If you improve one area, this will dramatically improve your ability and competence overall. This is an extension of the previous article. The Top 19 most common technical mistakes. They are separate articles, but this is an additional gem for the benefit of the more experienced fighters and coaches. Some will apply to you, some to others but everyone should find something you consider for your own benefit. You might find just one detail that improves your performance.
The top 18 are listed below and expanded on beneath:
- Not following a smart training program that covers all the facets required for your development/next bout, or to meet your training goals.
- Not routinely evaluating your performance to determine the improvement required.
- Not being someone, other people want to train with.
- Thinking you are entitled to special treatment when you have not proven yourself.
- Not realizing that everyone that is nice to you is not your best friend.
- Not training your mental strength and competition composure enough to deal with the pressure of performance and the uncertainty of competition.
- Not realizing that the hard work and grind is never ending if you want to improve and succeed at competition.
- If you lose a few fights or are losing motivation to train you blame others and look at what other gyms can do for you, before first looking at yourself, taking responsibility and talking to your team about what you can change and what the team can do to adjust together.
- Believing that your plastic title belt from one of the many sanctioning bodies in your state (own fishbowl) makes you a champion.
- Giving up when you get your first serious injury.
- Not sacrificing enough in your life.
- Not being coachable enough to work on the true weaknesses that matter.
- Not focusing on your strengths to WIN.
- Forgetting where you come from and what you were like as a beginner.
- Not having other ‘things’ that matter in your life, to support you and keep you training hard over an extended period.
- Having too many people in your ear, giving you ‘advice’ (family, friends, associates, other people with no expertise in combat sports).
- Allowing your weight, training intensity and routine to fluctuate too much between fights. Training without a smart program and being inconsistent.
- Have a good diet you can maintain to live a healthy life.
The Top 18 points expanded:.
- Not following a smart training program that covers all the facets required for your development/next bout, or to meet your training goals.
Your skills and attribute training should be programmed for your training to be developmental and time efficient. Goal driven training requires a plan and steppingstones to get there. Have class goals, week goals, month goals and big picture dreams. Always develop your mental game in alignment with your physical development. Your attitude and mind set to training is critical to how you turn up, how you perform and how you improve. Your mood is directly related to how successful your physical efforts are.
Train every class with a deliberate practice mindset and follow a program of development for your skills, attributes, and all conditioning requirements with the focus on your Muay Thai improvement. Ensure you do not tip the balance into over training, or just over training your energy systems at something else.
Physical conditioning that is sport-specific and immediately translatable to performance is important, with all aspects of training following a deliberate practice mindset to enhance improvement. Often people do not train enough, but when people do train a lot, they often do not train smart enough to ensure improvement. When people over train it is often in one area, with no balance between all aspects required for development.
Following a smart program with discipline and a great coach is critical.
2. Not routinely evaluating your performance to determine the improvement required.
Not every win is proof of improvement and not every loss is a lack of improvement. Not every bad session where you get your arse handed to you in sparring is bad for you. Not every compliment you get from others is a positive. Your mum and dad are there for platitudes, cuddles and telling you how good you are. Your coach is there to ensure you grow and have the tools to meet your goals.
You need measurables here. Benchmarks against which you can evaluate. It is easy with how fast you run or how much you lift, but when it comes to performance you need aspects you can measure. How long did it take before you wanted to quit? 1 round or 4, for example. It can be as simple as I am not going to vomit or cry today. I am going to pick the hardest person in the class first and last. You could pick something like leg kicks. I am going to score 10 clean leg kicks today, or I am going to check kicks. Pick something you want to be better at and quantify it by focusing on it and measuring it. I personally used to work on ‘watching’ and ensured I saw every strike that belted me and breathing so I had to realise when I wasn’t doing it properly, or at all. You could work on a technique or something like – I am not going to gas myself sparring. How many rib kicks you can do in a minute is simple, if you maintain the standard of the kick not just count rubbish kicks.
1000 repetitions of shit will only give you shit. It is the quality that counts, not the number.
You need to be your harshest critique and your best friend. You need to take notes and use spreadsheets for performance measurables and how you feel. Daily. Guessing is pointless and means you are not serious and should stop reading here, because you are wasting your time. Have daily, weekly, quarterly, and performance-based competition measurables that you discuss with your coach and are accountable for. The basics are the number of sessions you do, when you train and what you are training. Simple questions, but critical to answer.
