I was training for an upcoming mixed martial arts (mma) fight and as I showed up to the gym for our Friday afternoon team practice, I noticed the cars of my teammates weren’t in the lot yet. Sure, some of them could have been running late, but not all of them.

This is weird I thought to myself as I walked through the doors of Trials Mixed Martial Arts.  I was greeted as usual by our coach and world champion fighter, Ryan Schultz, who was sipping a cup of coffee as usual waiting for the chance to make us all better.

Beginning my warmup routine, I jogged around the gym, did a bit of jump rope, and started shadow boxing, all while keeping my eye on the door just waiting for a teammate to show up.

Fortunately for me no one else arrived this day and with this experience began an integral part of our law enforcement coaching program.

Ryan emerged from the coach’s area and onto the mats in full sparring gear! He told me to gear up and reminded me most of our team fought the weekend before, so they were in recovery mode, while my fight still a few weeks away meant I still needed hard training. 

Today he said it would just be the two of us and we would do one round of full mma sparring.

I thought to myself one round. My fight was scheduled for three – three-minute rounds so I needed at least that much time, but he’s the coach I’ll do what he says. What I did not know was the 1 round was for 25 minutes! It lasted almost two and a half times of my expected fight! For 25 minutes we boxed, kickboxed, wrestled, attempted submissions, escaped submissions, got tired, wanted to quit, and never did! 

This round was not designed to critique perfect technique, or offer detailed break downs, it was designed to test my heart and my spirit. Ryan would offer words of encouragement, “keep moving”, “breath”, “wrestle, wrestle, wrestle” were all phrases I can still hear him saying to me to this day.  He was building confidence in me! Confidence that if I could go with a world champion for 25 minutes, I could go for nine minutes with an amateur fighter.

When I began our Ground Tactics Coaches program, this was a drill that would be paramount in bridging the gap between law enforcement techniques and coaching students to believe in themselves in the darkest moments. This would be the way we would replace fear with belief!

In this video with a student from a recent course you can hear me doing the same for her as Ryan did for me. This confidence drill included 45 minutes of alternating between jumping jacks, scissor jacks, flutter kicks, and holding planks in 50 second intervals with 10 seconds of rest to create elevated heart rate and stress response.  Each student came into the middle of the mat three times each with a different coach each time escaping, controlling, breathing, and making use of force decisions while under duress. 



https://youtu.be/oxKe5VudsGs

“Giving Cops Confidence to Win”