What to write in your first post??? Now I am part of this new bloging craze I am not sure what to start with!!

I think I will start with the obvious, a bit about myself. First off I will apologise for my rubbish grammer and spelling it aint my strong point!!

I am a 28 year old professional cage/mma fighter who also holds down a full time job. I am married to my lovely wife Jennie who puts up with my crap moods and the fact I am never at home. I have been training in Martial Arts of some sort for most of my life, I started in Tae-Kwon-Do when I was about 10 and then moved onto Kickboxing when I was about 15 but it wasn’t till I was 18 and met my future wife to be that I started training MMA and taking it more seriously!!

When I met my wife at college she was training at what she said was a Karate club, which I had no interest in at all, after 6 months of her nagging at me to come down to the club I finally caved in and said I would try a session out. I found that it was anything but Karate and that the club instructor (Phil Wright) had recently discovered MMA in the form of the UFC and had started playing around with grappling and the BJJ revolution! This new concept had me hooked and so started my lifelong obsession with MMA!

I trained with Phil for about 2 years when he was forced to close his gym, this led to me searching out several training options in order for me to improve my overall game. Over the next 8 years I spread my training out over an Olympic freestyle wrestling club, BJJ club, Thai boxing club, Amatuer Boxing gym, Team Quannum and Team Coliseum MMA gyms in order to give myself a good grounding in all aspects of training and fighting. I also made several trips abroad to the US and Japan to train with some of the best in the world most notably the Miletich camp!

I was about 21 when I first got the itch to step in the ring/cage and test my skills, so after a discussion with my coaches at the Coliseum (Aaron Chatfield and Danny Wallace) I decided I was ready to take that step. Having no Amatuer scene in UK MMA at the time I was forced to step straight in at pro taking a fight on a show in Cornwall called the Xtreme Fighting Championships. I won this fight in the 1st round via rear naked choke and so started the competition bug. Over the next 8 years I competed on shows all over the UK such as Ultimate Combat, XFC, Pride and Glory, Cage Warriors and King of the Cage UK. I have also been lucky enough to compete internationally on shows such as Bodog and the M1 Challenge the latter of which I am currently active in as the Team England Middleweight. I hold notable wins over Che Mills former Cage Rage champion, Peter Angreer German Top Team member, Raman Jarman Shooto veteran and Yusuke Masuda DEEP veteran. I am mostly known, though, for my epic 5 round battle with Dan Hardy for the Cage Warriors Welterweight title. The fight went to a split decision but unfortunately for me it wasn’t my night and Dan edged it! This fight has been classed as one of the greatest fights in UK MMA history and I was proud to be part of it!

So we are pretty much up to date. Like I said previously I am currently part of the M1 England team being coached by Aaron Chatfield and Dave Butlin. We have just defeated Team Spain to secure our place in the semi-finals which are to be held in Russia, September 26th where we face the Russian legion.

Signing off!

12 Gauge