Fight Science Made Simple

 Welcome to episode five of the Fight Science Made Simple podcast. I'm your host, coach Adam Snyder. I'm a lifelong martial artist. I'm an active MMA fighter and I'm a performance and recovery coach. If you're new here, welcome. I release new episodes every single Monday, and my intention with this podcast is to take complex topics related to performance, recovery, strength and conditioning, nutrition mindset for combat sports, and turn them into simple.

Easy to understand actionable steps that you can start taking today, implementing into your training, implementing into your routine, so you can see immediate improvements to your performance and your recovery. So if you're a fighter, grappler, martial artist, combat athlete, and you dig that and you're excited about that and you haven't already.

Why don't you give the podcast a follow so you don't miss out on anything that we're releasing every single week, weekly episodes. And if you wanna support the podcast, something really simple that you can do that helps us a lot is just share these episodes, share it with your teammates, share it with your training partners.

Share it with really anybody that you believe could benefit from the information that we're putting out here. And it doesn't just help. You become a better martial artist because you're just gonna have a better teammate to train with. But it just helps the sport fight sports grow in general because everybody is gonna be at a higher level, and that's my mission.

I want everyone to train harder, recover faster, and stay on the mat for life. And so that's what we're here to do In today's episode, episode five, we're gonna be talking about a really important topic I talked to. Hundreds of martial artists every single week between the fighters that we coach, the people that I train with, and primarily on Instagram.

I DM a lot of fighters and martial artists every single day to attempt to make the most valuable content possible to help as much as I can. And recently a lot of fighters, martial artists, combat athletes have been. Asking me about mindset. A lot of them have been very open and honest and transparent about struggles with confidence and struggles with belief, and struggles with being consistent, sustaining the pace, being a fighter, being a combat athlete.

Training a martial art is a very challenging thing to do, and although mindset and mental health is. More normalized in 2025. There are still some stigmas around it, especially for males, especially for fighters, especially for male fighters. A hundred percent for female fighters, as well as is gonna be very applicable to you.

We use these exact same methods and frameworks and tactics that I'm gonna talk about today with our own fighters, male and female, to help them build more resilient. Mindsets and really just have more joy in what they're doing. And so because there is still some stigma around the topic of mindset and a lot of misinformation out there, I wanted to create an episode to hopefully remove some of the stigma to.

Some of your mindset challenges more valid so you don't beat yourself up about it as much, and then also give you some valuable tools to better navigate mindset. Maybe build a stronger mindset and more importantly, have more joy in what you're doing. We only get one life, and if we spend most of it stressed and hating our day to day, it's kind of a waste.

And I want you to enjoy it. And being a martial artist, being a fighter is fucking cool and I want you to enjoy it. So that's what we're gonna talk about today. Um, I'm pretty open about this. I grew up. With an old school mentality, an old school mindset. I started training kickboxing when I was five, juujitsu a couple years later.

Started competing pretty young and I was brought up on that old school, no days off. Outwork everyone type of mindset. And I ran that mindset from the point when I was five years old all the way up until the point when I was 25 years old, a good two decades on that mindset. And I got. To a, I think a pretty fair level of success running that old school mentality.

Um, winning fights pretty solid shape, pretty mentally tough, successful business college degree. Getting to work with people and have a career doing what I love at a very young age, and it got me to a point of success. And then. It just kind of led to a plateau and a stagnation because I was achieving all of these things.

But I was also miserable. I was stressed all the time. I was beat up and burned out all the time. I was questioning how sustainable it was and how long I could actually do it. I was skipping events with friends and family to train extra to put more work in, and now you're going to have to make sacrifices in this game, 100%.

But like anything, there's a sliding scale and I think there's too much sacrifice. And I was definitely on the. Too much sacrifice side of things, and it just led to burnout. It learned, led to breaking down. It led to injury and it led to, I just, I really was not enjoying my day to day. I was getting to some low points.

I experienced depression and anxiety for the first time, and so it caused me. To, in addition to learning about exercise science and studying the, the human body and really mastering the craft of performance and recovery, also diving into the mental aspect of the game because fight sports, combat sports, although.

They're physical sports. I would argue that they're more mental sports than physical sports. If you have two guys and one guy has a ton of talent and the other guy has a moderate level of talent, or maybe no talent at all, but the less talented athlete has more belief and more joy and more mental resiliency than.

