You only get one brain: Why MMA fighters are changing how they spar (2024)

Max Holloway was fresh off his unanimous decision victory over Calvin Kattar at a UFC Fight Night event in Abu Dhabi last month when he issued a word of advice for his fellow fighters: Stop sparring so much.

“You guys only get one brain,” Holloway said at the post-fight news conference, after claiming in interviews before the fight that he’d largely decided to forego sparring altogether. “Save it. You guys don’t need to do it. You sparred enough. You trained enough. You know how to punch someone. You know how to slip a punch. Why (are) you going to take unnecessary damage before the main game, you know?”

Years ago, a statement like this might have been a form of heresy in MMA gyms. Back in the early days of the sport — especially back when the Iowa-based Miletich Fighting Systems gym was known for churning out champions via brutal sparring sessions that regularly resulted in training room knockouts — sparring was considered absolutely essential for every fighter. You could walk into an MMA gym on sparring day and see 15-year veterans and world champs mixing it up with regional scene rookies, often multiple times per week.

But as MMA training evolves and brain health understanding improves, that’s beginning to change. Most coaches and trainers will still tell you there’s no way to learn how to do this sport in the cage without first trying it out in the gym, but some are coming around to the idea that regular, hard sparring might not be essential for every fighter at every skill level.

“Where is the fighter at in terms of their career?” asked Sayif Saud, founder and head coach at Fortis MMA in Dallas. “If he’s three fights in, four fights in, he’s going to have to spar. He’s got to deal with adversity, and you’ve got to see, when he gets in those adverse situations, how does he react? You don’t want to be getting that experience in the fight. If you do that, the next thing you know, maybe you’re 4-4, and that doesn’t bode well when you’re still just starting out in your MMA career.”

"When you get to a certain level, you just feel like what is this contact for? We save the contact for the big day."@BlessedMMA tells @arielhelwani he didn't spar in training camp for #UFCFightIsland7 and has not since the first Volkanovski fight. pic.twitter.com/UxXgVJNWpV

— ESPN MMA (@espnmma) January 13, 2021

Of course, just saying that fighters should spar isn’t the same as telling them how they should approach sparring. The old-school Miletich camp fighters would tell stories of going full bore at one another in 4-ounce MMA gloves with no headgear. Later, more gyms adopted the use of boxing gloves and shinguards in sparring, with headgear optional and mostly used by those worried about cuts in the weeks leading up to a fight.

Now, at places like Fortis MMA, the smaller gloves are coming back into fashion for some sparring sessions, if only to give fighters a more realistic sense of what they’ll be dealing with offensively and defensively in the cage.

“Getting used to working your defense with the small gloves, I think that’s a big, big deal,” Saud said. “If I put a 16-ounce (boxing) glove next to my face, that’s going to cover a good portion of my face defensively. If I do it with a 6-ounce (MMA) glove, it’s not going to cover my temple or all of my jaw. So we do more work with the smaller gloves now, just to get used to the defense, feeling your location, feeling where your openings are. I think that’s important. You just can’t hit each other hard with those because that’s going to end terribly.”

This is the core difficulty at the center of it all. It’s not like practicing tennis. Fighting, as a sport, is inherently dangerous and damaging. Even doing safer, lighter versions of it involves the risk of injury, and those injuries could diminish a fighter’s performance when it counts or render him incapable of showing up at all.

But if you don’t practice with someone trying to hit you in the face, how will you stay calm when it happens for real? How will your body absorb the blows without freaking out and shutting down? How will you ever get any better without practicing, without creating some sort of simulation of the thing itself?

For John Crouch, head coach at The MMA Lab in Glendale, Ariz., the value of sparring is as much about the psychological aspects as the physical ones.

“It’s hard because you don’t want to risk unnecessary damage, but if you and I are sparring and you feel like I’m not really hitting you, you’re immediately better and more comfortable,” Crouch said. “I’ve had guys — and I don’t want to say any names, get anybody in trouble — where the reason they get tired so quickly in a fight is because of how emotionally intense it is. And so the importance of some sparring is to get yourself heightened, emotionally, to be at that place where it feels like a fight so that you learn how to drive your race car through that.”

But as Crouch added, there are some ways to do that without being hit directly in the head. That’s the part he said he tries to limit as much as possible for his fighters. At the same time, he said, he has had to recognize that for some fighters, sparring is how they build confidence, an essential psychological building block for their preparation before a fight.

