"I NEVER
PLANNED TO
END
UP HERE."
I grew up in remote Australia. In my early twenties I moved to Sydney, walked into a gym to train jiu jitsu, and the next class happened to be kickboxing. I did both back to back. That was it. I got a job as a personal trainer — the only job that let me train every session at the gym. My dedication got me noticed. The head coach made me the training partner for all his privates. That’s where my real education began.
I decided to move to Brazil. I stopped in Thailand for three months on the way. On my first day training I hurt myself badly. I was stuck on the sidelines for weeks. An old Thai coach saw me sitting there looking miserable and asked me if I was able to throw a punch on his pads without any pain in my ribs. I was able to! So, he said come back tomorrow. Five weeks later I had my first fight. I sold my ticket to Brazil and stayed in Thailand with a goal of having 10 fights before I left.
I punched them out over 2 years and then I left Thailand in 2010 and moved to Dubai, where I co-founded a gym with a training partner that I met in Thailand. And we spent a decade building fighters, working with some of the UAE’s highest profile clients, and continuing to develop our coaching. I never did make it to Brazil. But did manage to grapple enough and I currently hold a brown belt in Brazilian jiu jitsu under black belt Olavo Belo of Gracie Humaíta Dubai, and I have now been coaching striking for fifteen years.
WHY I BUILT STRIKING DECODED
After a decade of coaching beginners I started to notice something. Most people were being taught what to do — combinations, techniques, drills — without ever being taught why any of it works. They were copying movements they didn’t understand. And because they didn’t understand them, they couldn’t improve them.
It took me ten years to fully realise that the three dimensional world most beginners think they’re operating in when they strike is actually four dimensional. Balance, weight distribution, inertia, rotation — these are the forces that generate power and create the foundation everything else is built on. And nobody was teaching this to beginners.
The moment I started applying what I’d learned from over a decade of training — the attention to weight, balance and mechanics — to how I taught striking, everything changed. Beginners started having breakthroughs in single sessions that fighters spend a decade searching for.
WHAT I ACTUALLY
WANT FOR YOU
I want you to walk off the mat better than when you walked on. Not better at a combination. Better at understanding. Because once you understand the principle — once you feel it correctly even once — something shifts. You develop an internal sense of right and wrong that no coach can give you. You feel when it’s correct before anyone tells you. And once you feel that, you can never unfeel it.
I don’t teach combinations. I teach concepts. Learn the right kick correctly and you already understand the left kick — you just need to apply the same logic. That’s how real progress works.
I’m not building a platform for people who want to be told what to do. I’m building a community for intelligent, questioning beginners who understand that the answer to almost everything in striking is — it depends. People who want to understand why, not just what.
— JONNO