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Stephan: I'm here today with my friend,Adam Singer, who runs The HardCore Gym in Athens, Georgia. He is probably best known for being Forrest Griffin's MMA coach during the formative years of Forrest's career. He's also a jiu-jitsu black belt and has trained tons of fighters. I'm really looking forward to picking his brain about MMA and jiu-jitsu and the relationship between these things. He's an outspoken guy, so I'm sure we'll have a good conversation. So thanks for talking to us today, Adam. Adam: Hi. It's a pleasure to be here. Stephan: So, you're driving around town as we do this interview? Adam: It's hard for me to find any place where I'm not going to be bothered by people. And so I figured, I've got the air-conditioner on in the car and I'm just going to drive around. We have what is called "The Loop". It's about 10 miles long and I'm just going to drive around "The Loop" with cruise control on and talk to you. Stephan: Okay. Well, hopefully we don't have the first live car crash on a podcast. I'm all about firsts but that's one I'd prefer to avoid. Adam: That'd be a 'snuff-cast?' Stephan: Yeah, the snuff-cast. I think that might be a very, very niche thing... Before we get too heavily into this, tell us a little about about your background in martial arts, how you got started and where you're at now. Adam: Sure. Yeah. I took traditional martial arts as a kid, tae kwon do, karate, and then I wrestled in high school and wrestled a little in the navy. And as soon as I saw the first UFC in '93, I immediately fell in love with it. I knew that that was what I wanted to do. I came down to Georgia to go to engineering school, and my brother followed me down here and we just started getting more involved in the martial arts. We got really into Jeet Kune Do for a long time. We travelled to California as much as we could and did a lot of seminars. The good thing about the Jeet Kune Do community in the early '90's was they were big into Brazilian jiu-jitsu as well. Stephan: They were merely an adopter of BJJ for sure. That and Shootwrestling as well... Adam: Right. Well, there were Ralph Faulkner and Paul Vunak. Paul was the first Jeet Kune Do person we trained with - we used to train in his house. He understood immediately when he saw the Gracie's how much they had to offer. There are stories that he actually took the Gracie challenge and lost, but never ended up in any of the videotapes. But he encouraged all the students to dive into jiu-jitsu and we did that. And after a few years with Paul Vunak, we started training with Matt Thornton, who runs the Straight Blast Gym. Matt is incredibly important to me, an important figure in my growth in the martial arts. We were doing jiu-jitsu and we opened the gym. We started at the university and then we opened a gym up off the campus probably 12 years ago, maybe a little more, and now the Hard Core Gym has grown into what it is today. Stephan: And when you say "we", that's you and your brother? Adam: Right. Most people don't separate Rory and I. I'm the older one. I am the one that never fought in the UFC. My younger brother fought in the UFC and was on TUF. So whenever I say "we", I'm speaking of myself and Rory. Even when I say "I", I'm usually speaking about myself and Rory. Stephan: It's the royal "I". Adam: The Singer Brothers, that's how we're known. Stephan: Perfect. So maybe tell us a little bit about some of the fighters that you guys have trained and have come up through you guys. Obviously, there's Forrest Griffin, he's probably the biggest name, right? Adam: Right, When we first started to doing this, Rory and Forrest came to the conclusion one afternoon that they wanted to fight. And I really had no interest in fighting, so I said, alright, ' Over the years, I've definitely had over 10 guys fighting in the UFC and the WEC (before it was taken over by the UFC). Forrest Griffen. Brian Bowles was a homegrown world champion in the WEC before that division was in the UFC, so obviously really proud of that. Todd Duffee came up to my gym. Junior Assuncao got back to the UFC in our gym. Carmelo Marrero, he beat Cheick Kongo and fought in the UFC. Micah Miller fought in the WEC with us. Stephen Ledbetter fought Jeff Curran in the WEC. I know I'm going to forget names because we've got a lot of guys move through the gym. For a small gym in Athens, Georgia, we found a fair share of really high level guys fight in the gym and for the gym. Stephan: So when you said that you were going to coach, had you had much coaching experience at that point? Had you worked one-on-one coaching with a fighter who's trying to make a run for the big time? Adam: I had no coaching experience at that point initially; I don't know if it's just the way my brain works because I'm an engineer by trade and a scientist by education, but I believe I have some really solid leadership qualities. Matt Thornton really helped me develop how to teach, how to coach, and how to help people learn for themselves. I dove into the pool and really started studying coaching.. I