3. Not being someone, other people want to train with.
Although you compete alone, you need a team to train with. Being arrogant and self-centered will not endear you to training partners and without training partners your best friend is a bag, and your potential is limited despite your ego.
When you are a beginner, you look up to others and learn from their training habits. You appreciate the advanced people who have time for you and help you develop. When you spar with them, they do not destroy you. They challenge you but assist in growth. When you then develop into an advanced student, how do you treat others? If sparring or partner work to you is your chance to prove yourself and go hard on others or show off, then you are a dick. If you forget who made you, you, and who helped you develop, you are a dick. Remember why you respected the people who helped you and aim to emulate them. No one likes to train with people who show off, beat them up every class, or coach them all the time while training. People love doing pads, but do you ever hold pads for other people, or only take?
Be a team member, turn up for others. Don’t just train when you have a bout coming up in your ‘camp’ period and then clock off when you are not and others are. That is selfish. You must have self-belief and a level of confidence to compete well, but you do not have to beat everyone up at training, train selfishly and put yourself first all the time. You may win a few fights and have deluded spectators, but you are still a dick.
Coaches might enjoy a champion in their gym to build recognition for the club and their work, but they hate people who injure others, don’t support the team and when they start winning, forget they were shit one day and it was the coach and team that got them there. Students who think they are more than the club, that the coach works for them and everyone is there for their benefit are dicks. Some clubs tolerate them, but eventually, these types of people are detrimental to a strong club. If this is you – slap yourself!
4. Thinking you are entitled to special treatment when you have not proven yourself.
You need self-belief to be successful, but you need humility to be a good person. Respect is earned in the gym, not given. Respect is not based on your self-believed entitlement. I am not a believer that respect is given automatically or demanded, it must be earned. You should respect police, officials, ambulance drivers and military officers by default because their position requires them to be respected but it is the position you respect, not the individual. An individual must earn respect. In fighting, respecting your opponent too much can undermine an impressive performance. I digress!
If you want to be good, suck up the grind and do the work. People usually think it will take less time than it does. Shut up and train. Do the work – at basics – and do not be in a rush to go to intermediate classes or start sparring. These foundation months are worth spending time on. Do not invite yourself to intermediate classes or jump into sparring based on your ego. Wait until invited, talk to your coach about it and ‘listen’ if given advice.
5. Not realizing that everyone that is nice to you is not your best friend.
If you have a coach that feeds your ego, they are not being honest with you and only developing their own ego. If you want to be coached by fans you will be a loser. Platitudes do not improve you. Some coaches need your fees more than they want you to improve. Be pleased if you have a coach that challenges you and challenges your ego. Being coachable is critical and for it to work, you must understand that the hardest things to change are the things you have been doing the longest.
If you have a coach that always feeds you ego, wants you to be promoting yourself all the time, on social media relentlessly and bases your training on their belief in you – you’re being conned. To be great and humble, you must be able to do strict self-analysis, review faults and openly discuss areas that need improvement.
6. Not training your mental strength and competition composure enough to deal with the pressure of performance and the uncertainty of competition.
Train uncertainty and read my article about uncertainty and performance. No matter how hard you train physically, you must match it with building mental strength for performance and the toughness of the sport. Build resilience and fortify yourself against challenges to come. Your mental strength, focus, development, and mindset requires as considerable focus, often as much training as your physical development. If you remember being nervous turning up to your first class, first sparring, then your first competition – imagine how hard it is to compete in front of a 1000 people, live streamed and forever on YouTube. It is 100 times harder to be the main event than first fight. By then you need to ensure you have trained your performance mindset.
How? Read good books about it. Listen to more experienced people, develop routines, and practice positive self-talk. Shake your demons loose, lock them away and develop self-belief and real confidence based on competence and doing the arduous work in training. An old schoolbook I recommend is – The Inner Game of Golf. Seems bizarre, but it is the original classic for learning how to talk down the demons and work on positive self-talk.
7. Not realizing that the challenging work and grind is never ending if you want to improve and succeed at competition.
Training to fight or just training to improve is like walking up a down escalator. You cannot take your foot off the pedal. You need breaks, you need recovery time, and you need to factor in periodization, however this must all be programmed around a constant and never-ending cycle of improvement. Total quality improvement is a business concept I relate to coaching because I believe you should never get complacent and there is always something on which you can improve.
