BTG 140 - What's better, a big team or a small team?

[Music] Hello and welcome to the breaking the guard podcast. On today's episode, I wanted to talk about the benefit of coming from a small gym, small camp in terms of growth and progression, particularly if you're a highle competitor or you aspire to be a high level competitor because a lot of people get lured into this idea that you need to join the biggest gyms that have the most UFC fighters and that's like the path to success. And I will argue against that. On one hand, if you join a very well-known established gym, you are going to have a lot more connections and politically it's going to be easier for you to get in the UFC. That is a a fact. But what I'm talking about is as far as skill acquisition, I believe, and I've trained all over the world. I've trained in lots of big gyms. Uh so again, this is my take. I'm not saying it's, you know, 100% factual or whatnot. This is just my opinion, right? Um, but it's my belief that the problem with bigger gyms is that they're too big. There's too many people to manage both in coaching staff and in athletes. And sometimes less is more. Uh, and what I mean by that is that when you have a stable of 30 pro fighters in your gym, that's a lot of talent sitting in one roof. And this creates many problems. One, there's going to be a lot of people fighting in the same weight class. So now there is potential matchups that you could have between each other inside the gym. which is not great, right? Two, one, coach is going to have a really hard time managing all those athletes. It's just not going to happen. So, you're going to have to split up resources and you're going to have to have many coaches. Now, I've seen some gyms, there is one head honcho and then he's kind of giving directives to the second tier of coaches and sometimes there's even a third tier, right? Like, and it's getting you could see like when you have to like hand off and delegate these things, we're getting different results now, right? Because each coach is going to be responsible for like a subset of athletes. And now the whole is not necessarily the same, right? Like one coach might be teaching one thing and then another coach might be teaching another thing and then these you know two athletes are developing at different rates depending on the capacity of the coach. The other thing is that even if you did have one coach teaching everybody everything, there is going to be a problem, especially with a big gym like that where the skill gaps are going to be very different, right? Like some people are going to need to learn more like standup, some people going to learn more grappling. And a shotgun approach to teaching everybody is not going to be the most effective, right? Like each athlete is going to need if we were living in an ideal world, which if you're a professional athlete, at the top of your game, you should be. You should have a coach that is specifically tailoring the instruction and the training to your needs, right? So that you're getting the most out of it. if I have to split, you know, between 30 different people and hope that I'm getting little nuggets, I'm, you know, not doing myself a great service there, right? So, again, these are just off the top of my head some of the big disadvantages uh I find with big gyms. The other thing that tends to happen is that you start getting little sub uh like little clicks within the gym where there's like one group of people that always train together and then there's another group of people that train together and then there's another group here and then these groups don't really intermingle. So even though they're under the same house, they're not really all working together. And mind you, this could even happen in the small gym. I know it's happened in even my gym a couple times and we have to break it up because it's bad for the culture. Like we're all supposed to be one unit and uh you have to be able to recognize when people start creating like little factions within the gym. That's that's not good in my opinion. We want everybody to be all uh working on the same path. However, that is very difficult when you have a lot of people when my brother and I were focusing on training pro fighters and we had, you know, guys in the UFC and Bodog and Elite XC at the time, right? Like that's when we had Mosby Doll, McCarthy, and we had uh other guys in our fight team. We were small. There was maybe like less than 15 fighters. So, and the coaches were me and my brother. We share the same system, which is important. Like I said, when you have a lot of people, just having one guy handling everything is going to be difficult. We need there's going to come a necessity to have multiple coaches and just for the fact that one guy doesn't know everything, right? Usually there's going to be one who's a specialist in one area and then we need to like mix them around. That's fine as long as all the coaches are working under the same system. And in my opinion, that is what the the general manager, head coach, you know, whatever you want to call that guy who's at the top of the totem pole should be making sure that all of his lieutenants below him are working the same system. Right? Because if you have a proven system that produces champions, you wouldn't stray from it. You would keep everybody working within that system. Now, they