could sit down and just pick Pat Militech's brain. I could pick Robert Follis's brain... whoever I could find. I read books and I studied. Even now I just took a coaching course with Matt Thornton a couple of months ago. I'm talking with John Cavanaugh who's probably one of the top coaches in the world - I'm talking to him all the time, refining what I'm doing and learning the tricks. Spending time with my coach Roberto Traven, learning how to coach. That's what I do. That's my love. Stephan: It's often under-appreciated that fighting performance and coaching are two different things. I mean, who would you rather learn boxing from: Mike Tyson or Mike Tyson's coach? If you were to learn boxing from Mike Tyson it would be a short and painful experience. You probably wouldn't learn that much, other than what it feels like to wake up after being knocked out. Knowing how to train people in something is very different from actually being able to perform those same skills... Adam: I agree. And what I tried to do, and what I always made sure of, is that I was always on the mats doing all the rounds that the guys were doing. So when I was coaching Forrest, Cale Yarbrough who was on TUF, and my brother Rory Singer, and all these guys, I was also one of their training partners. I was never the best guy in the world but I have decent skills and I'm very technical. It's important for me to also be on the mat performing as I was learning how to coach. I think those things together gave me a unique perspective and really allowed me to help my guys maybe a little differently than some other coaches. I think you're seeing that also with a lot of the top coaches now: they came up through the sport, they were on the mat... Maybe they had no competitive career, or maybe they had a small competitive career, but they understand what the fighters are going through. They understand the wear and tear on the body. They understand how these things interconnect. So it's not necessarily the same as learning from Mike Tyson, but it is learning from someone that has the experience. Stephan: Well you've done the coaching, and you've done the training. But have you done much of the managing? You know, the art of sitting down and negotiating contracts, or is that something you let other people take care of? Adam: My brother got into that for a little while and he didn't like it. That is not for me. I don't like talking to a promoters, I don't like talking about money. They always just tell me ' Stephan: You mentioned the wear and tear on a fighter's body, and that's actually something that I really wanted to talk about for today. As opposed to talking in the abstract, can you give us an example of the wear and tear that has happened to some of the fighters that you've trained? Adam: Well, I'll use Forrest as an example because I was there with him on day 1, and I'm still with him at the end of his career as he's retired. He has a shoulder that's barely functional. He's had another knee surgery. He's probably got a bunch of other things that hurt as well that, but because he hasn't had surgery on them I don't even know about. But at 36 years old, he has a lot of injuries and things that some he'll never really recover from. And we're seeing other guys with those same things. It's no different than a football player who retires after a 5 or 6-year player in the NFL. I know football players who they can't pick up their kids anymore. They can't lift an arm over their head. I've seen NFL players who have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning. Their bodies are just destroyed. It's no different with MMA. It's not just the damage that we see in the fights, necessarily. It's all the time leading up to those fights. It's all the training, the year-round banging away in the gym, everything that they need to do to keep that professional career. And it just wears on you. It just builds up over time. You know football players practice and play, and then they have an off-season. But most MMA guys don't really have an off-season. When you're a young amateur or a young pro, then you're training year-round because you have to be prepared to take fights. The pervasive paradigm in the sport right now is based on training really hard, and sparring hard with tough partners, and heavy conditioning, and heavy strength training. I think it wears on you, and I think that we will see more guys who are going to have long term ramifications to their health. Not just from concussive injuries, but also just their joints and body parts wearing out. What's Dominic Cruz's knee going to be like in 5 or 10 years? Stephan: Let's go back to the concussion thing, because of course, the NFL is going through a whole bunch of legal problems and publicity problems. The sport of football is going through some challenges with people realizing the amount of concussive trauma that happens in that sport and the long term effects of it. In soccer and rugby and other sports - boxing obviously - the effects of accumulated concussive and sub-concussive trauma are really becoming understood