#1 Leave Glendale Fight Club and Join A World Class MMA gym
First of all, no surprises here. Edmond Tarverdyan claims to be a world class MMA coach. However, the results of his work speak for themselves. Be it a world class MMA fighter or a rookie, Edmond has, to put it mildly, changed them for the worse.
Regardless of all the internet hate directed at this man, the jokes, memes, etc, it is a fact that world class fighters have kind of unlearned fighting after training under Edmond’s tutelage. Be it Rousey’s love interest Travis Browne or 170 pound veteran Jake Ellenberger, Edmond changed their very foundation; fighters who were on the brink of title contention were sent tumbling outside the ranks of the elite.
Now, the problem with Rousey is that she began training her striking, her boxing, in particular, under Edmond’s guidance. Rousey is a world class judoka, no doubt about it. Is she an Olympic medallist? Absolutely! But she is not an elite striker. She is a grappler, at heart.
‘Striking’ is something that she needs to build into her senses from the ground up. A major issue that exists with Edmond’s training is that he threw Rousey into the deep end of boxing drills before developing basic boxing footwork.
Rousey, to her credit, is a natural athlete. She is a quick learner and a diligent practitioner of martial arts. These qualities have helped her develop decent raw punching power. And for this, only Rousey deserves credit not Edmond; the reason being that Judo involves a lot of utilization of the hip flexors.
The hip flexors of a judoka are fine-tuned after years and years of drilling the wide variety of judo techniques. This technique and this explosiveness can be utilized in the striking arts like boxing, Muay Thai as well as MMA; since MMA allows both striking and grappling.
Rousey has good punching power but the art of stand-up fighting requires much more than just that. It requires footwork, angles, distance gauging, defensive circling, etc. Thus, Rousey is unfamiliar and untrained in a vast amount of the striking aspect of MMA.
The topic of striking, as a whole, is tough to cover over one article but there are some essentials that prove Edmond’s fallacies as Rousey’s coach, particularly in her striking. In almost all her fights Rousey closes the distance by bull-rushing her opponents.
In that process, she walks right into a few of her opponent’s strikes, especially punches. Now, no matter how pillow-fisted your opponent is, if you keep ducking into punches in order to close the distance, those shots add up.
The impact of the strike is doubled when you duck into it. Now, as a boxing coach, it is Edmond’s job to teach Rousey to close the distance without, quite literally, walking into every punch your opponent throws. The art of fighting is basically, hit and don’t be hit.
This is where Edmond made a critical error with Rousey- instead of teaching her to first measure and then close the distance, he let her fall into the rookie habit of walking into range in a straight line. This is where boxing footwork comes in handy. On your first day in a boxing gym, you are first walked through the basics of footwork; then, gradually, you are coached in punching mechanics.
Following that are the boxing heavy bag drills, mitt work, combo drills, etc.
In most of Rousey’s training montage right from her Strikeforce days, you can see her training advanced striking combinations usually ending with a knee or moving into the clinch that allows her to utilize her Judo. Now, Edmond and Rousey deserve credit for ending the combos with a knee (that facilitates the clinch) or simply ending the combo by moving into the clinch.
However, it is the process of entering the correct range for this technique, where Edmond has failed to tutor his pupil.
More on that later. Now, in stark contrast to Edmond and Glendale Fight Club, we have another tutor-pupil duo in Firas Zahabi and Rory Macdonald fighting out of the highly respected Tristar gym in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Now, Macdonald started training at the age of 14 under David Lea but eventually, moved to Tristar to train under Zahabi with the likes of MMA legend Georges St Pierre. That, right there, is what Rousey needs to do right now.
Not necessarily Tristar but any elite MMA gym in the world would suit Rousey. It’s a well known fact that Ronda is fiercely loyal to her team which, unfortunately, means that she won’t relieve Edmond of his services.
Here she can take a page out of Macdonald’s playbook and retain the services of her coach by including him as a part of her new team. Macdonald did it with David Lea, Rousey can employ the same with Edmond; thus staying loyal to her team whilst also ensuring that she is constantly evolving at a world class gym.
The Tristar gym seems the best option for Rousey, as of now, considering the fact that none of the women’s 135 pound elite train there. Also, it would provide her a significant step up in the quality of training partners and striking coaches than her current gym.