Amateurs and beginners train around their life. Professionals and advanced people understand the grind. You must maintain the training, be able to lift and constantly work on the basics and your foundations. You will go through a phase where sparring is more fun than basics, and pads are just a great workout, but if you want to improve you must have focus on your training and things that you need to improve. You must keep doing the hours, you must have the hunger to run up hills, do sprints, pads, sparring and your own bag work.
Your motivation will wane, so you need to rely on discipline. You cannot train less but you can train smarter and more focused on performance than quantity.
8. If you lose a few fights or are losing motivation to train, you blame others and look at what other gyms can do for you before first looking at yourself, taking responsibility and talking to your team about what you can change and what the team can do to adjust together.
The longest heading of any point says it all. Take responsibility for yourself first. Your performance is your responsibility. You have a team to get you there, but you are the only one standing in the ring. Blaming others, looking for an easy excuse will not solve your weaknesses. Talk to your coach and your team. A few group sessions with the team might help. You might even consider seeing a psychologist. If you can’t do that, you will always face the same problems or new ones.
It may be time to change teams, switch your training up, but this is a solemn step that should not be considered first or taken lightly. A good coach will agree you need a change if the team isn’t working for you as well as it should, but it is still your responsibility and no one else’s fault.
A secret method I copied from UFC legend Georges St Pierre – when you have been training for a long time, you have had many fights and need spark in your training but still need the grind, do something different in your training camp. Be an athlete and learn something new, add something in and do it smart. Do 1-2 sessions a week of something you are not good at but can learn and it can benefit your training camp. Add learning some gymnastics, add swimming, try mountain bike riding, do some public speaking. Do it smart though, I don’t recommend motor cross!
9. Believing that your plastic title belt from one of the many sanctioning bodies in your state (own fishbowl) makes you a champion.
This means that when you lose your humility, you need to pull your head in and remember that in the big world of combat sports, there are multiple people out there that can beat you. In fighting you are often only as good as your last fight. You could be the ONE Muay Thai champion and people are lining up to beat you and training their arse off to get in there with you. You get cocky, ease off or lose the hunger, you are going down.
If you win an amateur belt on a local sanctioning body. Well done, but it is only the start, not a time to advertise yourself as a champion. A title holder is just that, a title holder. One of many. You must want more and win back-to-back titles at the highest level to be a champion. This whole area is a major reason that contributes to the lack of credibility in Muay Thai as a mainstream sport. The identification of a single verifiable champion at state, national and world level. It is usually the leading promotion that defines it. For MMA it’s UFC, for K-1 its Glory, for Muay Thai it is now ONE (despite the lack of traditional Muay Thai on display). In Australia it is… well, no one really! You must shine above the others and be known across multiple sanctioning bodies and multiple promotions to be considered a champion.
When you return to training and act like a champion on a different level to your teammates, when you switch to thinking your coach is there for you, at your whim, that things need to change for your convenience – you have a disease called ‘cuntflu’.
10. Giving up when you get your first serious injury.
Every serious athlete gets injured and in combat sports it is more likely than most sports. It will usually happen leading up to your biggest event, when you lift your training and your level of contact. How you react can define you and determine if you have what it takes to get past it and come back stronger. Just face the fact that you will get injured and work ways to train around it, get healed, do not come back to training too fast and build back into your game and schedule.
Many people struggle with serious injuries. Talk to coaches and experienced fighters and you will find out that everyone has more than one. Do not let the injury beat you. When I had my 3rd knee reconstruction, I learnt that the gods of fighting where just saying to me to work on your boxing. When I had my elbow reconstructed, my comeback focused on my kicking. I learnt to swim, ride bikes, and a lot about rehab – but nothing stopped me from wanting to build back to training and fight again.
Seriously, do not be flippant! Seek professional medical advice. Especially if you get multiple concussions. See a Dr and do not go to your coach with, ‘I think I have broken my heart’ or say your physio said ‘you need to rest your left toe’ so you cannot train. Do not look for excuses or sympathy. An injury is a problem to solve and get past. Some injuries are career ending but most are not. When you are injured, get the training schedule back first. If you are hurt, you are not injured. If you are injured, you hurt and have something that needs surgery or serious rehab.
