The UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) is like a modern day traveling circus of Mixed Martial Art Gladiators who wage blood sport each weekend in a different city around the world. To the uninitiated and veteran combat sport enthusiasts alike, MMA seems a barbaric and bloody degradation of modern sport.

Coming from the world of high school, college, and Olympic wrestling with its highly controlled violence (the use of joint damaging submission holds, strikes, kicks, and chokes are not allowed), I had lost my initial interest in MMA soon after its emergence in the 1980s. 

Once the age-old argument of who would win in a fight -- the judo, karate, boxing, or wrestling athlete -- was settled (wrestlers and jujitsu practitioners have the edge), the violence of MMA seemed unnecessary.

As the sport has grown worldwide and has begun recruiting the Olympic wrestlers I have come to know over the years, I have become an inadvertent practitioner in MMA performance training and nutritional support programs for fighters, because the sport desperately needs to modernize its approach to training. In many ways, mingling and working side-by-side with an international cadre of athletes and handlers at UFC and Bellator MMA events is not unlike my experience working with athletes over six Olympic Games, just a lot more bloody.

The difference is that the stakes are higher in terms of the health and well-being of MMA athletes. While I use to worry that my Olympic athletes, like Jackie Joyner Kersee and Flo Jo, might pull a hamstring on the track, now I worry my fighters could suffer a life-threatening head injury in the cage. For the last two years, our role is to be sure that Phase IV-sponsored MMA fighters are peaked, hardened, and ready for battle; that their weight cut is healthy and that they don't rely on live sparring, with all the accumulative damage to brains and bodies, to train their fitness, but instead get fit outside of the cage and bring that fitness to the fight. They don't fight to get fit, they get fit to fight.

This past weekend, the UFC visited Albuquerque, New Mexico, with a full card of bouts that included Phase IV-sponsored fighter and fan favorite, Scott Jorgensen, working his way back to another shot at the title. Scott won a unanimous decision a lot like the way his friend and training partner, newly-crowned Interim World Bantamweight Champion, Joe Warren did last month: on conditioning. With Joe and I in his corner Saturday night, Scott ground down his opponent's will with a blisteringly-paced wrestling attack that included 10 takedowns and overarching domination on the mat.

His opponent was rendered listless after the first two minutes of each of the three-minute rounds. When fatigue reduces our opponents to 60 percent of their effectiveness, our athletes are still at or above 80 percent and score big in the later rounds. Congratulations to Scott for a courageous fight and on coming back from some heavy hits to regain his composure and focus on this must-win bout!

You can read more about how we dropped Joe and Scott down a weight class and helped them get back on top.