaknesses and then prescribe individual solutions within the structure of what the whole group is doing. I found that  the most common thing that all these fighters  need is just basic strength. All of these guys are so highly skilled, they’ve been doing this sport for so many years, but they really need strength to apply behind that skill. So most of what I program for these guys starts with that and we top it off with sport-specific conditioning.

The team has grown a lot and all the guys keep picking up wins, and it’s been super rewarding to watch. As they get stronger and better, the programming has to get more specific and I have to get better as a coach. I make adjustments, they work hard, and we keep on making progress as a team.

What type of athlete can benefit from Gym Jones Fight Ready? What kind of athlete needs something different?

Buck:

When most people think about mixed martial arts, they think about UFC athletes;  professional athletes who already have a camp and a coaching staff. That kind of athlete has got a lot of guidance from a lot of different places. But there are thousands of athletes worldwide who are training in regular gyms or even in their garages, who have aspirations of fighting or competing but maybe they’re on a lower level. They don’t have sponsorships, can’t afford a coach, they can’t hire someone to take care of every individual need. But they still need that kind of multifaceted guidance in order to make progress in this really complicated sport. So it’s a chicken-and-egg situation; where do you get that guidance before you feel like your fighting career can justify it, before you can afford it and really take the time to take advantage of that coaching? That’s where Matt and I and your teammates on the app come in.

Back then in the beginning of my career, it was the wild west! We were just making it up as we went. I would have loved to have a program like this, and a coach who knows what they’re doing who I could get some advice from. But this isn’t just for aspiring professional fighters, not at all. I think the athlete we can really help is the journeyman, the athlete just getting their career started, regardless of what that career looks like. 

Tell me a little bit about mistakes you’ve made in the process of making it up as you went, and how you want to help your athletes avoid those mistakes on this team. 

Buck:

The first mistake I made early on was training like a bodybuilder. You know, I was sticking to hypertrophy rep schemes that I learned from Muscle Mag when I was 16 [laughs]. I was just trying to put on mass, not realizing that it was the total wrong approach for someone  in a weight class sport. So I can put on all this mass and feel very strong, but if I don’t make 155, I can’t fight. 

Another mistake I made was really overtraining in the gym. Way too much volume on the strength and conditioning side, to the point where I was smoked before I even got to the mat to practice. At 20 years old, you can pull that off to a certain extent, but it’s still not productive and it’s certainly not efficient. I didn’t know how much volume was too much or too little to facilitate progress.

The final mistake I made was thinking that Crossfit was the answer. No hate to Crossfit, but it’s not the solution for someone who is training for a specific sport. For a fighter, you’re learning grappling, boxing, kickboxing, jujitsu, cage wrestling, and all these things. And when you put Crossfit on top of that, it becomes completely counterproductive, and the risk to reward ratio is not in your favor. You have to remember that Olympic lifting is a highly specific sport in and of itself, and when you add a “for time” component to that, for someone whose technical focus is in a different sport entirely, you’re just asking for an injury. Nobody has the physical bandwidth to do it all, and to do it all well enough to stay injury free.

These are all mistakes I made with my own body. Now, as a 46 year old athlete, I’m still paying for those things. I’m grateful that now I have people like Matt who I can  consult to help me balance all of the training I’m doing in a smart and effective way. So I hope to be able to help some athletes navigate that a little more gracefully and safely than I did. 

Matt:

Yeah, for me it was definitely volume. Early on, I always thought that more training would automatically equal more results. Over time, through injuries and aging and performance plateaus, I’ve had to figure out the minimum effective dose for making progress. It’s so much more complicated than, “If I do more, I’m going to get better quicker.” I see that mindset in almost all of my fighters, they want to come in and go hard every single day. It’s hard for them to take a recovery day, it’s hard for them to see the big picture outside of what they want to do in the gym on any individual day. That’s probably the most beneficial thing with a team like this, is giving an athlete guidance as to how much they need to be doing, and to balance high intensity and low intensity training so that it is all beneficial to their performance on the mat and there’s no garbage volume in there. Also, like Buck mentioned, helping them stay safe with these movements. Helping someone understand that we can get the same benefit of the triple extension that we get from olympic lifts, but from safer movements like kettlebell swings or ground to shoulders with a med ball. It’s so important to keeping that risk low, and there’s huge value in having someone to give you the guidance and the tools you need to understand how to achieve that in your own training.

