This is the final story in a three-part series about the UFC Performance Institute. The first story looked at the technology being used at the PI; the second examined how the PI is being used by athletes other than MMA fighters—and how the UFC is using its unique positioning in U.S. sports to expand internationally. This story goes into the analytics of mixed martial arts.
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In 2017, UFC fighter Joanne Calderwood was at an impasse. Coming off two straight losses—a submission in September 2016 against Jessica Andrade and a defeat to Cynthia Calvillo in July 2017—she escaped to Australia for a few months of relaxation but couldn’t stop wondering if she should quit mixed martial arts nearly 20 years into her career. “I was at a standstill point where I was struggling to make weight, and my lifestyle took an impact from that,” she says.
Soon after, a conversation would change the trajectory of her life. Calderwood was introduced to Clint Wattenberg, the director of nutrition at the UFC Performance Institute, who took her on a scientific walkthrough of how she should be fueling her body. “We Skyped and I explained all my concerns: that I didn’t really understand how to cut weight and still maintain a good lifestyle with my nutrition,” she says.
When Wattenberg urged her to visit the Performance Institute in Las Vegas, Calderwood jumped at the opportunity to get hands-on feedback about how she should be eating in order to cut weight and maintain peak performance.
“I took the step, came here with an open mind, and did all the tests they wanted me to do,” she says. “They proved to me—showed me the science—of where I should be at my career.”
According to the data, many of her struggles with making weight came from the fact that she was trying to fit into the strawweight class, the lowest division for UFC women (its upper limit is 115 pounds). In order for her to get under that threshold, she would remove all carbohydrates for weeks leading up to a fight. But the science revealed a new solution: her body was best suited for the next weight class, flyweight, which has an upper limit of 125 pounds.
“My body couldn’t handle me cutting to strawweight,” she says. “They showed me all the data and I was really taken aback by it.”
It has been common for fighters to take longer breaks in between matches and then go hard leading up to a fight. Using science and data, the UFC Performance Institute wants to change that mentality.
At the PI, Calderwood ran on the treadmill with a mask on her face so trainers could get a read on her aerobic capacity. They followed her around with metabolic carts and iPads as she worked out, giving her real-time data about how her body was reacting to certain loads. They ultimately “triangulated” all of that data with what she ate and drew out connections to her overall performance.
But, of course, there was still a problem.
At her first fight camp—a condensed period of training at the PI before a match—nutritionists approached her with a screen full of flashing numbers and charts as she exited the octagon following her last spar a week before her fight. Something was off.
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“They could see my heart rate wasn’t getting to the max, and they asked me what I ate,” Calderwood says. “I told them I had cut out carbs and bread because it was a week to the fight. I was still scared of all these massive changes and afraid I wouldn’t make weight. They showed me, ‘Well, your heart is struggling to get to the max because you haven’t fueled it enough.’ That was me being stuck in my old ways, so for the rest of the weekend I resumed my carb intake and made weight perfectly fine. My training didn’t suffer. Now I know that my body does need that and it’s OK.”
After moving to Las Vegas, Calderwood’s stats started to improve. She won an August 2018 fight against Kalindra Faria, via submission in the first round, and then earned a decision victory against Ariane Lipski in January 2019. While she lost her most recent fight against Katlyn Chookagian, in June, Calderwood says she feels like her performance and entire lifestyle are at an all-time high.
“I am coming up on two years since I’ve been here and I feel the best I’ve ever felt in my career,” she says. “I feel like I’m getting the best performance out of my body. I had not been fueling my body properly all those years.”
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The UFC Performance Institute in Vegas has attracted fighters from all around the world, and Calderwood is among nearly two dozen athletes who have moved to the desert full-time to take advantage of the complementary service. The PI has even attracted athletes who don’t compete in MMA; NHL players, NBA All-Stars, NFL players, Olympians and even U.S. special forces have paid to use the same services.
The PI’s open layout allows its staff nutritionists, physical therapists, trainers and sports scientists to interact with one another and form a comprehensive picture of an athlete’s physiology. The data collected from all of the fighters training at the UFC’s facilities in Vegas and Shanghai—and from those working out remotely while plugged into UFC’s athlete management system—enable the organization to crunch numbers and break down the analytics of how MMA athletes train.
It has been common for fighters to take longer breaks in between matches and then go hard in the months leading up to a fight in order to get back into shape. But the PI wants to change that mentality, using science and data to show that fighters should be training on a 52-week schedule with varying degrees of intensity.
“They’d only treat themselves like a pro athlete and come to a fight camp when they had a fight signed,” says James Kimball, vice president of operations at UFC Performance Institute. “They’d train for two months leading up to it, then after a fight go into off-season mode and not step into a gym for a month. We’re trying to change this into a 52-week fight camp, so they can be pro athletes year-round.”
