Typically, “Gym of the Year” is awarded to the fighting team that collectively puts together the best results over the course of a 12-month period.

Massive camps like American Top Team and Jackson-Wink MMA are always logical candidates just based on the sheer number of athletes who are racking up victories for the crew. In 2017, Team Alpha Male had a number of memorable moments, even if a few late stumbles offered a bit of a setback.

But for this year, MMAjunkie’s “Gym of the Year” award goes to a facility that was opened in late May, but already has served more than 40 percent of the UFC’s roster: the UFC Performance Institute.

“Going into this thing, we didn’t know how it would be received, but we’ve been hugely excited by the response,” UFC Performance Institute Vice President Dr. Duncan French told MMAjunkie. “We’ve only been open six months now, and so far the feedback and the experience of the fighters has been outstanding, so we’re really excited.”

Part of the UFC’s new multi-million dollar corporate campus in Las Vegas, the UFC Performance Institute – often referred to as “the P.I.” by staff members and UFC fighters alike – is visually stunning and boasts the most high-tech training and recovery equipment available to any MMA fighter. And best of all, it’s free to use for any athlete on the UFC roster. Just make your way to Las Vegas, and the facility is at your disposal.

“Every fighter comes with a different set of experiences and skills, and obviously the teams around them are all different,” French said. “Some of the big gyms have got lots of expertise – their own strength coaches, their own nutrition staff, their own physical therapists, etc. But there’s a majority of the roster that they’ve got an MMA coach, a striking coach and themselves, and that’s it. So, look, we try to plug the gaps and plug the holes in the portfolio of services that an athlete needs.

“It’s a very individualized and customized approach, but in working with their MMA coach, their head coach and the athlete, themselves, to try and really figure out how we can support the process, we feel we can really contribute, No. 1, in terms of objectivity and diagnostics but also just conversations, philosophical ideas on how we’re going to support this athlete to continue to develop and improve.”

The facility served as base camp for UFC lightweight champion Conor McGregor as he prepared for his historic boxing match with Floyd Mayweather. Upcoming UFC heavyweight title challenger Francis Ngannou relocated from France to Las Vegas to take advantage of the P.I. And perennial flyweight contender Joseph Benavidez has been utilizing the building’s state-of-the-art recovery tools while rehabbing from surgery.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Tours of the Performance Institute will yield sightings of any number of current UFC fighters, not to mention UFC Hall of Famer and current UFC Vice President of Athlete Development Forrest Griffin, who’s always on hand to lend some advice.

The UFC Performance Institute is receiving rave reviews among UFC fighters and potentially could assist not only the betterment of every fighter on the company’s roster, but of the sport itself.

“You walk through the front door of the Performance Institute, and our mission statement is right there on the first wall, and it starts with the evolution of the sport of MMA,” French said. “That is absolutely our mantra here. We all buy in to that, and we all feel that the Performance Institute connecting with the global community of MMA is going to advance the sport for the greater good of everyone.”

A non-traditional winner for a revolutionary facility: MMAjunkie’s 2017 “Gym of the Year.”