Your training schedule and teammates are important so even if you cannot train, be at training and do your rehab at the gym as much as you can. Following the schedule and being with your teammates will help you recover and be back at training faster.
11. Not sacrificing enough in your life.
If you want to be great at anything, you must give up many things. You must decide what you are willing to give up. It is usually nothing dramatic like selling your soul to the devil, but you must spend so much time training that other things must be discarded to allow you to go to the gym every night and on the weekend. Muay Thai is not a sport you can do as a social recreation unless you are just doing it for fitness or fun and never want to be serious. Even for a serious beginner, you need 3 days a week to develop. For someone who wants to compete, you need to build your training up to 6 days a week and often twice a day.
A sacrifice is not just something you give, it’s something you miss out on, you put aside what you want to do and make it a second priority to your training. You will not be as good as you can be without giving up everything that conflicts with training consistently. You also must give up sleep ins, fast food, late nights, and drinking. You must suffer, and you need to have the discipline to train when you do not feel like it and when your mates keep inviting you to drink after work. You have miss family birthdays, work promotions, postings, jobs that do not line up with training, going on dates and the birth of your first child.
How far you go will be inversely proportional to how much you sacrifice. If you are the type of person who prefers freedom and takes any opportunity to miss training to catch up with mates, then chuck it now and stop kidding yourself. Just go and be one of those blokes who tells their mates at the pub on Friday night they do Muay Thai while the real fighters are not drinking and going to bed early to train hard tomorrow. Then after they fight they often party hard to celebrate but get back on track fast to fight again. Training is the habit, not socializing.
12. Not being coachable enough to work on the true weaknesses that matter.
Being coachable is critical. Coachability is a critical factor and something most people think they are good at when they are, mmmm… variable at best. It becomes harder to adjust your skills and habits the longer you train. Advanced students find adjustment harder when skills are embedded. New students are an empty cup and suck up every skill taught. This is normal, so what is coachability? It is the ability for a student to listen; adapt and try to do what the coach is asking for.
Coaches will understand this more than students. Some people are more coachable than others, but everyone must be more self-aware of their coachability. Every coach knows someone who acts like they listen but then does not change a thing. This person is usually someone who asks questions endlessly. They are called ‘askholes’.
As a student, you must try to be coachable and realise when you are not being coachable and talk to your coach.
13. Not focusing on your strengths to WIN.
You win with your strengths, but you lose with your weaknesses. The closer you get to a fight or when you are sparring, you must develop your strengths and apply them. You must train your weakness to improve but you cannot step into a fight spending all your time working on them, or you’ll neglect how you win and what you’ll win with.
You need a few things you are awesome at and can win with. Drill them to death and own them. It could be a leg kick, an over the top (over hand) punch, an elbow etc. but you need a few. If you are not fast, you can do sprints forever and you will get a little faster, but it will not be a strength. If you are aerobically fit and have a good base, you can keep it with routine work. If you fight someone faster than you, you cannot beat them at speed or get fast enough to match them. You must use your strengths to win and your attributes. If you have good strength adaptation, hit hard. If you are fit, work hard, if you have good speed and interval capability, use that rhythm to fight well.
14. Forgetting where you come from and what you were like as a beginner.
A good club is about the people and there are always people at distinct levels. New people, intermediate people, and advanced people. As you improve and progress, contribute to developing others and the club will grow stronger. If it is a one-way trajectory for you, you are selfish. You may be a great fighter and even have a place at a club but if you remember how hard it was to be a beginner and help out, you will also improve as a person and improve the club. Coaching also makes you accountable and improves your technique because you are now responsible for others and your faults will be theirs.
15. Not having other ‘things’ that matter in your life to support you and keep you training hard over an extended period.
You should have family and friends that support you that do not train. You need a job, and you need a life after fighting. If training is just for fitness and fun then you will have these, and training is probably part of your social life. You need a job that has longevity. Get good marks, go to uni, do an apprenticeship, because you will never make enough money fighting to live off. I am not slapping your dreams – it’s just a matter of statistics. Muay Thai is not tennis. You have a short competitive life and no high paying events. If you get to the UFC, you still will not make enough money to live off it unless you are 1 in 10000. You need something for after you compete. You could become a great coach and earn a million dollars like me, but that is also statistically hard and costs a lot more emotionally than you might be prepared to pay.
