Last October, while browsing the Everlast website for boxing gloves, I saw an advertisement for a contest:

This is your chance to train with Randy “The Natural” Couture

Have you ever dreamed of training with MMA legend Randy Couture - now is your chance! Tell us why you deserve to train with Couture in 500 words or less and you could be selected to train with Randy “The Natural” Couture at Xtreme Couture in Las Vegas.

Tell us why you deserve to be in the cage with Randy

I did not know what to think. This was an opportunity of a lifetime! Randy Couture was one of my heroes. He embodied everything I loved about the martial arts since I was a teenager. It was not because he was the former 2-time Light Heavyweight and 3-time Heavyweight Champion of the UFC. It was not because he was the fourth fighter inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame. It was because, on paper, he was always the underdog but, time and again, he found a way win decisively. He was 34 when he first entered the Octagon, an age past the prime of many fighters. He faced fighters who were much younger than him, and sometimes bigger.

His most memorable fight to me was his championship fight against Tim Sylvia, a 6’8” and 265 lb. giant who was almost 13 years younger than Randy (Randy was 43 at the time). It was like David versus Goliath. Yet, for five rounds, Randy dominated Tim Sylvia both standing and on the ground, and won a unanimous decision. At his post-fight interview, I remembered the first thing he said was “Not bad for an old man.” The audience gave him a standing ovation.

In spite of his success inside and outside the cage, you rarely heard Randy speak with anything but humility and sincerity (at least publicly). In a sport where talking trash was the norm, he was always gracious and respectful toward his opponents, both in victory and defeat. To me, this was the fine line that separated an honorable warrior from a mindless brute.

I entered the contest with the faint hope of winning the grand prize, but the realistic expectation of winning one of the consolation prizes. These consolation prizes included things like Everlast training gear or apparel. A couple months later, in December, I received an e-mail from the Sports Marketing Coordinator for Everlast. My heart skipped a beat when I read the first line of the e-mail; he congratulated me for my selection as The Grand Prize winner! He said my story was inspiring and Everlast felt I would be a great representative for their brand at Xtreme Couture in Las Vegas.



Training for the Training Camp

I contacted Everlast for the details. I was going to a three-day training camp on the last weekend of January. Everlast would pay not only for the training camp, but also my flight and hotel. They would also provide me all the training gear I required for the camp. At the camp itself, I was going to train in Wrestling, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Boxing, and Muay Thai as they applied to Mixed Martial Arts (MMA).

I wanted to make a good impression, so I promised myself I would go to Las Vegas prepared and in good shape. Up until that point, I was training in Olympic Weightlifting with Aimee Anaya at Mike’s Gym. I grew to love the Olympic lifts and trained with Aimee about two to three times a week. Thanks to her coaching, I was stronger than at any point in my life. At the time, I did not have any fights in the horizon, so I trained in the martial arts only often enough to maintain my skills (about two or three times a week to avoid overtraining). It was debatable if this was the best programming, but I got away with this because the strength and power from the Olympic lifts transferred well into combat sports. In sparring, I was hanging with opponents who outweighed me by 30 lbs. or so.

Shortly after I got the good news from Everlast, Aimee and Greg Everett moved up north to open a new gym. After that point and before the training camp, I shifted more toward sport-specific training. This included training more frequently in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and Muay Thai, as much as five or six times a week. I trained at The Compound, an MMA gym in Oceanside. To supplement my conditioning, I worked in a CrossFit met-con once or twice a week. I was unsure about the intensity of the camp, so I prepared for the worse since Randy Couture and his fighters were known for their conditioning. I had to prepare for the unexpected.

Little did I know then, but the training camp would exceed my expectations.

Day One: Wrestling

The first day of the camp focused on wrestling. It was no accident that many UFC champions, past and present, came from a wrestling background (including Randy Couture). Wrestlers were trained to takedown their opponent, and defend a takedown. In MMA, the superior wrestler dictated if the fight remained standing or went to the ground. If the fight went to the ground, wrestlers (who trained to pin their opponents to the mat) often finished fights with brutal and relentless “ground and pound” (i.e. striking their opponents from a top position like side control or the mount).

Wrestling was the class I looked forward to the most, not because it was my strength, but because it was my weakness. In America, wrestling was a popular sport in high school and college, especially in the Midwest. However, I did not grow up or go to school in America. I was born and raised in the Philippines and, growing up, the only wrestling we knew was Hulk Hogan versus Andre the Giant. The closest I came to wrestling was studying a little Judo. Ironically, I moved to the Midwest after graduating high school but enlisted in the U.S. Navy not long afterwards.

The best part was the wrestling coach was Randy Couture himself. Who better to teach wrestling than Randy Couture? Randy Couture was a 3-time NCAA Division-I All American and a 3-time alternate for the Olympic wrestling team. His specialty was Greco-Roman, arguably the best style of wrestling for MMA.

I was surprised how good a coach Randy Couture was. No, he was an awesome coach. I should not have been too surprised, since he was a coach on a couple seasons of “The Ultimate Fighter” reality show. He has trained and cornered fighters for both Team Quest and Xtreme Couture. However, those were world-class fighters. I was surprised how well he taught the fundamentals to novices like me. He broke the techniques down into cues (not unlike a CrossFit seminar), explaining in depth not only how but why. I especially liked how he compared the differences between wrestling as a collegiate and Olympic sport, and wrestling as it applied to MMA.