now, even though it's not easy to tell when the person has that trauma - short of dissecting their brain which you can only do after they're dead. My opinion is that the UFC, and MMA in general, is going to be going through the same thing very, very shortly. I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing class-action lawsuits against the UFC for things like CTE and long-term brain damage regardless of whatever waivers the fighter signed. What do you think about that? Adam: If anyone sues the UFC in 10 years because they didn't know that they could possibly end up with brain trauma then it's bullshit. Now if you played football in the 1960's or 1970's, before anyone understood this stuff, then you're suing for something that nobody knew. So to me, it's sort of a catch-22. Everybody who plays football knows, and they start at a young age. It's years and years of cumulative damage, from high school to college to the professional leagues. It's terrible - don't get me wrong - but I have a problem with people pleading ignorance about not knowing what the long-term effects are now. So the thing about MMA fighters is most of those concussive events don't even happen in fights. They happen in sparring and they happen in training, and I believe that we can change that aspect of the sport and reduce those concussive effects down the road. There are people that go their whole MMA career without ever getting knocked out, without ever taking really hard blows in a fight: it's all during training. Because we still have this mentality in MMA where we want to get together with 10 or 15 other top-level guys, put on the gloves and bang out rounds. And I think we need to move away from that. I bet if you ask them, if you laid out the evidence, and asked them, Stephan: But what do you think about the issue of informed consent? You and I, we get presented with this: we're going to go bungee jumping, we get told that the bungee may snap, and we get asked, But I think it's a little bit different when you're talking about kids in their teens, and people in their early 20's... At that age you think you're going to live forever. And you also don't think about the consequences of being 40 years old and not being able to remember your phone number. That just seems so far away. At that age you're young and stupid. That's why that's the area that I have difficulty with; it's not so much about the adults making these informed decisions, but it's more about the youths and adolescents making those decisions because I don't think they're informed. They don't really have a sense of what it's really like to live for 30 or 40 years with Alzheimer's-like symptoms, you know. That's, I think, the tricky gray area for me... Adam: I agree with you 100%. The problem is if they consider the consequences even further, then you can't fight because you could die in the ring or the cage. You can have injuries that last forever. You could end up with Alzheimer's. There are so many things that can happen that if you start dwelling on these dangers, if that's what comes to the forefront for you, then you can't fight. Coming back full circle, I think it's imperative that as coaches and camps, we change what's going on in the gym. We can't change what happens in a fight. If we have good refs then hopefully people don't take undue damage. In most cases in MMA we don't see those repeated blows to the head over 30 minutes of a fight. And after a fight we can manage how long it takes to come back to the sport and how long we allow people to rest before getting back to contact training... I think there are a lot of things we can do, outside of the event itself, to minimise the head trauma. We can't get rid of it entirely because then we won't have a sport anymore, but I really believe we can minimize it. In football, maybe you can't minimise it because you have to hit each other in practice. I think in MMA, I think we can work to minimize some of that. Stephan: So if you and I are both training for fights, then how can we train so that we don't get hit in the head too hard or too often during training? Adam: Do we really need to hit each other in the head that hard? And if we do, do we need to do it that often? Do we need to do it round after round after round? Do we need to put on the gloves, the head gear and just go at it 2 or 3 times a week? My buddy, John Kavanagh, is getting a bunch of guys ready for their fights, including Connor McGregor and Gunner Nelson. I know that in their camp, they rarely hit each other hard in the head. And we just talked saw Robbie Lawler talk about not sparring. And we just saw Johnny Hendricks talk about not taking head contact. And I think hopefully those guys will start to pave the way for this kind of training. It starts at the coaching level, obviously... Stephan: Yeah, it's really the coach who needs to keep the egos in check so that 2 guys don't start brawling... Adam: You have to keep egos in check. You have to make sure that the structure of the program isn't based on sparring…
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