(Georges St-Pierre performing a snatch)

[Pro MMA fighter, BJJ brown belt and head coach of Caged Steel Gym Danny Mitchell founded his blog "The Tao of Dan-Jitsu" in 2010, and will be continuing it here at www.YourMMA.tv in 2011. To get you up to speed, we are reposting his most significant entries prior to his return.]

I have been involved in martial arts for roughly 14 years now and been competing in full contact matches of varying types for about 12 of those years.

For years I experimented with different bodyweight exercises; squats, push ups and sit ups were the mainstay of my program, and for years I barely touched a dumbbell or even graced the weights gym with my presence.

Competing on a regular basis, I found that my superior technique was enough to win fights and I would often beat guys who were more than twice as strong as me just through having a better knowledge than them and by using the classic martial arts theory of ‘using their strength against them’ like something out of a dodgy Segal film. This pretty much threw me into the mindset that, ‘I do not need to do weights, they will make me slow and take away from my technical approach to fights’. And that was how it stayed for a long time.

As the competition got better and better coaches became available in the UK, fights got harder and opponents got more intelligent. Then shit started to get tough. A new breed of fighters started to appear, fighters that were highly technical, yet highly athletic, strong, fast and agile.
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