I've heard Khabib say that you keep your child in gymnastics till they're 10, then they could do martial arts.

But now I understand. It teaches you body control. Like, you know, you throw a sidekick and you snap it up in the air and you hold it and you turn and block and all that stuff. Like it teaches you body. It's like a, almost like a form of yoga. You know, and it teaches you to control your body. I do a lot of kicks in the air now and I do them slowly. Like I, and it, it's really good for your control and your balance. And I didn't think that when I was younger. I thought that was like a waste of time. I thought like really what's important is like hitting things really hard and being fast. And now I realize like, no, no, no, no. There's like a lot of value even to help your techniques and to be able to hit things hard. Like do it slowly and just have full control of your balance and your movement.

And then, as soon as I saw the UFC, I immediately started taking jiu-jitsu.

Oh yeah, another great example of cross training too, because Hickson got really into yoga and everybody's like, what the fuck are you doing yoga? Like yoga's for girls, right? Hickson got really into yoga and got super flexible and suit and really good at controlling his breathing.

But in jiu-jitsu, the beautiful thing about grappling is you know how good everybody is because they all spar. They're all rolling with each other and they essentially go in full blast until the tap. And so there's no hiding.

That's probably the best way to do it because you're just working on timing, pattern recognition, and just getting your reps in.

So I started fighting before I could really be scared. I started fighting when I was 15.