might be in different parts of it because in MMA, the system is going to be quite large. But like if we imagine the the system to be a pyramid, there might be guys who are starting at the base. Well, there might be other guys that might be in the middle tier. And then you know you have that top level guys they're working at the tip but it's all part of the same system. So even guys who are crossraining a different you know coaches they're all seeing a similar set of techniques because they're all within the same system. But I will find sometimes that when you're working in these bigger gyms that the coaches all have their own systems. So you have people working one set of things and you have another people working another set of things and they're not married. To me that's problematic because now it's almost as if you're competing with each other, right? Like you can have um you know one coach he's running his own system and then another coach is running his own system here. These athletes now that are training under them are not functioning at the same level, right? Because they're working different systems. If we're in a big gym, we should have a unified system that all the coaches agree this is the best way forward. This is how we produce champions. And ideally, if you've gotten this big, you are successful in what you're doing. So, we already have a proven model that works. And everybody should be following the proven model. And this is what again this is when factions start to occur where oh like the one group thinks differently. You know that's going to create rifts and and create friction. And unfortunately, usually when that happens, that's when you got to split people off because normally people don't like change their mind uh and come back to your way of thinking if they started from there and they drifted. And it's unfortunate, but it happens. But uh that's just a reality of the thing. Like if someone has to split off, you have to split them off. Let them go their own way. They're going to be happier. You're going to be happier because your gym culture is going to be more cohesive. And uh like I said, this has happened in my gym and I'm not a very big gym either. So, it can happen to anybody. Uh that's why it's important to make sure that everybody stays on the same page. You know, if you're doing meetings and making sure that, you know, everybody's happy and everybody has a shared vision and we all agree on the path moving forward, that helps to nip these things in the butt, right? like we don't have somebody who's maybe disgruntled because they feel like they're not getting uh they they don't agree with the the vision, but they don't want to cause friction, but they're going to do it on the side, right? Like that's no good, right? Everything needs to be out the open. And maybe that person has a valid point, and if you were to bring it up, then everybody can catch catch on, right? But if you're going to be a team and in my opinion, everybody's functioning on the same page, which means everybody's working with the same training systems. You might have different coaches just because, you know, we can't have one guy doing everything, but they're all working with the same vision. That's why in my gym, we have the curriculum. We have a lot of coaches now and that's totally fine because they're functioning under the same curriculum which means they're in the same system. So even if you're going to my brother's class or my class or to you know Edgar's class, you know, it's the the same system being functioned. So we're we're not competing with each other which I believe is important because again team we're all working together. The one thing I think that really gets uh there is a a significant advantage to working in the big gyms is uh usually one greater resources obviously you have uh a lot of coaches to choose from which like I said could be good or bad depending on what you're looking for. Um two usually you have better equipment a lot more space so that's useful. Three, your connections are going to be significantly greater for getting sponsors or just getting into shows because normally if you're a big gym, that means you have a lot of athletes and certain shows and like that it makes it easier to feed you in because you're you're going in with a known commodity. And then I think one of the other big things that people a lot of fighters in particular are targeting is uh sparring partners. And for sure that's going to be a a big advantage when you are going into a big gym. You're going to have your pick of the litter as far as who to spar with. So you're going to get a lot of different looks and that's important, right? Uh is it the most important thing? I don't think so. It definitely has value though, so I wouldn't discount it. I I think it would kind of depend where you're at in your in your career and what you're needing to work on. I think early in the career probably not as important. Think late in the career more important. Um but that is something you can always get even in a small gym. This is why like you when my brother and I were competing we were flying sparring partners. you need different looks, you pay people for a few months to come and train with you. Sometimes we have people join as a result of doing that. Either way, you can you can always acquire talent that way. Uh so it's not like