The more talented athlete, then that person's gonna win. They're gonna have the advantage our minds are, are really, really powerful. And so because we understand how strong and powerful the mind is. That means we need to train the mind. You need to train the mind, just like you would train your jab, just like you would train your jiujitsu just like you would work on your conditioning or your strength, your mindset is a skill and an attribute that needs to be respected and taken seriously and trained just like any other quality or attribute that you would train in in your career.

And so that's what I'm gonna help you do today. A lot of that old school mentality that I talked about, no days off, pushed through the pain, outwork everyone. That mental toughness, that grind, that mental resiliency. I don't want you to get. It twisted and think that that's not important, especially infighting.

You gotta be fucking tough. Shit's hard. Your body's gonna break down. You gotta put yourself through hell, especially if you're trying to make a career out of this. It's a lot of sacrifice and a lot of wear and tear for a really, really, really long time. Without reward and the guarantee of reward is so slim If, if 1% of people fight and train in a martial art and then 1% of that compete, then 1% of that actually makes something out of it.

And so it's such a low percentage. To be successful in your mindset has to be rock solid and you have to be mentally tough and you have to be resilient and you have to be able to bite down and grind, and you have to be able to. Suffer and enjoy suffering to make it, but it's not everything because.

Although it is important to have those attributes, if you're in a constant state of grind, if you're in a constant state of suffering, if you're in a constant state of hard work and no days off, then you're not giving your body, your mind, your system, the space that it needs to recover. And so what's going to happen is you're just gonna put too much stress on your body, too much stress on your system.

And like anything. There's different thresholds to this. Some people can handle way more stress than other people, but eventually what will happen is you will get to a point where your body will break down. It could be a physical breakdown, like a catastrophic injury. It could be a mental breakdown like depression or wanting to quit, or having self-doubt or losing consistency.

We call these rock bottom moments where. A fighter or a martial artist just pushed them, pushes themselves to their limits, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual limits, so consistently without any space for recovery, that it leads to burnout and it leads to breakdown. And so. Having mental resilience and mental toughness and being able to grind is a very, very important skill and a very, very important attribute.

But it is not the only thing that encompasses a championship mindset. That's what you want. You want a championship mindset. You need to be able to tap into that grindy. Resilience, mental toughness. Part of the time when you need to, maybe it, it's a sparring day and you had a long day at work and you need to dig deep and push through.

Maybe you have three training sessions that day. Maybe a family member is sick. Maybe you're got a car crash that day and you still have to go through your day and you're wondering, what is it gonna cost me and I have to drain, right? There are times where. You need to fucking bite on your mouthpiece and dig deep, but it can't be all the time because if you're doing it all the time, every single day from morning to night, then you're gonna break down and you're gonna burn out.

And honestly, it's a very anxious driven place to be in. Like some people do it. Out of, it's all they know, like they were taught. Maybe they grew up that way. Maybe they come from a harder background, maybe coaches, you know, taught 'em that way and, and it's just ingrained. That's how it was for me. Like I grew up, I out of a really good childhood, but I started training an old school martial arts, old school fight mentality for me young age.

So that's just how I was taught. Just grind, grind, grind, grind. Other people are just psychopaths and are addicted. To that level of grind and other people, it comes from a place of doubt, a place of fear, a place of fuck. I'm going to lose this fight and I need to do more in order to compensate for my insecurities.

And neither of those places are are great places to be, in my opinion. Champion mindset, a championship mindset. Is grind, is mental toughness, is mental resilience, but it's also trust and faith. It's also confidence. It's also joy and gratitude and love and relaxation and belief. Belief in yourself. Belief that you're exactly where you're supposed to be and everything is happening and unfolding the way it's supposed to happen.

Belief in some form of higher power. I'm not a religious person, but I am a spiritual person and I believe in the universe and I believe in the interconnection of everyone and everything. And I do believe that there is a, a universal cosmic plan that that we fall into. And that could be God for you. That could be religion for you, it could be spirituality, it could be the fucking force.

But I've just found that when you have some level of faith. It allows you to relax. It allows you to have more belief. It allows you to have more trust in the moment, and those things are really beneficial. And so being able to go through your day to day, being able to train, being able to do hard things, eat the right foods, recover the right way, and do it from a place of full confidence, full belief, not cockiness, not ego, but just trust and relaxation is.

Such a, a challenging skill to develop and it's still something I'm working on today, but. Not only is it more sustainable, you can put a high level of workout for longer. You can stay in this game for longer. It's way more enjoyable. It's a hell of a lot more enjoyable because you're not coming from a place of stress and anxiety and feeling like you're behind and negative self-talk.

