Vrss-Fightgear

**Tomorrow, Don Heatrick S&C is joining us live inside VFC.**

Don has coached more than 1,500 fighters worldwide, including Liam Harrison and the Yokkao Elite Fighting Team.

Tomorrow, VFC Premium members get to bring their questions directly to him.

Strength. Conditioning. Fight camp. Recovery. Training load. Balancing physical preparation with the actual demands of fighting.

**Thursday, 27 August**
10:30 a.m. London / 5:30 p.m. Bali

The Q&A is included with VFC Premium, alongside your ticket to **Strength From Within Vol. 3: The Science Behind Fight IQ**, the SFW replay vault, future digital SFW events and future VFC Lives.

**Founding membership: $89 USD/year.**

Join before we go live tomorrow: https://www.skool.com/vrssfightgear

aggression in fighting isn’t always personal.

you can respect the person in front of you, feel no real hostility toward them, and still be completely willing to hurt them within the rules of the fight.

that’s part of what makes aggression in combat sports psychologically so interesting.

anger, hostility and physical aggression aren’t the same thing. and some of what looks like aggression in sport may be instrumental: behaviour being used in service of another goal.

in a fight, that goal might be to score, impose your game, create damage or finish.

no hostility required.

Kostorz & Sas-Nowosielski, 2021
Stanković et al., 2022

before the fight, everything can feel loud.

fear. adrenaline. anticipation. your heart racing. your mind going everywhere.

then the fight starts, and something can shift.

in a 2013 study of professional MMA fighters, researchers explored how athletes experienced and regulated that intensity before and during competition.

the goal wasn’t to feel nothing. it was to find the level of arousal that allowed them to stay sharp, present and responsive inside the chaos.

because sometimes the psychological battle starts long before the first strike is thrown.

Jensen et al., 2013

faith shows up everywhere in combat sports.

prayer before the walkout. a glance upward after the result. gratitude the moment someone gets handed the mic.

but the research points to an interesting distinction: simply having faith and actively using faith to cope with pressure may not be the same thing.

for some religious athletes, prayer, surrender, support and other forms of religious coping may change how they experience stress and uncertainty.

and that matters when attention is part of performance.

so maybe the question isn’t whether faith makes you perform better.

maybe it’s what faith gives you when the pressure hits.

Shahdan, Noh & Adnan, 2022
Noh, Mat Zaki & Danaee, 2024

your gut has its own nervous system.

roughly 168 million neurons constantly monitoring what’s happening inside you and communicating with the brain.

under pressure, those internal signals become part of what you consciously feel: the knot, the pull, the restless sense that there’s still something left to do.

so that “hunger” you feel in training or fighting isn’t necessarily just a metaphor - it’s part of how your body tells your brain that something matters.

research: Michel et al. (2022), How Big is the Little Brain in the Gut?

visualization isn’t just imagining yourself winning.

it’s rehearsal.

when you vividly imagine a movement, many of the same motor-related areas of the brain involved in physically performing it become active.

and research suggests that mental practice alone can even produce measurable improvements in strength, although physical training produces substantially greater gains.

the interesting part isn’t choosing one or the other.

it’s what happens when mental rehearsal becomes part of the physical training you’re already doing.

in our latest episode, psychologist and mental performance coach Anaïs Verny breaks down the science of visualization and how athletes can use it to strengthen the connection between mind and movement.

this is anaismindset , and this is the VRSS podcast.

research: Yue & Cole, 1992; Ranganathan et al., 2004