Ryan Hall did a lot of impressive things Saturday night at UFC Sacramento, and made them look easy. He hit takedowns, hit sweeps, landed hard left punches, and dropped Darren Elkins three times in the first two rounds.

The latter two were well-timed and placed left hands to the head. The first knockdown for Hall came from a spinning high kick.

Given that the elite Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu competitor is known for his ground prowess, his effective and powerful striking against Elkins might have surprised many. To be fair, Hall outscoring opponents on the feet isn’t exactly new, though he certainly goes about it with a different tempo and angles not used by many others.

Still, knocking down one of the most well-conditioned and tough competitors at featherweight three times in a single fight, and on the strength of many flamboyantly technical spinning kicks no less, was impressive enough to surprise just about any onlooker. If it weren’t for what I witnessed firsthand this past February at Hall’s 50/50 Martial Arts Academy, I might have been more shocked myself.

View photos Ryan Hall (L) kicks Darren Elkins during a featherweight mixed martial arts fight at UFC Fight Night in Sacramento, Calif., Saturday, July 13, 2019. Hall won by unanimous decision. (AP) More

Hall: ‘I don’t take vacations’

When I spoke with Hall last September, looking ahead to his December 2018 fight with BJ Penn, he detailed his constant, busy approach to training. Hall insisted that he didn’t fight for the money — he and his fellow black-belt wife Jenn’s academy in Falls Church, Virginia, was the source of their regular income — but simply because he has “the skill and desire to do it.”

So, Hall was intent on taking the time between fights to actually add to his skill set. Then, after becoming a better, more well-rounded martial artist and fighter, he looked to book fights and plan training camps, during which specific tactics could be developed for an opponent and his timing and conditioning could get sharpened.

The two years between his win over Gray Maynard in 2016 and his engagement with Penn in late 2018 was certainly more time than Hall had planned for or wanted — that lay-off length was due to people turning down fights he’d accepted, Hall said — but at the very least he was confident that the world would certainly see an improved fighter given that he’d been working on himself almost nonstop for several years behind the scenes.

Hall went on to quickly submit the legendary Penn. Six weeks later, I traveled with my friend and Foundation Chicago team member Ramy Daoud to train at the Hall’s 50/50 academy and we witnessed just how serious the TUF winner is about this whole no offseason thing.

What we found was a man with a system and team dedicated to breaking down fighting to its elements, moves down to their minutiae, and then drilling them ceaselessly. We caught a glimpse of the ways Hall doesn’t let anything stand in the way of his training – not running a gym and teaching there daily, not his growing family including a newborn baby, not even injuries and health concerns. We saw just how seriously Hall takes his training and how he uses every opportunity to train.

Shortly before we arrived in the Metro D.C. area to train at 50/50, Hall had made a training trip to work with elite kickboxer Raymond Daniels. While we were there several pros also visited Hall, as did 2020 Olympic hopefuls and members of the national Canadian wrestling team twin brothers Thomas and Phillip Barreiro.

Hall spent hours training with them all, drilling and asking questions like a student. The week after we were set to leave Hall’s friend, coach and former three-time world title-challenger Kenny Florian visited and conducted his own seminar, giving Ryan another opportunity to learn.

Mere weeks after scoring the biggest win of his career, and with no subsequent bout yet signed, Hall was already full-swing back in training when we arrived in mid-February. As far as we could tell, he’d been in that mode for some time already.

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