What is the kind of coaching you find your athletes need most, outside of the actual meat and potatoes of strength and conditioning?

Matt:

Honestly, for my guys it’s just basic self-belief. We have a few guys in the gym who are right on the cusp of the UFC right now, they’re really close but they’re still just one tier below and they’re waiting to get called up. And for those guys, the mindset you have to get them into is believing in themselves while they wait for their time to come. You have to remind them, you’ve got the best training in the entire world. You’re working hard every single day. Trust your training, believe in your skills, be confident in yourself and just go out there. We have to instill that in these guys so deeply, because some of them tend to be a little more tentative, which obviously isn’t going to work once you step into the ring. We have to train them to trust themselves, shut off their brain and let their training take over. And that starts with believing in yourself. One of my fighters Sean Woodson says that’s the “number one ingredient.”

Buck: 

One hundred percent, and I’d add to that, once these athletes believe in themselves you’ve got to get them to continually trust the process. Help them understand that training has to be process focused, and with everything we do we’re looking for a specific outcome. Even if we’re motivated and energized and excited about training, we’re not lifting just to lift, we’re not rolling just to roll. Every training session is built around something specific we are trying to accomplish that day. That transfers directly to a fight because every time you find yourself in front of an opponent, you can’t get lost in the long game of “yeah I’m going to kick this guy’s ass…” that’s just the driving force that’s going to get you there. You want to have a specific process you’re trying to implement. And if you’ve trained right, that process should be to perform exactly the way you’ve trained. And if you’re confident that you can trust your training, and you can funnel your opponent into what you’re best at, there’s nobody in the world who can beat you.  John Danaher was huge on this. His guys were beating opponents who had no business losing to his guys; 20 year black belts were getting taken down by guys who had been training for a year. And it was because his athlete knew, for example, I’ve got the best guillotine on the planet. So it doesn’t matter who you are, if i take you to the guillotine world, you’re going to die there, because that’s my process and I implement it over and over again. I go to sleep thinking about it, I wake up thinking about it, and when I show up to the mat and see my opponent, all I see is a neck. And that comes from me having a very specific process and purpose in everything I do and with every move I make. So having the confidence not only to believe in yourself but to follow a process and trust that process enough to never stray from it… that’s where it all comes together.

Buck Grant: 

I’ve been coaching combat sports for 25 years now. I was a professional mixed martial arts fighter, I fought amateur Muay Thai, and I have a first degree black belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I’ve coached a lot of professional and amateur athletes, a UFC, StrikeForce and Belator level, you know. At one point we had one of the largest mixed martial arts teams on the East Coast. 

We really pride ourselves on our conditioning, because since the time when I started competing, there’s been a really big change in martial arts. It’s now viewed as a sport that athletes are competing in, rather than an art. Things really shifted when–and I’m going to date myself here–all of a sudden we were competing with wrestlers, and we realized, to be competitive we needed to have an engine, be very strong, and be technically proficient. And all technical things being equal, the better athlete is going to win the fight. So it was a big deal for us to change the way we trained to accommodate the combat athlete vs. just the mixed martial artist. 

The biggest challenge with strength and conditioning for a fighter is training in a way that isn’t going to hinder their performance on the mat. Because if I send an MMA fighter to a random Crossfit gym to work out, that coach is going to have no idea what we’re doing in that athlete’s sport-specific training, so they’re going to really hammer them and that athlete’s going to come back to us too tired (best case) or too injured (worst case) to spar and train for a fight. 

So if an athlete doesn’t have that connection between their sport and their strength and conditioning, they’re going to run into a lot of problems. So my job as a coach is to carefully implement strength and conditioning work that is specific to each athlete and allows the sport to remain the main thing in their training. My experience on the fighting side of things, you know, actually being in the ring and then coaching guys corner side, helps me to work closely with the strength and conditioning guys to identify what strength and conditioning gaps need to be prioritized and what aspects of the sport need to be protected in each athletes training. 

