The Best Training Method For Improving Martial Arts Skill with Gabriel Varga 

I love how the self defense championship thing brought all these channels together

This is exactly what I asked about when asking about your course . ( trying to understand if it's include this type of progression )

Keep grinding. There are shortcuts... but they won't get you as far as the path you're on.

@@hard2hurt Will do. Thanks, Mike.

@@hard2hurt this is just my opinion and you can feel free to disregard me. But I respectfully disagree with your method of holding people from sparring for 3 months. Part of why Jiu Jitsu schools have better teaching and a culture that’s more conducive to learning is because they encourage sparring ASAP. Regardless of experience levels. This is, IMO, the correct approach. I would be extremely discouraged, saddened, and bored to tears if I joined a gym and knew I wouldn’t be allowed to spar until 3 months in. From my perspective, I should be allowed to spar the moment I pay my monthly fee. I simply can’t see a good reason to do that to someone. If they go too hard because they don’t understand yet that sparring isn’t a fight, I’d personally argue they need 1:1 sparring sessions with the coach and the gym enforcers. That way they can be taught control and how to be nice. If that doesn’t work, then you can revoke their sparring privileges. If it’s a situation where your established gym members might go too hard on them in sparring, then I can see why you’d hold a new member back for 3 months. But it would also speak to the culture you’ve built in that gym. Perhaps you’ve encouraged people to go a little too hard without teaching them control. I remember my first MT class, I was 12 and my coach threw me in with a heavy weight for sparring. I had no idea what I was doing but I had the time of my life. That experience was so awesome and I knew I wanted to pursue this as a life long passion. Then over time I had to learn that sparring is not a fight and I was schooled by later coaches on how to be controlled and play nice. And after I learned to do that, sparring became even more amazing. IMO, that’s the right move. Push everyone into sparring right away. People that don’t understand how to spar correctly can be isolated and their problems can be solved I’d love to pick your brain on this. Why do you do it your way? I want to hear your reasoning, if you’d ever be so kind as to get back to me. Perhaps this would be worthy of its own video.

​@@BiggityBoggity8095 One of the problems with sparring early is you don't know enough to actually learn from it, so you're getting beat up (hopefully just metaphorically, assuming you're at a gym with good sparring culture) with very little benefit. My muay thai kru never said anything to me about when I was or wasn't ready for sparring, but I waited for about 3 months of my own volition to give myself time to develop enough foundation to (a) feel like I could keep myself safe defensively and (b) actually process what was happening in order to respond during the round and learn for the longer term. My BJJ coach had me just do grip fighting and situational sparring for the first week or two, then I went into full open sparring. About 2 months in now, I kept getting mounted by one person I worked with yesterday, and when he asked if I had any situational questions, I told him outright that I don't know enough to know what to ask in a useful way. In short, sparring experience by itself is not valuable if you aren't learning. It's like doing a workout that gets you tired but doesn't actually improve your S&C (e.g. see all the gyms that have trainees run in circles to warm up 🙃)

@@Ash__Adler I would argue that just as important as the practicality of a routine is how much you enjoy doing it. Unless you’re out here like Marvelous Marvin or Mike Tyson where you have the discipline to force yourself through anything no matter what. But only a select few phenoms are like that. For everyone else like you and me, if it’s not fun, we’re not gonna keep doing it. There are exceptions to that rule. A lot of the foot work drills I do, which I learned from Barry Robinson and Icy Mike, I find boring and they make me feel stupid. But I do them anyway because I appreciate the practical application. It’s like eating your vegetables. But the majority of what of what people do should be something they find fun, they look forward to it. For me, sparring is first place, and hitting pads is second. I do this not simply to get good at hurting people, but because learning how to hurt people is fun. And if I walk into a gym knowing that I’ll be held back from the most fun thing about this hobby, I’ll probably just do the free trial and never go back. In fact, I think I’d feel genuinely hurt if someone wouldn’t allow me to spar. I’d either read it as an insult or I’d feel like I did something bad to earn their mistrust. I want to spar. And if I can’t do it, then the class is useless to me. There’s no way I’m alone in feeling that way.

Live drilling does in fact teach you a lot of things that you don't even realize you are learning.

Lessons on teaching are so rare... I wish there was more people doing this so that I could learn myself. I have been in some instructor level courses and done some instructor training... but it wasn't very actionable.

There's definitely a difference between the content from people who think about teaching effectively (e.g. Mike, Gabriel Varga, Joe Valtellini, Jordan Preisinger, Nathan Corbett) compared to people who think they can teach just because they were good fighters (won't name names because I'd rather only give publicity to the people doing it well 🙃).