One thing he pointed out was his bias toward wrestling, given his athletic background. He acknowledged that different fighters came into MMA from different backgrounds, with different body types, and fought with different styles. His purpose then, was to show the tools that were available, but left it to the fighter to choose which tools to place in the toolbox. He also encouraged adapting or modifying these tools to suit one’s body type and fighting style. This was a theme that recurred throughout the training camp.

This led to the importance of cross-training in different disciplines. For example, the first cue he taught was the proper distance for a double-leg takedown. A shot for a double-leg takedown should begin at one arm’s distance. Any further, and the opponent had more time to defend the takedown (e.g. by sprawling). In traditional wrestling, this meant a wrestler was close enough for “hand fighting”. In MMA, however, this meant a fighter was close enough to trade punches (in boxing terms, the fighter was “in the pocket”). Randy mentioned his takedowns in MMA improved as he improved his boxing, giving him more confidence to stay “in the pocket”, even setting up takedowns with boxing combinations (like he did against Tim Sylvia).

His next takedown cues (which concerned changing levels and penetration) were good examples of how he modified his wrestling game for MMA. Randy explained how he had to modify his takedowns to take into consideration his opponent’s ability to defend a takedown with strikes (e.g. a knee strike to the face) or submissions (e.g. a guillotine choke). In MMA, he did not shoot in like he was in a wrestling match, low with knees to the ground and the right foot forward. He shot in with knees bent but off the ground, only low enough to clear the arms. After he penetrated, he kept his head high and upright, preventing a guillotine choke. He kept his left foot forward, like a boxer’s stance vice a wrestler’s stance, which allowed him to exchange strikes to set up a takedown. He got away with this since he was already one arm’s distance, close enough to penetrate by merely lunging forward with the left leg.

Randy introduced each cue gradually. Between introducing each cue, we would drill the double-leg takedown, keeping in mind only the cues Randy discussed thus far. I liked this slow but sure coaching style, since I was not too concerned with thinking about too many cues at any given time. In fact, we spent about an hour drilling the fundamentals of the double-leg takedown.

After drilling the double-leg takedown, he showed us pummeling drills from Greco-Roman wrestling. These drills taught us to establish double underhooks, the most dominant position in a Greco-Roman clinch. This was a familiar drill to anyone who trained in wrestling or grappling, but it did not hurt to go back to the basics. From there, Randy demonstrated throws from both a clinch with a single underhook clinch and a double underhook.
After the wrestling class, Randy talked about the mental game. I wished I had this speech on tape, because Randy was both an eloquent and inspiring speaker. There was no way my writing ability could do his speech justice. The theme of his speech was how the fear of failure was the biggest obstacle to success in both sports and life in general. There were many athletes who would rather quit than fail. Time and again, he has seen fighters who were dominating their training partners in the gym but, when it came time for them to fight in front of thousands of spectators, they crashed and burned. Randy attributed this to the fear of failure. They were so afraid of losing that they were more focused on avoiding risk rather than doing what it took to win.

Randy discussed some of the mental strategies he employed to overcome the fear of failure. For one, he told himself that if the worst thing that could happen to him was lose a fight, then life was good. There were more important things to him than a mere fight. He still had his family and his friends, all of whom would be there for him no matter what, win or lose. He felt he learned more from his losses than from his wins. His losses taught him what he needed to work on, or what he needed to improve.

Sometimes, no matter how hard he trained for a fight, there were factors involved that were outside his control. For example, in his last fight, when he lost the UFC Heavyweight Championship to Brock Lesnar, he felt he was executing his game plan perfectly. He was controlling the bigger and stronger Brock Lesnar with his Greco-Roman wrestling, damaging Brock with dirty boxing from the clinch. It was not until Brock caught Randy with a glancing punch in the second round when the tide turned quickly against Randy’s favor. There was nothing wrong with his game plan up until that point. He was caught. It was one of those things. The lesson he imparted was not to worry about those things that were outside your control, but work diligently on the things that were.

Randy shared a visualization strategy he learned from a sports psychologist when he was wrestling at the Olympic Training Center. He had us close our eyes and visualize a fruit, imagining the sight, sounds, smell, taste, and feel, until we could almost taste it on our tongue. This showed how one can use the imagination to elicit a physiological response. He said he would do the same thing whenever he learned a new technique. His training partners sometimes thought he was crazy when he would close his eyes in the middle of training, almost like he was zoning out. Before he would go to sleep, he would lie in bed and mentally visualize either a technique he learned that day, or an upcoming fight, until he fell asleep. Come fight night, it was all second nature to him.

Lastly, he reminded us about why we were all training in MMA in the first place. For him, he does it become it was fun. He enjoyed every minute of it. If he did not, if it came to a point when it was nothing more than drudgery to go to the gym and train, he would be doing something else. That was the reason he could train regularly even at the age of 45. Randy was often asked why he walked into the Octagon wearing a smile, when some of his opponents came in there with a mean scowl. He answered by saying if you walked into the cage like you were angry with the world, chances were you were not going in there for the right reasons.

Before we were dismissed for the evening, Randy reminded us to resist the bright lights of the Las Vegas Strip. We had a long day ahead of us. The second day, we were training in boxing and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.