I’m pretty curious about this myself, so I hope a fair number of people respond.

As for myself, I’m a four stripe green belt under “Kiko” France (blackbelt under, I believe, Ricardo Liborio) and Dr. James McRae (purple belt under Burton Richardson/Kiko France). The green belt isn’t universal in BJJ (if I remember correctly, it’s just an ATT thing), but it’s between white and blue.

The emphasis of my training is for the street, as opposed to competition, so I have an very entry level smattering of Muay Thai, Boxing, Judo, Wrestling, JKD, and Gun/Knife training.

That said, I’ve been out with a broken arm for about seven months, so to what extent I’m still of that ability level is questionable. Word to the wise: hammerlocks can cause a spiral fracture of the humerus with a surprisingly small amount of force applied.

Well, considering Luke trained at some point with Lloyd Irvin, the many members of the armed forces who post here, and there was this fantastic fanpost all about training, I’d say there are numerous martial artists here. If your friends think training is such a big deal, do they train as well – and why does it matter to them?

Personally, for self-defense, I practice sucker punches to the groin & running away. That’s the upper limit to my skill but it works well so far.

4 stripe blue belt at Easton Denver. I trained under Coach George A. for quite a while. he is a great guy and a very good instructor.

Kickboxing,not much bjj around here but when a seminar rolls into town im there,that and me and a few of my kickboxing teamates roll for a few rounds after our sparring sessions

I can say there are several active professional fighters from the highest level who have registered screen names here on BE but never choose to comment.

Before I left Brooklyn, spent 10-12 (great) months training at Brooklyn BJJ under Professors Brian Glick and Gene Dunn (both Renzo Gracie black belts and excellent instructors). It was a non-compete school, but I’m looking find a good place to start back up here in Mass (if anyone has suggestions… there are ATT and BTT affils nearby…) and maybe enter a grappling tourney for fun in the future. No interest in MMA though, I’m too nice and too handsome. :P

Kajukenbo since 2003, but I’ve concentrated primarily on boxing since the beginning of this year.

I have never had a rec’d fan post and it is nice to see lots of response to it. I hope many more list their accomplishments.

Blue belt in Ground Control (Renzo Gracie school), been doing Muay Thai (just training) for 2 years now, and studied for a year and a half (and got a blue belt, but not in the typical ranking of BJJ) at a school called Clinch that taught Israeli Combative Systems, which is a fancy way of saying mostly stand-up and a little ground, with an emphasis on real life scenario and weapon defenses.
ALSO, I plan on taking a year off before medical school and was thinkin about moving to Los Angeles for a year to work at a hospital and train BJJ fulltime to compete. Any suggestions as to the school? Ive been thinkin about 10th planet or LA boxing since Ive been moving towards Rubber Guard as an experiment, and am slowly adapting and getting more flexible… not sure tho..

My Grandad taught me to box from the time I was about 6 or 7. I wrestled through junior high, and fought alot through high school. But my real fight training came from playing junior and college hockey in the early 90’s. That was crazy.

after becoming obsessed with MMA a few years back, i started training in muay thai for about 6 months, then switched to BJJ. i only did it for about 3 months before i had to quit because of law school. with the summer coming i think i might get back into the kickboxing. i absolutely love BJJ and feel i can definitely get good if i had enough time and money to do it, but i really like hitting people in the face.

I am white belt, one stripe chum in BJJ. I’ve gone once a week for the past few months as I have been a poor poor man. The school is great though. Beston Gracie jiu jitus. Royce, Royler, and Rodrigo have all done seminars there. I wasn’t training when Royler came, but I went to the Royce one and it was awesome. Didn’t have enough money for Rodrigo though which was sad.

http://photos-c.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc1/hs034.snc1/2483_52037836663_514551663_1422130_6236562_n.jpg

(Instead of opting for the fighters fist pose, or the stern look, I went for the shit eating grin. Time will tell if I made the right choice).

I initially did not want to reply in this post as I subscribe to the Jahbulon way of thinking, but as the post didn’t dissolve into a cock measuring competition, I thought what the hell.

Gary Goodridge’s gym in Barrie, On.
I weigh about 140lb when I’m wet.
But I can do 100 pushups in one go and run a 2400 in 9 minutes flat.
I’m also a morning person :P

boxing as a kid for about 3 years.

I also train mma out of gold medal grappling in woodbridge va. Bjj under Pedro Sauer at OneSpirit and Judo under Maurice Allen at One Spirit.

I am still technically a white belt in bjj, but that’s because I switched schools and predro’s system is different from what I learned at Capital BJJ. I’ll hop on my Blue belt when I get back though.

I’m also a Blue Belt in Judo. I’ve put alot of time in on the mat there this year.

