Writer to Fighter, by Ste Passey

This year I have made it my own personal mission to finally get inside the cage and compete in an actual MMA bout. I hope come the summer of 2013 I will have the skills necessary to give a good account of myself and not have my head ripped off!

I do not have any martial arts or combat sports background of note. I trained in traditional Jiu-Jitsu between the ages of 6 and 12. I became the clubs youngest ever junior black belt at 10 years old. Unfortunately, I quit as friends, football and girls took over my young life LOL. During my teenage years I got involved in more than my fair share of street fights and took up boxing for a short while. After only 1 amateur bout I stopped that too. That was pretty much it until approximately 2 years ago I walked into Next Generation MMA in Liverpool, UK and began from scratch learning MMA on a casual basis.

I am now 26 years old, father of 3 young boys (aged 10, 7 and 4 years old) and a devoted husband to my beautiful wife. Over the next few months I intend to push my body and mind to the limits in order achieve the required skill level to fight at an amateur level in MMA. This will not be an easy feat as I will need to balance family, work, my website and training. In my head I have all this pretty much figured out, but the application may prove to be the tricky part.

I work full-time in a demanding job that requires me to work shifts. My shifts entail working days, lates and nights. Anyone that has worked shifts before will understand how exhausting that can be. When I am at home I try and spend all my spare time with my wife and my boys as my job keeps me away from them a lot. Then there is running the UK’s best MMA website MMAMount.com. Fortunately, for me I have a great team of writers that makes my job easy. You may wonder with all this going on when will I find time to train. This is a question posed by the wife almost on a daily basis. To me it is simple. Because I work shifts I get time with no kids and occasionally no wife so I will train then. Also, I tend to extend my working day by training just before work to minimise the impact on my family.

Being the sole bread-winner and having 3 growing boys in today’s poor financial climate is hard enough without the added costs of MMA training and MMA kit. In addition to that I plan to fight at featherweight (66kg/145lbs). This is going to take a colossal effort on my part because weight cutting is hard enough without doing it whilst working shifts! In order to help achieve my goals I have enlisted the help of a couple of sponsors:

USC Nutrition - who will be providing me with supplements to aid with training and cutting weight



UK Fightwear - who will be providing me with some equipment



Over the course of the coming months I will be documenting my trials and tribulations in these blogs. I hope you will follow me on my journey as I make the transition from writer to fighter.

You can follow me on Twitter @MMAMountSte

You can also follow my sponsors @USC_UK and @UKFW or visit them at www.uscnutrition.com and www.ukfightwear.com respectively.

This blog was written by Ste Passey from MMAmount.com