You're just having fun doing what you love doing, and honestly, in my opinion, that's. That's the meaning of life. Just doing what you love every single day from a place of purpose, from giving your gifts to the world and to the universe fully and unapologetically. And if your gift is fighting, then you should be doing it from a place of joy, not from place of fear and anxiety.

And so. That's kind of an overview of what my belief is of a championship mindset. What I want to do is give you some actionable skills and a little activity. This is something that I do with myself and I do with our clients to help them build their version of a championship mindset, because your version of a championship mindset is gonna be different than mine is gonna be different.

Than someone else's. But this framework that I'm going to give you is going to be so beneficial and it's going to be universal. And the first part of this framework is identifying beliefs, limiting beliefs specifically, because at the end of the day, our entire mindset, really who we are as a human, whoever you are or you identify as, is really just.

A, a combination of programming, a combination of beliefs about yourself and the world and others, and the universe that you've collected over time. More specifically, the first eight years of your life, the, the beliefs that you form in the first eight years of your life are solidified and make up who you are today.

And then as you go on throughout your life, as you have life changing moments, experience, trauma, things like that, you might have other core beliefs and core moments and core memories that form. But for the most part, most of your beliefs about who you are and what you're capable of achieving and how the world works, it's formed in the first eight years of your life, from your experiences, from your parents, from your guardians, from your friends, from your coaches, whoever, the people around you form the beliefs around you.

And. What's crazy is most people, A, don't know this, and B, are unaware of their beliefs. They're unaware of why or how they do anything. And if you're experiencing doubt. If you're experiencing fear, if you're lacking confidence, if you are moving from a place of anxiety and uncertainty, if you don't have trust, if you don't have presence, then it's most likely due to some form of limiting belief that you either picked up in your early childhood or from a more traumatizing event in young adulthood or even in your adulthood life.

So, I mean, it's kind of crazy. It's right, like fuck, like how do I even reprogram my brain? But the first is just having. Awareness, and that's the very first step. We're gonna do a three step formula today. Uh, the, the first step is awareness, being aware of why you're doing things, the thoughts that you're having, the feelings that you're having, so then we can identify what your limiting beliefs are.

This is a really, really important concept, and this shit's not easy. It's hard. It's hard to identify and break down who you are and try to understand why you are the version of yourself that you are. And. Try to understand the limiting beliefs that you have about yourself. We create lies and fallacies and fantasies about ourselves to make it easier to just move through life.

'cause life is stressful and hard enough to then be brutally honest with ourself is also a challenging thing to do. And so here are some examples of what limiting beliefs might look like. A, a more surface level limiting belief could be, I am not a good wrestler, right? I suck at wrestling. This could be a more surface level.

Limiting belief, a deeper level limiting belief could be, I'm not worthy of success, I'm not worthy of love. Um. I'm a loser, right? Like, you could have these, these, these deeper rooted, I'm, I'm poor, right? I'm never gonna make it. And, and these are deeper rooted limiting beliefs that you might not even be aware of, but they manifest in ways of being more timid and sparring or skipping training sessions or not eating in alignment with your goals and your dreams.

And you might not even know why. But it could be these limiting beliefs, and most likely is these limiting beliefs that are holding you back. And so the first thing that you need to do is start just being aware of why you're doing the things that you're doing. Why you're saying the things that you're saying, thinking and feeling the things that you're, you're thinking and feeling.

You have to notice them. You have to become aware of them. And then once you become aware of them, you can start identifying what limiting beliefs are tied to this. Um. One activity you could do, I've done this before, is just gone through my entire childhood from the earliest memories that I have, and just write out a timeline of everything that happened that I can remember in my childhood, and then start to break things down.

Interactions with parents, interactions with friends, things that happened in my life, core memories that I've had that have then translated to some of the. Mindset challenges that I have in my life today. Some of those could be confidence, some of those could be belief. Some of those could be certainty and trust, and we can start to unpack and understand why we are that way.

Okay? So that's the first step. You want to be aware and you want to identify your. Limiting beliefs Once you identify your limiting beliefs, now we need to replace those limiting beliefs, and we do that by rewriting them into new empowering beliefs. So if you identify a limiting belief is I suck at wrestling, you can rewrite and reframe that limiting belief into a positive belief.

I'm a dominant wrestler. Okay. You don't have to have proof of it just yet, and we're gonna talk about that in step three. But you have to start thinking it and start feeling it because your words have power. And I know it's, it's, it's can be hard to wrap your mind around, right? You show up to practice and you get taken down every single practice and you feel like you suck at wrestling.

