Diego Sanchez Coach Explains Drill Chasing Emil Meek With Knife
Diego Sanchez’s coach Joshua Fabia expanded on the drill that involved chasing fighters with a knife.
UFC welterweight Emil Meek recently revealed how during a training session with Sanchez and Fabia, the latter chased after the pair inside a locked cage with a sharp blade.
“How can I put this,” Meek said while laughing. “I went in full-belief mode: everything they tell me to do, I’m going to do it 100 percent. Man, it was the craziest s*** I’ve ever done. At one point, Joshua, he was running after us in a locked cage with a real, sharp blade, to make us move.”
Fabia — who came under the spotlight following Sanchez’s disqualification win over Michel Pereira last weekend — shed light on that controversial but unique drill in an interview with MMA Fighting, adding that he initially used sticks to chase them down:
“The drill is, they’re all in the octagon, moving, trying not to touch each other, or get touched by each other,” Fabia explained. “So I want you to think of an athletic, high-speed game of tag that allows you to play, but also play with that fear and anxiety space, without getting hurt, without feeling you can’t make a mistake. And so, this is happening, five, six, seven, eight, guys, and I progressively come in and I say, ‘On top of the game that’s going on, this is to enhance your awareness, now I’m coming in, do not allow me to touch you also. So now I’m like a wild animal, putting pressure on all of them and not allowing them to stay focused on their specific thing, and just moving them. This is what I do. I go out, they’re continuing again, I come in with a stick, make them move from the stick at different lengths and different speeds. This is why Pereira didn’t land those big kicks on Diego. Amazing.
“So now, the drill has been picked up, and now you need truth, because I can tell that you’re playing. You’re not treating each touch as if it was true danger. Where if I treat each strike as a knife strike, you will move. Now before this drill even began, I showed them the power of the history of metal in the human body by showing them that Diego, with his eyes closed, I can move a knife toward his body, and his body will feel it. You can see his body reacting. That the human body can feel metal; it’s different. It’s from the history of how much the human body has been stabbed. I show them visually, they see it, they have idea. Now, 20 minutes later, yeah, I chase them around with a knife to make them move, so they realize, I’m not playing around. And if you think the guy in the ring when it’s one-on-one is playing around, that might be why you end up losing an eye.”
It’s certainly a different method of helping a fighter’s movement.
What do you make of Fabia’s drill?
