I have always been an enthusiast of mixed martial arts. Even though I started getting really serious about following the sport in 2006, but I’ve always found something uniquely intriguing about two fighters going into a ring or a cage and doing what they do best: Putting on a great fight and entertaining the fans that throng arenas and stadiums around the world for MMA events.

Coming from a journalism background, I also love writing my opinions in regards to the state of MMA today and the fighters that live and breathe this beautiful sport. However, I realize that there is more to MMA than two men slugging out in the ring, throwing punches, kicks, knees and submissions on the ground. There’s a whole lot of processes involved in just winning a fight and that’s the beauty of it. Every fight begins standing up and this is where the fighter starts thinking, “What do I do? Pull out my kickboxing skills? My karate strikes? Work my boxing on this guy?” Then when he starts clinching, the fighter will start thinking again, “Okay. I’m in a clinch. Should I try to work a Muay Thai clinch? How about if I use my wrestling background to take him down?” Then when the fight goes to the ground, the fighter asks himself, “Okay. We’re on the ground now. Let me see if my wrestling could work on this guy. Or how about my judo skills? Better yet, I did some Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and this would work wonders. What if I put those skills to good use then?” Of course watching the fights maybe exciting, but what about going through these ordeals? That was when I realized that I had to start training in MMA. Before you ask, no, I don’t intend on becoming a pro fighter. I wanna get the feel of MMA fighting and go through what every fighter goes through when they spar or compete in a match.

Having done a little bit of shootfighting over at The Academy of Mixed Martial Arts Western Australia, my thirst for MMA training kept on coming and back then while I was studying in Perth, I didn’t have a car and getting to Mirrabooka from my university located in Murdoch is not an enjoyable thing considering how far away the gym was. So I started looking for MMA gyms in Malaysia and by typing out “MMA”, “mixed martial arts” and “Malaysia” on Google, I stumbled upon a humble gym located in the Bangsar Puteri condominium near Bangsar Shopping Center.

The gym was called KDT Academy and it featured FizFit, Kettlebell and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu classes. More importantly, it also featured Crazy Monkey Defense, which until then was something I’ve never heard of. Having viewed videos of the classes on YouTube, I soon realized that this was what I wanted to do. So I saved up money and finally, about a few weeks before my birthday, I headed to KDT and signed up for their Crazy Monkey Defense Programme. I had a light chat with the owner of the gym, Vince Choo, who is a BJJ purple belt and the CMD pro trainer and from that chat, somehow we immediately clicked and I told myself, “I definitely came to the right place cause this is probably the one guy I’d definitely love to train under.”

I signed up for the programme’s beginners classes and there were a lot of people also taking it up, aside from some of the more advanced students who also joined in on the beginners sessions. During the first few months of doing CMD, we did a lot of boxing and of course, my level of cardio has never been up to par, so I constantly gassed out everytime we work the gloves. In recent times however, I haven’t been able to gas out as much as I used to in the past and that made things look up for me. I guess all the boxing really did wonders to my cardio level.

What I also learned from this is that CMD is more than just a form of MMA. In fact, it’s a martial art of its own. There were so many technical aspects of it with terms that sounded Greek to me when I first started (the Fight Compass and MMA Matrix to name a few) and techniques which made CMD what it is. In fact, this isn’t just any martial art. It is very modern and it does keep up with the times, especially when mixed martial arts has become the fastest rising sport in today’s world.

While majority of the stuff I learned during my time was boxing, there were also times when we did Monkey Jits, which is BJJ incorporated into CMD to turn us CM Monkeys into well-rounded fighters. There have also been kicks and clinches taught to us by Vince himself and recently, he started teaching us the ground game aspects of the programme. As I continued learning, I realize just how hard it is to fight on the ground. Professional MMA fighters make it look like a piece of cake, but it really is that tough. I’m so used to fighting on my feet that it became a whole new ordeal fighting on the ground. Learning how to make transitions, apply submissions and defending in guards are strenuous and took a lot of my energy away, but it was great fun and a great learning process.

Which also brings me to something which I find almost after every CMD class I intend. Perhaps it’s due to the stressful and hectic nature of my work, but I always have this sense of satisfaction and absolute bliss after each and every CMD class. Those on my Facebook and those who follow me on Twitter would realize that I would update my status by saying something really positive about the night’s class, whether it was something new I learned or the fun atmosphere on a whole of the class. And that of course brings me to my fellow CM Monkeys who are an awesome bunch to train with. These guys are very helpful and they would always look out for each other, helping everyone out by polishing techniques and strikes and generally making the classes (and also open mats sessions every Saturday afternoon) a fun experience. They’re also people I’m very proud to consider not just sparring and training partners, but friends as well.

Last weekend, the man who started CMD, Rodney King, came over to the gym for a three-day seminar consisting of Monkey Jits, CIA (Combat Intelligent Athlete) techniques and of course, a full-on MMA seminar at the end. Rodney taught us a lot about CMD, especially to newbies like myself. His techniques were fun to learn and he was very helpful as well. Most inspiring were the talks he gave during the seminars where he told us about his life as a martial artist, his times spent as a bouncer back in his hometown of Johannesburg, South Africa and many more. Those three days spent at the seminar was one of the most fondest times I’ve ever gone through in my life and if anything, it was something I’d love to go through all over again. Of course I’ll have to wait till next year when Rodney comes down to KL again for another action-packed seminar.

It’s been about four months or so since I took up CMD as a hobby and since then, I never look back. Aside from performing on stage whether as a singer, actor or even a dancer, practicing a modern form of martial art like Crazy Monkey Defense has been a healthy addiction for me and a fun one as well at that. It shed me a lot of light as to how hard and intense it is just to practice MMA and it made me strongly believe that yes, like a friend of mine said, mixed martial arts is a beautiful game.