I was training six days a week until this damned deployment.

Hopefully I’ll be fighting in one of the local DC promotions when I get back from the sandbox. My wife will kill me if I don’t hop in the ring soon after all the time I’ve put towards training.

I also do judo and bjj tournaments, and plan on hitting my first wrestling tournament early next year.

…but I want to drop serious weight before I really commit to it, mostly because BJJ is a lot harder to do well if you’re more Tank Abbott than Roly Delgado… and there’s few guys my size in the gym I go to locally, so sparring can be somewhat uneventful.

But if I can drop the weight and commit four months to serious BJJ and Muay Thai, I plan to fight at a local show for a buck forty nine and a six pack. I’ll probably get my ass handed, but many have been the times I’ve sat ringside and thought, “I could have won that fight.”

The wife has given the okay, so now it’s just a matter of time.

but I am more of a lover than a fighter.

I am a two-stripe bluebelt in BJJ under Kiko France (black belt from Liborio) at ATT-MO. I also have 5 stripes in the JKDU curriculum from Burton Richardson via Dr. James McRae (2 strip purple from Kiko France, originally awarded purple from Charuto Verrisimo). I’m supposed to be going for level 1 instructor through JKDU and be an instructor for Brazilian JiuJitsu for the Street sometime this summer if permitted by Burton (he likes to meet people before awarding instructorships, but him being in HI and me currently being in MO makes things challenging).

So far I’ve only competed in submission grappling tournaments. Mostly I’ve competed in men’s divisions, partially due to a lack of women’s divisions, and partially because I’m just a glutton for punishment like that. I love competing, but my main objective is training for the street/self defense type situations.

I figure this is as good at time as any, but anybody know of good gyms in Eugene, OR? I’m about to move out there and will need a new place to train.

I’ve got less than 10 and more than 5 amateur boxing bouts (depending where you look).

I’ve been training BJJ but the time constraints of school have prevented me from really getting into it the way I did with boxing. It’s hard to learn quickly on a twice a week schedule. I’d like to compete at MMA, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to commit the time.

I’m 1-0 in mma, 0-1 in boxing.
North and South Carolina Judo state champion last year.

Seems there are a lot of training partners are on here, too. I constantly reference this site to people I know/train with and even link the occasional Fanpost on Facebook, but all of my friends and my brother are only BE stalkers and won’t actually join.

I wouldn’t recommend getting into any amateur fights if you’ve never really trained under anyone/ gym’s. Sparring partners are needed before taking that next step. Unless you’re like a Charles Crazy Horse and just don’t care haha

Started with Tae Kwon Do through highschool then trained Wing Chun Kung Fu (not the dancing animal stuff) for 5 years.

Currently in love with grappling. Training at a Gracie Barra BJJ gym here in Aus. I am competing for the first time at the end of this month and again the following month and depending how I go, will get my blue belt.

I enjoy jumping in the ring before BJJ classes with the MMA guys just for shits and giggles. Way too old for all the macho bullshit.

Very interesting reading some people’s stories here.

Trained for about 15 months at Ralph Gracie in SF (still a white belt), also boxed for 6 months. Then I took on a new job and it killed my schedule.

Now I am going to be going back to school and plan on re-enrolling at Ralph Gracie in Mountain View…No interest in fighting MMA, but train for the fitness aspect.

I am a large man (6’2 250) and was 225 when training. I would like to get back to that size.

I trained jiu-jitsu for about four months, then realized it was totally incompatable with my bad habits, which involve copious amounts of alcohol and smoke. It was a lot of fun though and maybe something I’ll revisit in my late 30s when I mature enough to get my shit together.

I’ve been in martial arts since I was 5 years old. I have a black belt in TKD, I started Muay Thai and BJJ in 2002. I have also trained with the University of Central Oklahoma wrestling team many times. I have had 4 pro mma fights with a record of 3-1. The one loss was a fight I took on 3 days notice. I have been out for a while recovering from back surgery If you want to check out some of my fights go to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBXjTNeJfxE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-d-uTL46Vk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6wUMwFsWrQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGIFsh9YWbk

The last one is just a light round on the focus mitts. Let me know what you all think!

On the second video above skip to about the 1:30 mark to get right to the fight, its a decent ko so its worth it.

 martial arts training is way expensive, and there is lots of talent on this site. Thanks everybody for sharing some very interesting stuff.

3 year varsity letterman on the wrestling team
been doing BJJ for about a year now.