In 2018, the UFC released a 40-page report highlighting the state of the UFC athlete. Titled the Cross-Sectional Performance Analysis and Projection of the UFC Athlete, it attempts to provide an established, clear method of how to physically prepare for MMA. Kimball says the UFC plans to release an updated report every other year.
Compiled from data at the Performance Institute and from training sessions and historical UFC fights dating back to 2002, the report analyzes what it takes to win in every weight class for men and women. It also provides best practices for injury prevention, strength and conditioning, and weight management. The goal is to optimize athletes and coaches around the world with data-backed findings and a standardized guide to prepare for elite MMA competition. “We’ve built a performance paradigm reflecting all of this information, attempting to answer the very question that has eluded us all: how to train for MMA,” Forrest Griffin, the former UFC light heavyweight champion who now serves as UFC’s vice president of athlete development, writes in the report.
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Key insights include how the length of UFC bouts have increased over the past two decades, and how that affects tactics, strategy and the athletes’ approach to physical preparation. In 2002, the average UFC fight lasted 8:06. Average times steadily increased by more than two minutes to 10:43 by 2017, a 32.3% change. Durations tend to differ by weight class, with strawweight fights demanding more time than heavyweights. The way fights are won has also shifted over time. More than half of all fights were finished by a knockout or technical knockout in 2002. That number was just 31.9% in 2017. The trend coincides with an increase in fights going to decision, up to 50.3% in 2017 from 28.3% in 2002.
Across all weight classes, heavier bodies are proven to have a higher incidence of knockout and technical knockout finishes, regardless of gender. An average of 60.1% of all heavyweight fights are finished that way, while just 26.5% go to decision. Meanwhile, just 20.5% of male 125lb flyweight fights are finished by knockout or technical knockout, with the majority (60.3%) going to a decision.
“If you pull the ratio of, let’s say, head strikes. And you hit more than four significant head strikes per minute, your chances of winning go to 74%. If you take 74% and also add significant ground strikes, it goes up to 96%. So you then get the decision tree for ultimately how do people win in a fight?” says Duncan French, the vice president of performance at the UFC PI. “We need to have analytics for every single one of those things.”
In other words, Kimball says, “We reverse-engineer the process.”
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These insights are now informing new scouting and talent-investment strategies at the UFC. Earlier this year, the fighting league launched its first academy for emerging talent by opening its Shanghai Performance Institute. It also hosted its first combine to evaluate talent, with the development of 13 measurement tests that it built from scratch through this reverse-engineering process.
The UFC uses isometric high pulls, VO2 max and lactate threshold (among other metrics) to determine how an athlete can handle the intensity of a fight. It then compares the results of athletes in the combine to performance data from its rostered athletes to get a temperature reading on how they might match up on a physiological level.
“How powerful can you be in 10 seconds if you throw in a flurry of punches and kicks? Are they hard enough to knock someone out?” French says. “The fight is won on your ability to go super high-intensity, but to do it again and again and again.”
The UFC developed these tests based on the techniques and skills of previous fights that have proven to influence success. It collects and codes 167 different statistics from each fight, ranging from number of transitions to significant head strikes. One finding shows that 77% of UFC fights are won in six to 36 seconds of high-intensity effort. Those bursts of energy are followed by periods of low intensity that can be two or three times as long, then the cycle restarts.
“So the fight is won on your ability to go super high-intensity, but to do it again and again and again,” says French. “We’ve aligned our needs to understand people’s ability to go as crazy as they can, as hard as they can, in that really explosive period of time. How powerful can you be in 10 seconds if you throw in a flurry of punches and kicks? Are they hard enough to knock someone out? There’s a true link between our rationale and why we’re doing test days and how it fits in to wins and losses.”
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With global combines now being interwoven into the UFC’s expanding academy model, French says these data insights will help the league “identify where the talent and gaps are” as it looks to elevate the caliber of athletes on its roster. Kimball says he hopes to also shift the paradigm of how UFC athletes train. Many MMA fight camps focus on sparring with a disregard for the strength and conditioning, preventative physical therapy methods, and nutrition—factors that have made the PI so popular among rostered UFC athletes and those from other disciplines.
“That’s the culture we’re trying to change,” says Kimball. “Most injuries in the sport occur when they’re sparring. On a Wednesday for an NFL team, they’re not playing a full football game. Yet, our athletes will fight during the entire fight camp, and they’ll go hard. You don’t need to go that hard. Maximize what you’re doing when you’re sparring, but just spar maybe once every two weeks, not four times a week. That’s a long way away. But this helps us bring in the analytical piece to begin breaking things down.”
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