BJJ is full of wankers

A gym thankfully free of wankers

If you’re new to Notes from Ringside, and to be honest as I only started this blog a few days ago, you’re all pretty new, I apologise. Prepare yourselves for my first public rant.

The subject that has irked me enough to write about it here is probably quite a contentious one, for it involves many, many people who run blogs. At the risk of severely pissing off a sizeable portion of the blogging community here goes.

Unclean! Unclean!

The contents of your average fighter’s medicine cabinet

People of a sensitive disposition, stop reading now. This blog is about disease, in all it’s crusty, itchy, pustuous glory.

If you’re a pundit, ardent observer or casual fan, you’ll all have heard of the dreaded ‘staph’. The skin infection that has blighted our sport over the last two years has had plenty of press.

Practising what you preach

The first time I met someone who told me they did the workouts in the magazine, I was genuinely shocked. I don’t know why. I mean, they’re good stuff. The training advice we present is contemporary, functional and most of all, effective.

Still, when they told me they followed the workouts, I couldn’t help mask my surprise. I guess it was more that someone actually read them. It still weirds me out when people tell me about stuff they’ve read in the magazine. I’m like, ‘yeah, I know, I probably wrote it’.

Henderson vs. Silva, and why I hate giving predictions

I don’t like doing previews (usually because I get them wrong when asked to make a prediction). Also I hate having to actually register my opinion on how a fight will go, preferring to just watch the fight and enjoy it for as long as it lasts.

The up-coming Dan Henderson-Anderson Silva encounter is one of the most closely matched title fights of all time, even with their vastly different styles, and it is giving pickers fits.

Horwich is a hippy

Cage Potato, one of my favourite MMA blogs, recently (ha, almost two weeks ago) posted an exclusive interview with Matt Horwich of Team Quest.

I first met Horwich about two years ago. I realised within about 3 seconds of meeting him that the guy is a grade-A space cadet. Sure, he’s cool, but his fascination with Jesus unnerves me a bit (I don’t get fighters and the whole ‘God’ thing) and he seemed like a pretty mellow guy, even if he did carry a bible around with him everywhere.

Tape, a fighter’s best friend

I wonder how many of you know about the importance of tape. Tape is a humble yet indispensable piece of kit that holds a place in every fighter’s kitbag.

Personally, I can’t live without tape, and I know of plenty of others who are in the same boat as me. We need tape to hold us together, like a rag doll held together with bits of duct tape.

Paul Daley retires, journalists and fans alike despair

The way that news is now disseminated has changed beyond belief compared with only a short while ago.

The internet has always been a massive driving force behind this sport (see my latest Notes from Ringside column in Issue 36 of the mag, out Thursday 6th March for more on this). Forums especially, and more recently blogs, are where news is most often broken. The ‘major’ news sites are positively tectonic in their response to breaking news when compared to the flighty bloggers and civilian journalists.

Welcome to Notes from Ringside

Hi, I’m Hywel Teague. You may know me as the editor of Fighters Only magazine, and such informational videos, ‘Making fighters your friend and influencing promoters: How not to incur the wrath of the MMA industry‘, and ‘Ringside Photography: Buy a camera and never pay for VIP tickets again‘.