Bronze medalist in BJJ at the Best of the Best 9 in Omaha NE. White belt division. Currently a yellow belt under Sensei Conan Schafer at Roseberry’s martial arts academy in Lincoln, NE. I have not competed in an MMA fight yet, I have decided to train before going into the ring. I hate all the guys that come into the dojo and say, “I have a fight in a few weeks, I need to learn some Jiu Jitsu.” Are you kidding me? Anyone who knows anything about fighting MMA knows you don’t train a discipline for a week or two and then feel like you are competent in that area for the fight. Anyway, I have only been doing JJ for about 8 months, but I have shown that I am worthy enough to get my blue belt in July, which means that within a year I have made it from white to blue, I know that this isn’t a huge deal, but for someone who hasn’t been in any kind of good shape or competition sport for a decade, it isn’t bad.

I train at ATT. I can take care of myself. Not a pro fighter… yet

I don’t believe the story behind the motivation for this thread but…
2.5 years at Nashville MMA.

while i dont think being able to fight is really a necessity to be a fan, I’ve been doing jujitsu/kickboxing for two semesters and MMA for one

I should chime in I suppose. I didn’t wrestle in high school because I was a baseball player, and eventually became a school skipping slacker. I did train boxing for about 16 months and recently started training at Legion Fighting Alliance with head trainer Norm Alexander. But that was all of…um…6 days ago?

A shit ton of scraps in middle and high school (I just graduated last year, but I calmed down the older I got). Wasn’t a rough neighborhood, but I was small and dorky and got picked on a lot in middle school, until I started fighting back.

Blue belt (the 6th belt, considered intermediate at my particular school) in TKD, dropped out in middle school right before my next belt test, and just recently started again.

Had a year of training MMA for my graduation project in high school. I competed in a BJJ tournament about 2 months into my training (I lost…).

2 back yard “MMA” fights. One against a 180lb (i’m 120lbs) wrestler, who took me down and pounded the fuck out of me for 15 minutes (during which I hit once at the beginning, half way dropped him, after which he immediately took me down). And 10 minutes later against a 135lber, who quite after the first round.

I have trained some combination of Judo, MMA, and Jiu-jitsu for the last two years on and off. So I could probably beat most people who didn’t know what they were doing, but I would probably be in trouble against most others.

Black belts in Tae Kwon Do, Hawaiann Kempo, and Okinawan Kenpo.
I will be instructing Okinawan Kenpo and Kobudo.
I have been doing Muay Thai, Kickboxing, and Boxing since I was 5.
Will be fighting in the IKF in American FCR, International, and Muay Thai Kickboxing.

Should be testing for my blue belt in BJJ soon.

I train at Faith Martial Arts and MMA / Colorado Springs BJJ under Dave Armstrong and Bill Hosken.

I train in….

Style: HOOD

I’m fairly advanced in an obscure style of karate (was an instructor for years, shortlisted for the national team in kumite, still working on throwing fireballs with regularity), and trained a bit in judo and less so in jiu-jitsu.

Like most i started in martial arts as a child. Eventually got a black belt in Jiu-Jitsu under Robert Hansen. He’s not famous but he went nuts claimed he can speak with the dead and landed himself in a pysch ward. A few students from the school went on to train with Matt Serra, one of them being a guy named Aaron Friedman. Remember the name. I did some judo in college but then the partying got to me and became out of shape and now i no longer do anything.

Yellow belt in Taekwondo and some middle and high school wrestling. I would get into other forms of martial arts if it was available at places closer than an hour away.

I did Butoku-Kai Karate as a kid (like, late 80s-early90s), and reached brown belt. I stopped because I hit my growth spurt VERY late, and it was no fun training with other people at my level because they were all taller, stronger and more coordinated than me, compounded by the fact that I’m NOT a natural athlete. I just got too frustrated, and left. Then I got really really out of shape. Like, 6’2", 270lbs. out of shape by the time I was 26 years old.

I started training BJJ a little over a year and a half ago, with a smattering of kickboxing and judo thrown in. I realized I loved it and was totally hooked. Now I’m 185lbs., I do conditioning and strength training (I work out with kettlebells and recently ran a 10K road race), and hit up classes at least twice a week, three or four times a week when I can. I’ll never go back to being how I was. Funny thing is, when I started I thought that I was a big guy who should dominate in top control; turns out I’m actually a long, flexible guy who should be going for weird arm locks with my legs.

I’m also a former bouncer (I relied largely on my size to be intimidating and my verbal skills to keep things from escalating, but I know I can drop a bomb now and then… but I don’t enjoy it). I currently train under Adam Zugec at Zugec Ultimate Martial Arts in Victoria and I have a few promotions on my white belt from Marcus Soares. I’m moving to England in the summer and I’m not looking forward to finding another BJJ gym over there; it’ll be hard to find anything that comes close to ZUMA.