@@hard2hurt Yeah all the ones I've attended try to hard to be deep and end up saying lots of words that mean nothing when put together. It's refreshing to be able to watch lessons with tangible and applicable methods, and definitely has helped me a lot

Sounds like you have more of a fight club than a martial arts club.

Yeah, I recently started muay thai and the coach has us doing 1 or 2 strikes each but it can be kicks, punches or whatever, and I find it way more enjoyable than standard drilling because it really gets your mind thinking about how to deal with strikes coming your way without losing composure and without suffering unnecessary damage

Better at what?

@@hard2hurt Applying techniques we drill that day in actual sparring, I suppose? Both combos, footwork and grappling (and also helped a lot to smoothen my transition between striking and grappling). Though truth is we also do live drills (usually we do regular drills, then live drills, then light sparring, in a 90 minute session)

You're better at applying them in light and chill sparring. That is very different than applying them in any other context. It is different in type, not amount. It is akin to teachers teaching you how to pass the tests they created, rather than teach you how to _do the thing_. I train very regularly with several guys who are very good in light sparring. They look like experts, but wilt instantly and completely when given real pressure. Not only are they not ready, they are barely any more ready than a person with no training.

@@hard2hurt That's probably correct, I never thought of it this way. I'm moving gyms (irrespective of this, it's because I'm moving towns), but assuming my new gym will be similar, what would you advise to fill those gaps? I assume that hard sparring will come once I get to a certain degree of experience, but besides that is there anything you'd recommend?

Thank you! Make sure you are subscribed to Gabriel too... he is the man.

You mean how every bjj school class that's ever been taught is run?

@Busy right now It's funny you say that... I usualy find people who say those kinds of things are exactly what they say like, "Your full of shit!". Apparently you've never been in a gang or lived on the hard side of life. Learn to use you brain isnstead of your mouth!

I can assure you that he is a rare type.

Great! You are indeed very lucky and right to be grateful

Great! You are indeed very lucky and right to be grateful

Yeah, I personally am thinking a bit that for striking bagwork is probably mostly superior to completely compliant technique drills. The only thing it might help you do better is judge distance, maybe? Which is so is valuable? Although, this better type of drill where each person has a specific goal or set of things they are trying to do and repeat. Looks amazing. I wish my current teacher was good enough and knew enough about teaching to do that sort of thing, I have been looking for a better teacher. My current one knows a lot about the body and is a licensed nutritionist as well, so they have been able to tell me a lot about the physiology of stuff, but I don't even know if they have actually been in a fight/tournament although they have done it awhile, there just aren't many people arround where I am though. So they have said some stuff I think is useful though. Actual lessons are like mostly padwork or like shadowboxing occasionally a little heavy bag work. I know I am not ready for actual sparring though in this. (I did used to do like hema sparring and such though in the past.)

lol I understood that.

I practice in a system of nihon jujutsu and, even if we do different ways of randori and kumite (just sometimes this last one), I find very interesting this idea of a middle point between the kata and the different kinds of randori/sparring. The idea of to give, for example, opportunities to your mate for execute waki gatame, or o soto gari, but with another attacks from uke involved, and a medium and controlled level of resistance. I think this idea is 100% applicable to lots of martial arts.

Lol don't be too hard on your coaches.

Unfortunately I don't have enough grappling expertise... but grappling schools are really bad about this too.

Some people may not consider fencing a martial art. That is fine. I’m not here to argue that.

@@JohnSmith-ld2mc From a different branch of sword fighting, fencing is absolutely a martial art and anyone who thinks otherwise doesn't know what a martial art is. Bruce Lee had it right, don't fear the man who has practised a thousand kicks once, fear the man who has practised one kick a thousand times, because he has thought about all the applications he can use that one kick for. Pick your favourite techniques that work for you and train the absolute shit out of them.

Yours is a good gym. Hard sparring cleans up alot of bad (,for you) moves.

@@mordi2537 Hard sparring also has the added benefit of risking repeated brain injuries. 👍

@@kristianjensen5877 Learning and practicing fighting skills? We don't have much brains to begin with. 🤣

Are you sure it wasn't a Dutch Kickboxing class? Elbows and clinches aren't usually taught much in those. 😅

And so practice helps with sparring, but you need to spar to put what you learned in practice into sparring. Same thing with live fights and sparring

Yes. Tons. There is no other place to get this number of reps of hitting and getting hit safely. There are things sport training alone can't fix, but the benefits far outweigh those. We have done multiple videos on the subject.