you need to belong to a big gym to get different looks. Like you can always recruit or just pay someone for a month or a couple weeks, whatever the time span you need to have different sparring partners. And uh some examples of this that I think the easiest example comes from the grappling world which is Der death squad or now new wave. one coach, John Danner. Small team, the original core team was what, Gary Tonin. Uh, you had Eddie Cummings, Gordon Ryan, Nikki Ryan. I think those were like, and maybe I'm forgetting one if I I'm not sure when Oliver got in there, but you know, you had a few more guys there, right? It was a very small team, one coach. Look what happened. Amazing results for all those young men, right? Why? Because as one guy, he's teaching one system to all these guys and they were all coming up together at the same pace and most of them were closer in in weight. U so they were really able to work together. So, it was like a good group of guys that could just spar with each other constantly and uh get great results from that. And even now, even though New Wave is now become a big team or now it's I guess it's going to becomes King's Way in the near future, but even now it's still a small team, right? As far as like the competitors, excuse me, as far as the the competitors, there's maybe 10 or 12 guys there that are like the top pros. And I think that's overestimating. So, it's still a very small team, one coach. To me, that is a model of why it works so well. uh when if John had to manage 40 people, he would not get the same results in my opinion. It's just he's going to spread himself too thin. It's going to be a problem, right? But when you're working with a handful of guys, I can give a lot of time to each athlete and specified attention and actually and one of the things John does really well is he observes If I have to watch 40 people at the same time, it's just not going to work. I'm going to miss a lot of things. I might miss like gaps in one person's game or I might miss like new tricks that I I saw an athlete pull off that I can grab and share with the rest of the group. But with a smaller approach, you're with a smaller team rather, you're able to approach this in a much more significant level. with the fight teams. I I've seen obviously people win titles in big teams and I've seen people win titles in small teams. I would argue like Demetrius Johnson DJ comes from a small team. His trainer Matt Hume was I think it was AMC Pancreation. They had a few guys like Jeff Josh Barnett, Jeff Monson was there for a time. Uh I don't believe it was a big gym. Again, to me big gym was like 20 plus like active fighter top pro fighters, right? Uh and I've gotten pleasure of doing a seminar on a Matt Hume and very highly technical guy. obviously had a a very in-depth system. So, it doesn't surprise me the type of results he was able to generate, right? We look at even someone like Fedor, right? He doesn't come from a big gym. It's a bunch of Russian guys, right? Like, you don't need to have the biggest gym in the world to get the biggest results, right? And I would argue sometimes it can do you a disservice. Uh so really at the end of the day as a fighter or a competitor, you have to take a look around and and think for yourself as far as what are you getting out of the training and don't always just lean on. So here's the thing, right? Like if I just function as a robot and do whatever a coach tells me to do. On one hand, that's great. That shows a lot of loyalty and and trust, right? which is excellent because if you have that type of faith in your coach and in the system then you're going to fulfill coach's potential to the maximum. Now I think it's also important to understand that when you go training knowing the level of your coach, right? Because if you're just I'll give you an example. The first place I trained martial arts was a nice school. It was legit, but it wasn't the type of training that I was looking for. And I didn't know this at the time because I was a young child and 14 years old and that was just the first school I went to. Now, if I would have just stayed there for the rest of my life, I wouldn't be filming this video because my career path would have been very different, right? I would have maybe never competed or whatnot. Like, it was it was more the art form than competition. So you only gain that from experience, right? And I think it also takes a little bit of thinking. I know sometimes athletes don't like to think that much. That's why they're doing sports. It's more physical, right? They like to to do things with their hands and not do things with their brain. But you have to do both. All right? You have to know what you want out of your your life, what you're going what you're going for in your career, and then how your team and your coaches are going to align with your vision. And you have to measure your results accordingly, right? Like how much better am I getting every month or every week or you know, am I making improvements? Am I learning things? Am I getting stronger? Am I getting better conditioned? Am I learning new techniques? Like you have to constantly be evaluating these things to understand where your progress is. When you are stalling out as far as making progress, that is when you have to start thinking like, okay, what's going on here? Right? Especially if the