Ultimate Fitness

By Editorial Staff

While there are several mixed martial arts icons, perhaps the most insightful is Pat Miletich. Pat is a five-time world champion who is very thoughtful and honest about the sport. He now operates one of the most successful MMA facilities in the country, developing many of the current and future world champions. In this exclusive interview, Pat Miletich pulls no punches as he discusses the realities of this exciting, often misunderstood sport.

What is mixed martial arts?

For the layman, mixed martial arts is basically a combination of boxing, kickboxing, wrestling and submission grappling. Submission grappling is the art of getting joint locks on the elbows, shoulders, knees and ankles that would potentially sublux or dislocate the joints, and also chokeholds, which cut off the blood to the brain. It's all the Olympic sports combined into one. It's the closest thing to real combatives that you can ever have.

You've been at this for quite awhile. How did you get involved?

I stumbled into the sport. I was in college wrestling and my mother became ill with heart problems. I left school to help take care of her. I worked three jobs at the time. I was invited to come up to a gym that did kickboxing and martial arts, and found that I had a knack for it.

I started fighting to make extra money to help pay my mother's bills. It just kind of snowballed from there. I held the world title for four years. I was the United States kickboxing champion before that. It's been a unique journey. Everything happens for a reason. Back then, I was mad that I couldn't finish college, but now that I'm where I'm at today, I've had a great life. I've been very blessed - five-time world champion. We've trained 11 world championship fighters as well as fighters for 70 pay-per-view fights in about six years.

How does someone become a world-class fighter? What's the process?

Now that the sport has grown so much, a lot of people show up here at the gym and say, "I want to be in the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship)." We say, "Great. Here's a class schedule." You need to go to basic classes for about a year or two. Once you become one of the best in the basic class, come over to the advanced class and we'll see how you do there. After you've been there for a year or two, then we might get you in an amateur fight if you're still around. If you do well in the amateur ranks, you can fight pro fights, and if you win a lot of pro fights, you might get into the UFC.

Fighting requires a lot of dedication and eating right, an understanding of diet and sleep, and an understanding that you have to be able to do functional fitness, weight lifting, swimming, and different types of aerobics and anaerobics. Consider how long it takes to become a good boxer and multiply that by four, because you've got to be a good boxer, kickboxer and wrestler. Wrestling is a very intricate art, and you've also got to be good at submission grappling, which involves infinite amounts of combinations of submissions, pathways to get from one position to another position to a submission, and then knowing how to counter their escapes.