Interview: John Kavanagh on coaching methods, diet gurus, fancy gym equipment & more

This Saturday night in Boston, Irish featherweight superstar, Conor McGregor will make his fifth foray in the UFC Octagon against Dennis Siver. Already one of the most popular fighters on the roster due to his gift for gab, Conor has also displayed a solid skillset with plenty of talent to back up his boasting and smack talk.

The gym he trains out of, SBG Ireland, is headed up by John Kavanagh, whose coaching success includes Aisling Daly, Gunnar Nelson, Cathal Pendred and several other up-and-coming fighters. In a recent interview with Bloody Elbow, Kavanagh discussed coaching principles, why fighters don't need nutrition coaches, the changes the gym has experienced since Conor skyrocketed to fame and more. Here's what he had to say:

Bloody Elbow: You have some top level talent at the gym. What circumstances facilitated those fighters making a home on your team?

John Kavanagh: It was through a series of what I call "happy accidents." This bunch of guys all joined about the same time and have been with me for the last six or seven years. All of them seem to be getting their big breaks around the same time, too.

It kind of feels like an overnight success story, but it's not. I get brought into schools over here to do a little motivational speaking and so on, and I say to them, ‘It took me 12 years to become an overnight success.' Although it seems like we sort of burst onto the scene, Most of these guys have been with me for a minimum of seven years, some of them longer. Conor's been with me for 10 years and Aisling has been with me for 12. We've definitely been at this awhile.

Bloody Elbow: Aisling did very well on The Ultimate Fighter. Would you consider that her big break, or do you feel her prior experience already gave her the exposure, much in the same fashion that Felice Herrig was already a well-known, established fighter?

John Kavanagh: Before Conor, Ash might have been the biggest name here because she fought on all the major European promotions. She was quite well known. Obviously now, Conor has eclipsed everybody. But yeah, a lot of people have taken note of her and watched her closely.

Bloody Elbow: Do you have other females at your gym?

John Kavanagh: I do. I've got another girl who is the 5 time Irish National Boxing champion. She's a bit like Conor in the stand-up and she has a great pedigree. She's amateur at the moment, but I'm thinking she'll be pro later this year. I'll have Ash at 115 and this girl at 135. We'll be ready to take the UFC belts in those weight categories, too [laughs].

Bloody Elbow: With the success of your bigger named fighters, are you seeing a huge influx of people wanting to be the next big thing?

John Kavanagh: Yeah, we have. I'd gotten around 80-90 members in the 12 years I've been running a gym professionally, but I was never able to get to 100. I moved to a new location last January, and we just hit 400 members. There's definitely been a massive increase in membership and lots of interest.

Again, it's a couple of factors coming together. It's my first time having what I would describe as a "commercial gym." It's very nice looking, and it's warm, dry and clean. The girls seem to like that [laughs]. The kids classes and beginner's classes are a lot more popular now whereas before, it was just fighters and we were always in some little industrial unit, buried at the back of somewhere; cold and damp and dirty, but we didn't really care.

The gym is much nicer these days, and it's encouraging people to join. Obviously, the big names here being in the media constantly helps, too. The sport itself is in the media quite a bit, so there's that, too. It's getting a lot more attention.

Bloody Elbow: With that kind of membership boom, how much more staff have you had to add?

John Kavanagh: Well, I was kind of lucky that I fell for a girl that is actually very good at running the gym for me. My fiancé takes care of all the membership, my sister, who's been with me for a number of years, takes on a managerial role and takes care of the day-to-day logistics; paying bills and all that kind of stuff. I have 27 coaches and I have one other staff member that runs the reception area. This time last year, it was just me and my sister running it to now where four people are full time employees, and a support system of a number of coaches. I'm sort of figuring it out as I go, if I'm being honest. So far, so good.

Bloody Elbow: You've had guys come in that were already on the fringe of success that you fine-tuned and turned them into high level fighters. How have you adjusted your coaching to make it more scalable for the athletes that might not be on the brink of a big break?

John Kavanagh: I've got that small handful of fighters that have made it to the UFC, but I've got a lot more in the gym, and to be honest, it hasn't been much of a problem. I've got mixed levels to the point that I was at a show recently with one that was in his very first amateur fight. Then on the other end of the spectrum, I'll be in Boston with Conor for the Boston card. We've got all sorts of levels here and I personally love coaching at all levels. It's the same, whether it be a UFC or a small local show.

Conor is the same way. One day he'll be on a leg of a huge media tour and the next he's in the gym teaching a beginner how to do an armbar. It's very much a team effort here. You could say we're a family here, all of us. Everybody is trying to help everybody get better. Obviously that handful has moved onto a bigger platform with better money, but they're here trying to help their teammates achieve that same level of success.

Bloody Elbow: Since you have that family vibe going, is there a lot of pranking in the gym?

John Kavanagh: The Irish have a certain sense of humor, we call it "taking the piss."  Fans see Conor as this icon, but for us, he's just Conor, the guy that joined the gym several years back. We make fun of him because of the outfits he wears; just general, good-hearted fun. If someone is maybe getting a little bit ahead of themselves, we remind them and bring them right back down to earth.

Bloody Elbow: There was a bit of a stereotype that UK MMA fighters don't have good wrestling. Conor seems to be a very well rounded package. Is wrestling a key focus point in your gym?

John Kavanagh: About 8 or 10 years ago, we had a huge influx of Eastern Europeans move into Ireland. Just in my own gym, we've had a lot of Russians and Polish and Moldovans-our current wrestling coach is Moldovan-come out and start training with us. We've basically been working with high level wrestlers for the last 10 years. It's another one of those happy instances that came about at around the same time.