Matt Owen:

My experience with some of these fighters began about 15 years ago, doing the strength and conditioning for Lindenwood University Wrestling as work study for my degree. It was really neat to get such a solid foundation of coaching these guys starting at this collegiate level. They won three national championships back to back while I was working there, so when I opened my own gym nearby, I kind of just naturally started getting some of these same types of guys as clients. Eventually transitioned into other types of fighters and started training them for the mixed martial arts stuff, not just wrestling.

As more and more guys came on board, I saw an opportunity to put a team together, so in 2018 we really started building this MMA team. The whole structure of our programming was based around the specific and individual needs of each fighter. So like Buck said, you do have to target what each guy needs individually, but when you’re working with a team you have to identify the common weaknesses and then prescribe individual solutions within the structure of what the whole group is doing. I found that  the most common thing that all these fighters  need is just basic strength. All of these guys are so highly skilled, they’ve been doing this sport for so many years, but they really need strength to apply behind that skill. So most of what I program for these guys starts with that and we top it off with sport-specific conditioning.

The team has grown a lot and all the guys keep picking up wins, and it’s been super rewarding to watch. As they get stronger and better, the programming has to get more specific and I have to get better as a coach. I make adjustments, they work hard, and we keep on making progress as a team.

Buck Grant: 

I’ve been coaching combat sports for 25 years now. I was a professional mixed martial arts fighter, I fought amateur Muay Thai, and I have a first degree black belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I’ve coached a lot of professional and amateur athletes, a UFC, StrikeForce and Belator level, you know. At one point we had one of the largest mixed martial arts teams on the East Coast. 

We really pride ourselves on our conditioning, because since the time when I started competing, there’s been a really big change in martial arts. It’s now viewed as a sport that athletes are competing in, rather than an art. Things really shifted when–and I’m going to date myself here–all of a sudden we were competing with wrestlers, and we realized, to be competitive we needed to have an engine, be very strong, and be technically proficient. And all technical things being equal, the better athlete is going to win the fight. So it was a big deal for us to change the way we trained to accommodate the combat athlete vs. just the mixed martial artist. 

The biggest challenge with strength and conditioning for a fighter is training in a way that isn’t going to hinder their performance on the mat. Because if I send an MMA fighter to a random Crossfit gym to work out, that coach is going to have no idea what we’re doing in that athlete’s sport-specific training, so they’re going to really hammer them and that athlete’s going to come back to us too tired (best case) or too injured (worst case) to spar and train for a fight. 

So if an athlete doesn’t have that connection between their sport and their strength and conditioning, they’re going to run into a lot of problems. So my job as a coach is to carefully implement strength and conditioning work that is specific to each athlete and allows the sport to remain the main thing in their training. My experience on the fighting side of things, you know, actually being in the ring and then coaching guys corner side, helps me to work closely with the strength and conditioning guys to identify what strength and conditioning gaps need to be prioritized and what aspects of the sport need to be protected in each athletes training. 

Matt Owen:

My experience with some of these fighters began about 15 years ago, doing the strength and conditioning for Lindenwood University Wrestling as work study for my degree. It was really neat to get such a solid foundation of coaching these guys starting at this collegiate level. They won three national championships back to back while I was working there, so when I opened my own gym nearby, I kind of just naturally started getting some of these same types of guys as clients. Eventually transitioned into other types of fighters and started training them for the mixed martial arts stuff, not just wrestling.

As more and more guys came on board, I saw an opportunity to put a team together, so in 2018 we really started building this MMA team. The whole structure of our programming was based around the specific and individual needs of each fighter. So like Buck said, you do have to target what each guy needs individually, but when you’re working with a team you have to identify the common weaknesses and then prescribe individual solutions within the structure of what the whole group is doing. I found that  the most common thing that all these fighters  need is just basic strength. All of these guys are so highly skilled, they’ve been doing this sport for so many years, but they really need strength to apply behind that skill. So most of what I program for these guys starts with that and we top it off with sport-specific conditioning.

The team has grown a lot and all the guys keep picking up wins, and it’s been super rewarding to watch. As they get stronger and better, the programming has to get more specific and I have to get better as a coach. I make adjustments, they work hard, and we keep on making progress as a team.

Gym Jones Fight Ready is starting a new phase this week! This cycle will run like a UFC fight camp: the next 4 weeks will be
an MMA-specific strength phase, followed by a power endurance microcycle and an explosive power microcycle to finish out the “camp”.