After a few minutes of rest, we got back up and were going to practice kicks. Now, back in the day, I used to have some powerful kicks. Even when my former sensei would hold the pads, I would kick so hard that he would fly backwards. I was a little worried though because these days, I wasn’t very flexible. I couldn’t even get close to touching my toes without bending my knees. I really thought I was going to pull a muscle or something. I was relieved when my trainer said that we were going to practice leg kicks. Phew! I didn’t have to lift my legs very high. That was good news.

I started to kick the pad, but immediately my trainer stopped me. He told me I was kicking wrong. I was snapping my kick at the knee. He said that in MMA you have to use Muay Thai kicks, not karate kicks. He told me not to snap my knee, and to drive through the pad with my shin. It was hard at first, but I eventually got the hang of it. I kicked the pad about 100 times with each leg. By the end, my shins were red and whatever flexibility I had in my legs was gone. I collapsed again and drank more water. There was still one hour left in class.

The next thing we worked on was Modified Wing Chun. I say modified because the moves we were practicing were modified for MMA. We worked on blocking punches, getting out of the clinch, close combat footwork, and a few other things. This was a bit more interesting for me because I was learning new techniques and strategies. I got the hang of it pretty quickly and kept practicing for the next half an hour. After finishing up with that, my trainer started showing me certain moves that he had come up with for MMA. He had a lot of ideas about how Modified Wing Chun (MWC from now on) could be useful in MMA. He started getting really excited and showing me move after move and how each specific move is applied in each situation. His excitement was definitely contagious, and I really started to get into it. We got on the ground and he told me to start punching him. I tried, but he was able to defend all my punches. Not even a single punch I threw landed. He was showing off a little, but he was definitely proving his point. I realized that If I could perfect my Muay Thai and Jiu Jitsu and add MWC to my arsenal, I could be unstoppable. This gave me a huge motivational boost to train like hell.

First of all, my name is Garen Bagdasarian and I’m 20 years old. I’m originally from Armenia but currently live in Utah. Yeah, I’m not sure how I ended up here either. Before I lived in Utah, I lived in Queens, New York for five years. I’m not sure what that has to do with anything, but if nothing else, it should make you think I’m tough. I have a background in Shotokai and I’ve been taking karate classes for most of my life. Karate runs in my family; my uncles are both black belts in their respective styles and they operate a dojo in Nyireghaza, Hungary, where all my cousins train. The last time I had trained was probably about 5 years ago. Since then, my only exercise was basketball. But that just wasn’t enough. About 8 months ago I realized I was feeling incomplete. I realized that I needed more competition in my life; more adrenaline. And after I saw a video of my cousin beating some kid’s ass in Hungary (the kid was bigger, older, and challenged him), I knew what I wanted to do.

I wanted to fight.

I had been a fan of the UFC and mixed martial arts in general for a while, and I had been watching every event. Soon, as I began to gain more interest, I started downloading (yup, I download torrents) all the past events from different organizations. I was watching Vale Tudo, Pride, SHOOTO, early UFC, King of the Cage, Elite XC, etc. I enjoyed watching the fights immensely and felt a need to finally get off my ass and get involved. Luckily, my mom met a co-worker that had a background in MMA and taught classes. When she told me about this, I was excited as hell! I was ready to start.