You need people to hug you and love you when you get injured, fail and have a cry. It is better that these people are not your coach and training partners because we don’t want that job.
16. Having too many people in your ear, giving you ‘advice’ (family, friends, associates, other people with no expertise in combat sports).
Listen to your coach. Listen to advanced students. Listen to people who mentor you who have proven experience and valuable advice. Listen to your Dr when you’re sick and don’t Google your symptoms. The list of people to NOT listen to is huge – your barber, your Dr, your friends and especially your family, anyone who gives you advice but has no experience related to your training. Even if you love them, tell to shut up. Just be impolite and say, ‘thank you for caring about me, but you don’t know shit so please just yell at the UFC at the pub with the other experts’.
17. Allowing your weight, training intensity and routine to fluctuate too much between fights. Training without a smart program and being inconsistent.
It is actually common to have a training camp and ramp up for a bout. You need to focus on the next bout and increase your training intensity for preparation, but this system is extremely flawed if you use it as an excuse to not follow a program in between fights. If your weight blows out, you start enjoying life too much, lose your discipline and get distracted, you just have to work harder when you are training and you’re actually going backwards in your self-imposed off season. It is very bad for you to drop weight too far, add weight and do it again, over and over.
Fitness is linear and best achieved consistently, incrementally, in gradual steps. It’s not effective to let it lapse, go backwards and then try to kick it up. Things like your aerobic base, your core strength, your balance and your strength base require constant maintenance. So, if you do cycle your training, always keep a base level of maintenance. Your diet must be based on what fuel you need and be healthy for your entire life and longevity, NOT entertainment.
18. Have a good diet you can maintain to live a healthy life.
This should not be last, but I put it here, so you at least remember one critical thing to help! Eat for fuel not for entertainment. See a nutritionist to learn and improve your diet. Be disciplined. Discipline for training is easy compared to eating! We live in a time when you can eat any food you want, anytime and have it delivered to your house. That is an unbelievably sad thing. Enjoy your food, but enjoy how good, real food helps you live longer, train harder and feel better. Eat simply and enjoy easy practical meals and then it is easier to give things up when you do not have much to start with. The fancier you live, the harder it is to cut back, give up and downsize. Eat basic, real food and enjoy it without the easy options of takeaway, fast food, reheated meals and delivery food and you are 50% there!
Supplements. You do not need supplements unless you have a deficiency detected by blood tests. People forget that the word itself means, supplementing your diet. Just have a good balanced diet. Pre-trainers are bad for you. Energy drinks are really shit and most vitamins are just pissing money away. Recovery protein drinks can be useful when you train hard enough. You must eat before training, so a protein bar is a viable choice, but 4 a day will just make you smell.
Socializing is important. Who will buy tickets to watch you, if you have no friends! But you must give it up on every training night and plan your time out like training. On set nights. You cannot have a cheat day, a binge day and improve each week. Even your socializing must be moderated. You must have the strength to say no! To eat the salad not the chips, to stop at 2 drinks and skip dessert. Anyone that hassles you about it is not your friend and is just jealous you are striving for something more than them.
Alcohol consumption is detrimental to performance. Your body can process about 2 alcoholic drinks before the poison from the alcohol starts to overwhelm your liver and switch it from processing food to working on the alcohol. That means your food is processed after the alcohol and you are not getting the nutrients you need and your food processing is not functioning 100%. No serious athlete gets pissed every weekend, goes out every Fri and Sat night to binge on food and alcohol. Sure, have a drink or two with mates, 1-2 days a week but if you are serious don’t drink at all for 6 weeks into a bout and then only celebrate with 2 drinks and keep off the sauce on every training day. Have discipline or waste your training.
Read my article on weight maintenance and weight cutting for great insights.
Thank you for reading.
Have fun with your training, enjoy it, be obsessive and learn to love the grind. Enjoy turning up for your club mates and the experience of belonging and respect from others for your effort. When you feel worse not training and you get agitated missing class, you know you are on the right track to success.
I hope at least one of the top 18 things resonated with you and helps improve your Muay Thai. If you are a coach, I hope it improves your coaching knowledge. This is not an exhaustive list or meant to be the answer. It is just written to share knowledge and give guidance if people are looking for that. All we can do is give everything we know, and it is then up to people to do what they will with the knowledge.
If you have any comments or other points I didn’t consider, please email me at anthony@thephoenixedge.com.au
