This post is by new Bloody Elbow contributor Jen Flannery. Jen is a brown belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu under Ryan Hall and the head coach of the Fifty/50 Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Academy's women team. She is also an accomplish competitor on the international grappling circuit.

Recently, I read an article discussing the need or inevitability for female MMA fighters to train with males. (Female MMA fighters training with Men) I find the fact that the question, regarding who is better training for women, still gets posed a bit silly. Why? In my mind, this is no question at all.

In a perfect world, of course women who want to compete against women would only train with women. Why? It's simple. Physiologically this would give them the practice closest to what they will face on the mat, in the ring, or inside the cage.

We don't see female soccer players or basketball players practicing with or against male teams as their primary means of preparation, so why do we see females training with males in the combat sports?

Because we often have no other choice due to the number of women in the sport we chose.

When given the option to train with men or not train at all, all of these athletes (myself included) would much rather train with men. As combat athletes, our primary need to improve our skills is not for good coaches but rather for good training partners. And as anyone who has been in a wrestling room, MMA school, BJJ Academy, or Judo club knows , one of the first things you do when you step onto the mats is scout out your preferred training partners for the day.

How do we evaluate our best training partners if we want to have the best practice we can?

In my opinion, there should be no difference whether you are of the male or female persuasion - provided you train to be the best you that you can be. For example, I evaluate my options based on a number of items: people close to my size, people close to my skill, people who know how to train properly, those who are able to give adequate feedback if I need help with something or to notice if I make a mistake, people a little ahead of me to make me push myself to catch up, those a little below me on which to practice the pieces of my game that I'm working on, and of course those individuals who can give me a hard competitive round that will resemble what I will face in competition. And my number one rule of thumb is to stay away from anyone deemed too dangerous. After six major surgeries due to training/competition injuries; I don't play around with that.

Since we don't live in a perfect world where a female has all of these options rolled into female training partners, we simply run an internal algorithm to help us decide who best fits the bill (or our coach does).

If we are lucky enough to train in a place where females fit any or all of these descriptions, we will climb to the top faster than those who don't. All else being equal that is. Equal coaching, equal determination, equal work ethic, equal physical abilities, equal mental abilities, equal opportunities. Ah, but I forgot something, we live in a little place called reality, where there is no such thing as all else being equal. But should that ever occur, if we had the equivalent of the Olympic training center for BJJ or MMA, no one would be discussing the benefits of training with males or females for competition against females. The answer is much too obvious to warrant discussion.

As a woman, if your primary goal is self-defense, then likely training with women isn't as necessary for you, except to make it easier to execute techniques in the learning stages (although I would postulate that it takes literally years and years of training to get to the point where you can reliably beat your male training partners for real, and even then it would only be possible against those significantly smaller and/or at least two belt levels below you in skill). But if your primary goal is to be a combat athlete competing against women, it makes the most sense to do as much or all of your training with women as possible.

Female combat athletes frequently try to downplay this need, often because they don't have access to it. This reasoning makes perfect sense. Fighting is more mental than physical and when you walk onto the competition stage, be it a mat, a ring, or cage, it is important to believe that you have the best training situation possible to prepare you to win. This is important so that you don't second guess yourself. Because doubt is a "fighter's" worst enemy. And belief is one's most powerful asset.

Besides, for right now, almost all of us are in the same boat lacking training partners.

But the times, they are a changin'. And some women are going to come out ahead because of it.