coach isn't making that adjustment. Because as a coach, if I see an athlete stalling out, like they just kind of hit a plateau, I have to think, what's going on here now? Like, why are they not getting better? Is it something psychologically or is it something that technically that we're not addressing that's getting him stuck here? Like, I need to figure this out. But if the coach doesn't figure that out, then as an athlete, it behooves you to figure it out. because you should always be getting better, noticeably better in mixed martial arts. There's so much to be learned that it shouldn't be like, oh, you know, I've been fighting for like 10 years now. Like, I'm kind of just where I'm at. No, the me of 10 years ago gets whooped by the me of me right now. uh just because technically I know a lot more. Conditioning might be a little different but uh technically I have a big upper hand. So you shouldn't have somebody like oh he's kind of you know in the zone now. This is his his skill set. This is how he's always going to be. It's like you're doing something very wrong then if that's the case like we should be constantly be evolving. And you guys heard me say this many times, but someone like George St. Pierre, that's why he was able to remain on top for so long. And he still is like he's not competing anymore, but he's still training. He's still working on calisthenics and doing his gymnastics stuff. Like the guy doesn't stop, you know? He that's why to me he's one of the few true martial artists. Like this is a lifestyle, right? Like he's always going to be improving. He's always going to be working on himself. That's a goal of perfection that will never be reached. As a fighter, you want to aspire to be a martial artist in my opinion, right? So, there shouldn't become a point where like, ah, you know, I'm plateaued now. I'm pretty much going to stay the same. Maybe I'll just get stronger or more wind. Like, no, you should be learning stuff all the time. And the fact that you think that you've stalled out, that you've reached the plateau, shows to me uh a level of arrogance that you already know everything you need to know. Like, man, like I said, I've been doing this for 30 years and I don't know everything I need to know yet. I know there's gaps in my game, right? Like, so, and you might think, how is that possible? like, man, there's so much to cover in this sport uh that I don't think there's going to be enough time to ever be able to say I'm a master at everything. It just isn't. So, uh you you can't just rest on your laurels and say, "Oh, okay. Well, this is me now. I'm just going to maintain shape." Like, no, no. You you should always be adding skills. And if you're finding that you're not making progress in adding skills, adding strength, adding speed, adding stamina, right, or like mental toughening, we need to figure out why that's going on. And it might be a me problem or it might be my a team problem. It might be an atmosphere problem, but it needs to be figured out. But this is not meant to be a downer. Obviously, if you're in a big gym, it doesn't mean like again, this is just my opinion and take it for what it's worth. I think that a big gym can work if it's a unified system. You have a guy at the top. He coordinates with his lieutenants and says, "Look, this is what we believe that we or better yet that we know produces champions. We plug in talent into this system and they come out and they're world class." And I know an example in grappling that works well besides the new wave guys, team Lloyd Irvin, he has systems in place. you know, he's a a lawyer himself is a great marketer, a great business guy. So, he understands the values of systems and he knows how to set them up. So, he already has one for jiu-jitsu. So, he just plugs people in and if you have the right talent, you're going to get a champion on the other side. And he's done that many times now. Uh just like I I can see like for example, ATOSS obviously has their own system that works, right? They get talent, they put them in, champions come out the other side. So, it's not a mystery. We know, well, each coach after working for years in the sport knows a formula for how to produce champions. And we all have our different theories, but the beautiful thing about the sport, there's more than one way to do it, right? Like one side could have this way of doing it and the other side could have this way of doing it. and they both produce champions, right? So, it's not like, oh, there's only one way to do it. There's a lot of ways to do it, but whatever your way is in your house, in your gym, everybody should have that same structure. And the head coach's job is to make sure, in my opinion, that the lieutenant that he has under him are all coordinating and teaching that same system, right? are running that same system. Whether it's, you know, technique or strategy or psychology, conditioning, whatever, the diet, we're all on the same thing. We plug in talent, we get the X results. If everybody's doing different systems and, you know, working different things, we're now not really a team. We're like a group of random people that just happen to work in the same house, right? Uh, so I don't think that's the that's leveraging your advantage enough because I could see if you in fact did have a very uniform organized team where you had, like I said, that