Obviously Conor came from a boxing background, but he's been able to incorporate that wrestling into his game very well. Me personally, I was more drawn towards jiu-jitsu, so that's been very prominent in our training, as well. These guys have been at it for quite some time, and it didn't happen overnight, but we're there now.

Bloody Elbow: Do you have unique coaching practices you implement with your athletes?

John Kavanagh: All fighters develop skills at different rates, but my guys all have a similar approach in that it's an all-encompassing part of their lives. They don't really do much else. I have a secret Facebook group that I just have my fighters on. I put up homework for them to do; for example, I'll have them look at a fight and tell me three things Fighter X did wrong from this position or that one, and so on. Cathal has a good way of describing it, that we're like the geeks that stay back after school to do extra homework.

Another thing we do is I have different lesson plans. Like one week will be Lyoto Machida week. We'll break down his style of fighting and the techniques that contribute to his success. We'll look at the pros and cons of his approach.

I like to use the Socratic method when I coach, in that I pose questions instead of just give the solutions. It's long been proven that when tasked with finding the solution to a problem, people learn and retain the information better if they find it themselves, rather than just being handed the answer. I try to engage their minds, rather than have them go about with their brain switched off and their bodies on auto pilot.

I've been in gyms where the athletes work very hard, but they don't really think about what they're doing or understand why certain actions work uniquely for specific scenarios. Those are the guys that put in a hard day at the gym, go home and when asked what they did or learned, they aren't too sure exactly what they did or why. We recently finished a technical session where we broke down what Brad Pickett did wrong in his fight and what Frankie Edgar did right in his fight. These are some of the things we do.

Bloody Elbow: Some of the elite MMA gyms employ the use of unusual equipment like hyperbaric chambers or cryogenic therapy or floatation tanks. Do you believe in stuff like that or is it just designer gym fluff?

John Kavanagh: As far as the cryo therapy and ice bath chambers, there's actually not any really good evidence to show that they do much of anything unless you have an existing serious injury. When people do a hard workout and then jump into an ice bath, it's actually not doing anything, at least there's no evidence to say that it does.

Now, in saying that, that's not the reason I don't have those things. As a matter of fact, the reason I don't have much equipment in the gym is because we focus on martial arts. We have mats and pads.

I'm going to go off on a bit of a tangent here, but when I got into martial arts, I did it for the same reason many did, because I watched a lot of martial arts movies. Then, when I started getting into MMA, it became work. I saw everybody was boxing, but I didn't see any spinning kicks or moves that made me go, ‘Wow! That looks cool.' I sort of got a little disillusioned with it all. Where was all the movie stuff? That had gone out the window.

When I started developing with the style of MMA that the guys are doing now, I wanted it to be fun and interesting. My guys can be in the gym for upwards of 6 hours a day, but it's not 6 hours of the grind, as some wrestlers call it. It's very light paced, and is a good mix of a lot of styles. Capoeira and experimenting with different kicks and moves is incorporated along with more traditional disciplines.

We look at nature documentaries and shows to watch how animals move; silverbacks moving through the jungle, how tigers creep up on their prey, things like that. I try to remind them why they took up martial arts in the first place, because most people thought it was cool after seeing it in movies. It's always a goal to make it more like that rather than this hard sport where people just hurt each other every day in training without really progressing.

Bloody Elbow: Do you use diet/nutrition coaches with your team?

John Kavanagh: You know, a diet is super simple. I can tell you mine right now in one sentence. If it had a face or it grew, then it's pretty much okay, and stay away from processed food. It's just that simple. I think Matt Hughes said that he was just kind of a meat and potatoes guy. My guys just eat food. Very little on the supplement side, if any at all, and when you're getting closer to having to make weight, guess what? You eat less.

I think people always get a bit lost in this conversation. They think that there's some great secret to it. I tell my guys that there's no diet that's a cakewalk. You can pay these nutrition guys, the "gurus" as they call themselves, to try and find you an easy way to make weight, but there is no easy way. You've just got to eat less food and burn more calories. That's it. I think people make it more complicated than it is.

Humans are like this; they want dynamite abs, but they want them in 6 minutes. Of course that's a lie. Take this pill and you'll get fit in a week. Some humans are lazy and want to find an answer that takes away the hard work. The reality is, there's nothing that will do that. You have to put in the work.

I've even had pro fighters contact me, ‘I fight in 6 weeks, can I come and train with you guys?' I can do nothing with you in 6 weeks. All of my fighters that have seen success have a minimum of 7 years with me. It takes months, if not years just to develop a good relationship, where the fighter trusts me to have their best interest in mind and I trust them to follow my instructions and get used to our systems. People don't want to know that, though. They want the one week plan, the guru plan to get ripped in 6 weeks. It's all bullshit.

Bloody Elbow: Have you had any moments where you've had to rein Conor in over something he's said?

John Kavanagh: Absolutely not. I tell all of them that what they do outside these doors is up to them. He's always treated me, his teammates and everyone in the gym with complete respect. If he goes out and says some crazy shit, I play no part in it [laughs].

Bloody Elbow: Since your gym has been riding the wave of success and name recognition, have lots of MMA gyms been popping up in Ireland?

John Kavanagh: Yes, there have. Someone actually did a count recently, and it was 81 gyms for a small little island of just a couple million people. It's exciting times here.

You can follow John via his Twitter account, @John_Kavanagh