If you keep saying you suck at wrestling. Your subconscious brain is going to have that download. That's the program, and it's going to believe it to be true, and it's going to run that program. It's going to run that script. It will do things to, to be aligned with that truth of being a bad wrestler. And so you have to start rewriting.

I'm a dominant wrestler. I'm a great wrestler. I can't be stopped in wrestling, and you have to start speaking and thinking and feeling that way to start getting your brain to believe it. The same goes for if you feel like you're not worthy of success, you have to reframe that and rewrite that. I'm worthy of all the success.

I'm not worthy of love, I'm worthy of endless love, and you have to rewrite and re rescript those things. I'll give you a personal example 'cause it's helpful. In May of this year, I tore my ACL. It's a complete tear. I don't have an ACL anymore. I also didn't get surgery for my ACL and a large reason of why I just started grappling again, I'm kickboxing sparring.

I feel great, and a large reason of why I've bounced back so quickly and I've coped so well is because of the mindset behind it. And I've chosen empowering beliefs. Connected to my knee. Anytime someone says that I have a hurt knee or an injured knee, I correct them. No, no, no. My knee's not hurt. My knee's not injured, my knee's healing.

I never speak negatively about my knee because if I put that energy into the universe, if I put that energy into the world, A, the universe is gonna hear it. B, my brain is going to hear it and it's going to act in ways cause me to act in ways to keep myself injured and that's not what I want. Obviously.

And so we need to speak those new thoughts and feelings into existence. Okay? Very, very important to do. All right. Um, so that's the, the second step. We want to identify our limiting beliefs. That's step one. And then step two, we want to rewrite those limiting beliefs into new empowering beliefs. All right?

Awesome. Uh, and now step three. You wanna take action. We want to install our brand new. Empowering beliefs. We want to reprogram our brain, and this comes from two things. It comes from affirmations, daily affirmations, plus. Aligned action. You have to take action. This is so, so, so, so, so important because you can rewrite a limiting belief into, I'm a dominant wrestler, and you can look in the mirror every single day.

You can have that affirmation written out and read it out loud every single day. I am a dominant wrestler, and you can look yourself in the mirror and you can start programming that belief. But if you skip wrestling practice, if you don't watch film. If you aren't doing the things that a dominant wrestler would be doing, then you are not forming new beliefs and rewiring your mindset.

You are just creating delusion, and what's going to happen is somewhere deeper in your mind, you're going to recognize that I'm not doing the things that are aligned with what I say I want to be doing. And so you're always going to have a low level of confidence and a low level of belief in yourself, and so you need to rewrite.

You're limiting beliefs. You need to read them out loud, whatever those are. I'm a dominant wrestler. I'm worthy all of all the success money flows my way or whatever it is. I'm a champion. I'm one of the best fighters in the world. Whatever those beliefs and affirmations are, you need to read them out loud and then you need to take action to back those things up.

You need to figure out if you want to be a world champion. If you wanna make a career out of fighting, what is everything that a world champion or someone that is making a career out of fighting would do? They would probably follow a consistent training schedule. They would probably invest in themselves.

They would invest in coaches. They would have strength and conditioning and nutrition and recovery protocols, and work on their mindset consistently. They wouldn't just train. They would train hard, but they would also train smart. They would probably read and meditate. They would probably learn how to budget.

And, and manage a good financial playbook so that A, they can invest in afford travel and fighting and hotels and food and all of those things. And then when they do make money from fighting, they know what to do with it and they don't just blow it. And so you need to read your affirmations so you can reprogram your brain, but then you also have to know what actions are aligned with.

You reaching your greatest potential, your, your truest version of yourself. We call this the 2.0 version of yourself, right? If our philosophy is the fight science operating system, we're updating your operating system, we're updating you to the 2.0 version of yourself. You have to know, okay, Adam 2.0, what are the things that Adam 2.0 would do?

And then you have to do those things. You can't just talk about it. Action is so, so, so, so important. And. This is where a lot of fighters fall into a trap with mindset is because they never feel like they're doing enough. They never know if they're doing enough. They're doing all of this hard work, but there's no data.

There's no metrics. They're running everything themselves. They're running their camps. They're running their strength and conditioning, they're running their nutrition, they're doing research. They're seeing what this person's doing and seeing what that person is doing, and they lack so much certainty while also working jobs, maybe having families.

And so. You do so much, you do over go over the top. You do too much in order to compensate for this feeling of uncertainty in what you're doing, and that's why also having a coach, having a mentor, not just a coach for your skill training, but a coach for your strength and conditioning and your nutrition, your recovery, and every single aspect of your game.