head coach, all the lieutenants are trained in the system. They all believe in it. They understand it. And then they're, you know, distilling the information to the athletes. That can then be a super asset, right? Because now we're getting lots of different looks. Each coach is going to have some different insights that they're going to be able to upload back to the head coach who can then disseminate it down to all the lieutenants who then bring it down. So like now we're getting like a brain trust. This is kind of like a mastermind group in action for coaching. That would be ideal, but I've rarely seen that happen. Right? And it's just like I was uh talking to my brother the other day. You know, the problem is when you have a big organization, it kind of becomes like a big government, right? And we've seen what happens with government. It's very mismanaged, right? It's just too many moving parts. People are too disconnected from their constituents and they are not, you know, putting regulations or voting for bills that help their people, right? And I feel like that happens in not just government, just any organization that gets too big, it gets bloated, right? And of course, this is subjective to the industry or whatnot, but I think the point still stands. So, this should be hopeful, I think, for a lot of people because a lot of people, especially if you're like learning online, chances are you're you don't have access to one of these big-time coaches or big-time gyms and you're like, "Oh man, like how am I going to get ahead in in the raceport world?" Like, you don't need that. In fact, I'm trying to tell you that you're you might be better off without that. If you're able to find a very good coach that's working with a small group of people, right? And if you have that athletic ability and promise, they're going to want to invest that time into you and craft you into a champion or world class athlete. But having all these things doesn't really like having the big team is not the end all be all of how to become a champion, right? I like I said there just like anything else, there are points in your career where it might make sense. Like if you come from a really small town, you you have an amazing coach nobody's ever heard of, but he's obviously knows his stuff. and he's made you into an awesome athlete but politically has zero capital so you're not able to get recognized in any big shows then I guess you could make the argument well you might want to join a big team just so that you can get the exposure and the connections to be able to ascend to the bigger fields right sometime I can tell you firsthand it's when you don't have that the connections it can be very difficult and this is when Having a good agent can go a long way, right? Uh even though like a lot of people frown on agents because it's like uh you know we it's another middleman we have to work with. Why do we have an agent when you know if you're going to work with the UFC? You don't really get to negotiate anything. You're just you know being forced to contract. But just getting into the UFC is a big problem now. Back in the day it was easier because there wasn't as much talent. Now there's talent everywhere. So the agent is pretty much the the gatekeeper for you to get you into the show. So yeah, it does if you have been trying to knock in that door and haven't been able to get in, a good agent might have been the the difference of getting you in or not, right? And also understanding which are the right shows to fight for. Like the UFC has particular feeder shows that they like uh pulling talent from. If you're not coming from there, uh they might not even care, right? So these are things that usually big gyms have better setup, right? They have that that connective network that makes it easier to push people into higher levels. But to build the skills to be world class, that's where I argue smaller team is more ideal. And again, like I said, I have lots of friends and who have big gyms and training big gyms. So I'm not dumping on any one in particular. It's just something I've seen over the years. Again, I've been training now since like what, like 1999 when I started like officially doing mixed martial arts, Valatudo, NHP, whatever you wanted to call it. So, I've had the opportunity to go through a a lot of big gyms and I've seen more of this like mostly everybody's functioning at that same level where I think it's just unavoidable is when you have so many people and and many coaches, everybody's going to start creating their own clicks, right? And I feel like that's harder to manage with a big team, right? uh smaller teams it's very easy to manage and it's still a challenge but it's easier to manage. So any case that's all I have for you guys. So, uh, take my opinion for what it's worth and, uh, hopefully if you do come of a small gym, this is uplifting news. And if you do come from a big gym, uh, maybe take some notes in mind as far as I think mainly monitoring your progression like how much are you growing, right? uh is there a system in place that everybody's following that you know it's a proven system? I I I feel that is a a big part of it, right? Like it shouldn't be a mystery what your path to being a world-class athlete is. Like if you're a part of this gym, the head coach should have that vision for you and you should believe in that vision.