“I try to talk (former UFC and WEC lightweight champion) Ben Henderson out of rounds every single time he spars,” Crouch said. “But with Ben, he feels it’s a necessary part of his preparation. You know, he’s someone who’s never skipped a round in his life.

“We kind of came up together, and I was young in this sport too. We sort of did what we’d seen and what seemed to work for other people, which usually meant coming in on Saturdays and doing three hard (sparring) rounds to mimic the fight. Now we might do one hard round, then a round of hard wrestling and a round of really intense pad work, just trying to limit that impact to the head. But for somebody like Ben, who feels like he needs that (sparring) in order to feel like he’s ready, it’s hard to talk him out of it.”

For coaches who are used to dealing with workhorse fighters, this is a constant problem. So too, said Crouch, is keeping the intensity down in the gym. It’s one thing to say we’re going to do some light sparring just to practice our timing and technique. It’s another thing to keep it light after someone lands a clean strike, then someone else responds, and before you know it the intensity has jumped up several notches.

As Crouch put it: “Whenever you say ‘light sparring,’ there are four guys out there trying to kill each other.”

That’s why, for fighters like UFC welterweight Belal Muhammad, a lot depends on who you’re sparring with.

“I don’t spar with anybody I don’t know and trust,” said Muhammad. “The guys I go with, we can all have a gentlemen’s agreement to keep it light, and even if someone lands a good shot, it’s like, ‘Hey, sorry,’ and we’re all good.”

That’s not to say his approach to sparring was always this way. When he first started, according to Muhammad, his team was essentially a group of fighters with no coach. Sparring was their main activity in training, just showing up and beating each other senseless, which he maintains was maybe not all bad when he was young and fresh and still honing his craft and his toughness.

But for his last fight, a unanimous decision victory over Dhiego Lima at UFC 258 earlier this month, Muhammad said he didn’t do any hard sparring. Instead, he focused mostly on “situational stuff, where we’re not throwing hard punches but we’re doing hard grappling.” This, he said, has become the norm for him over his last several training camps.

“Once I got into the UFC, I started to realize that I don’t need hard sparring,” Muhammad said. “You need that early in your career when you’re still trying to figure out where you’re at. But all of us at this level, we’re all tough, we all know how to get hit and how to take a punch. Taking more punches doesn’t prove anything.”

At the same time, Muhammad said, that doesn’t mean practices should be easy. Pushing yourself is important, he said, and so is putting yourself into situations where you’re uncomfortable.

“You need that sometimes,” Muhammad said. “You need to go through that in practice where you get dominated or you feel like you can’t breathe.”

But simply getting hit in the head over and over again isn’t the only way to accomplish that, he pointed out. That’s especially true in a sport with such a strong grappling element, where there are other ways to put yourself through the necessary crucibles in training.

When it comes to honing his striking, Muhammad said, he prefers to essentially “play tag” with sparring partners, but only those he trusts not to suddenly decide they want to take his head off.

“That’s why I firmly believe that, if you have the right training partners, that can add years to your career,” Muhammad said.

For Javier Mendez, the longtime coach at the American Kickboxing Academy (AKA) in San Jose, Calif., policing sparring sessions to keep them as safe as possible is practically a full-time job.

The problem, he said, is that even at the highest levels, “ego gets in the way.”

“I’ll give you an example,” Mendez said. “About 10 years ago, I had one of my famous guys, and he’s sparring and he’s supposed to go really light — like so light you could almost close your eyes and not get hurt. He’s working with one of my champion kickboxer guys, and they were working, not going hard, but the kickboxer starts to feel like this guy’s doing a little too well and making him look bad. So he went and spinning-heel kicked him really hard and broke his nose. It was uncalled for, and I’m there like, ‘Bro, you’re an idiot.’ So yeah, the ego thing, it’s very real and difficult to control.”

Considering how much more training than actual fighting most MMA fighters do, it might also be vital to control. Particularly with the recent stories about former UFC fighters like Spencer Fisher and Mac Danzig, both of whom have detailed their health struggles related to brain trauma, it seems increasingly clear that sparring is responsible for a lot of the worst damage. Among fighters from an earlier generation in the sport, there are numerous stories of people getting rocked in sparring, or even knocked all the way out, only to get up and do it all again the very next week or sometimes even the very same day.

If fighters are going to safeguard their brain health to at least minimize the damage in an inherently damaging sport, figuring out how and when and whether to spar is going to necessarily be a crucial part of the answer. Now, at last, it seems that some people have begun to at least ask the right questions.

(Top photo of Max Holloway, left, and Calvin Kattar: Jeff Bottari / Zuffa LLC)