This is what the top people do. The top guys and girls in the sport do this. Because A, it saves so much time, like you already don't have a lot of time and feel like you don't have enough time. It adds hours back into your days and into your weeks. And then it also creates a. So much relaxation and trust because now you're not stressing, oh, am I actually doing this right?

Should I be doing it this way? Because A, you know, a professional's putting it together for you. And B, there's data. Like data's a beautiful thing. Data shows you if you're actually getting better or not. If you're just training and you're not tracking anything, then you're just going based on feelings and emotions and you know this, your feelings and emotions are different every single day.

Like it depends. What the weather's like, it depends what you ate the night before. Sometimes you just wake up and the chemicals are flowing in a certain way, and so you're not your feelings, you're not your emotions, you're not your thoughts. And so having a system that allows you to stay consistent, trust the progress process, and make progress.

Despite how you're feeling while you're experiencing lower points, you're not gonna feel positive and amazing all the time. You are going to have some challenges and struggles and low moments. That's the beautiful thing about being a human. But when you're training your mindset in, in an intelligent way, and you're also addressing every single aspect of your game, like a professional, then a.

You do that consistently and you do that long enough, it's just a game of attrition. Most people are not going to do that. So you do that long enough, you're gonna pass most people, and you're gonna get pretty damn far. You're gonna see more success. And then B, you're going to enjoy it. You're going to have more fun doing it if you're waiting until you're making hundreds of thousands of dollars to enjoy life.

If you're waiting until you're a champion, or you get the contract to feel good about yourself and believe in yourself and love yourself. I, I have a hard truth for you. When you get to that point, you are still going to feel exactly how you feel right now. If you're chasing an outcome to give you validation and confidence and belief and love for yourself, that outcome isn't going to get you there.

You'll feel good for maybe a week at the most, and then it's just another red car. In the, in the driveway, it's just going to fade. And so if you really want to get the most out of your career, if you wanna get the most out of life, no matter where you are in this game, what stage you are, learn how to master your mindset right now.

Learn how to have faith and love and joy and flirt with the process right now. No matter how hard it is, no matter how challenging it is, your challenges, your struggles are valid. 100%. You're allowed to feel the way that you feel, but you also have the choice to choose if you're negative or positive about it.

If you love it or you hate it, and I guarantee if you choose to love it. You're just gonna get more enjoyment out of this process. You're gonna live a better life and your chances of actually making it and getting those outcomes you want to achieve goals. It's important to have goals, but we wanna do this out of love not to achieve the goal.

And when we do this out of love and presence and gratitude, what happens is we actually end up achieving those goals faster and bigger and better than we could ever imagine. And. You enjoyed it every single step of the way, so a lot of information there. I, I really hope you found it valuable. I hope it wasn't too vu and meta and out there for you.

If it was, let me know. If you have questions, you can shoot me a DM on Instagram Fight Science Collective on Instagram is where, where we are. You can leave them in the comments of. Whichever platform you're listening to this podcast on, we're on all platforms. If there are any episodes or any topics that you want me to cover, let me know as well.

Um, I'm trying to make these, like I said, as value as possible for, for you. Um, my goal is to help as many people as we can for free because I recognize that this is a hard sport and. A lot of you aren't in a place where you can invest in yourselves yet, and that's okay. I still wanna help you. I wanna help you make it.

And then hopefully when you are in a place where you are ready to invest in yourself, 'cause you know it's something that you should do the best, the best guys and girls in the world do it. I'd be grateful for the opportunity to support you through that next stage of your career. Um, but until then. Let's keep diving into these podcasts.

Let me know if there's anything else that you want me to make. I've been really enjoying them. This is episode five. Time Flies baby. Um, every single week we're, we're gonna come out with new episodes. I think next week I'm gonna do, um. Um, training around injuries. I think that's a really important topic.

Uh, and that's another thing that in Instagram dms people have been talking about, um, not knowing what to do while they have an injury or just thinking they should take time off completely or doing the wrong things for their injury. And so, uh, especially as someone that's coming off of an ACL tear, I would say I'm like 90% healed and I started squatting like the week.

I tore my ACL, uh, I know a thing or two about training around injuries and so that's probably what we'll do next week. Like I said, if there's anything else, uh, you want me to make you wanna hear, let me know. I'm grateful for you if you suck around this long. Thank you. Why don't you give the, the podcast, the follow, share it with some teammates and training partners, and let's have a great week.

Until next time, see you later.