Mixed Martial Arts(MMA) training with BJ Penn!!!
I was very fortunate to have the chance to train with BJ Penn. Besides being a world class fighter the guy has great character and is a lot of fun to hang out with.
I started my trip flying from Ft. Lauderdale to California (6 hours), then to Hawaii. I thought I was there but when I got to Hawaii I found out that I had to take another plane to an island called “Hilo”. My god it was almost a twenty four hour trip. I was absolutely exhausted by the time I got there. After finally arriving in Hilo, it was time to pick up my luggage and it was nowhere to be found. Man, a whole day traveling and no luggage lol, it wasn’t my day. Later I was told that they had no idea where my luggage was and they would deliver it the next day. What was cool is that everyone knew where BJ’s gym was, so they were like “Don’t worry we will deliver your luggage tomorrow, it happens all the time.”
BJ’s strength and conditioning coach “Junior” picked me up in the airport and took me to the house of the fighters. It was already noon and by the time I went to bed I was really tired, but training was supposed to resume the next morning at 8 am. I was very excited and at the same time anxious to see if I had anything left in the tank.
7:30 am, Junior arrives and my whole body was really sore. We were going to do strength and conditioning drills and wrestling. We started doing kettle belt training for about 45 minutes and did 45 minutes of wrestling. After all that training we ran for about two miles and in the end I could not feel my legs anymore. I don?t think I could feel them for the rest of the week actually.
At night we worked on boxing with takedowns, doing rotation on BJ. It was a great practice and that was the start of my two week training camp.
We did Brazilian Jiu-jitsu, boxing and a lot of wrestling pretty much every day and we would work in the octagon cage once a week.
BJ Penn vs Sean Sherk
Everything that we trained worked in the match. I heard rumors of how good BJ’s takedown defense is, but not until I got there did I have the chance to see for myself his incredible flexibility and take down defense. Along with me were great wrestlers Jonhy Hendricks (4 times All American,) and Eric Bradley (2 Time All American). Sherk tried to take BJ Penn down twice and I could see that he immediately got frustrated and gave up the idea of taking him down.
We did train everyday on simulating Sherk’s take downs and BJ was more than ready to defend any double, single leg or anything that Sherk had in his arsenal. BJ’s boxing skills are way superior than Sherk’s and by keeping him on his feet the plan was to TKO him. BJ is also a great grappler and we were not worried about him getting ground and pounded by Sherk, especially since he did not do much damage on Hermes Franca his last fight.
The goal was to keep the fight on the feet and TKO him with his boxing skills, also BJ was training for a possible five full rounds with him. There was no way he was going to run out of gas since we were practicing six, five minute rounds with fresh guys coming at him. There are many rumors online on how BJ Penn doesn’t train but reality is the guy works very hard and that’s why he is the champion. He also has a lot of confidence in his skills and he knew that his were way superior than Sherks. A combination of hard training and perfect strategy is the result of another great victory by the UFC Lightweight Champion.
