It’s 6 a.m. on a Monday, and mother-son duo Yiwikai and Rashaad Thomas have already been training for an hour. Now they’re sparring on jiu jitsu mats at Syndicate Mixed Martial Arts, along with the rest of their cohorts: attorneys, housewives and social workers.
It’s all part of a new-to-Vegas program called Wimp 2 Warrior. Created in Australia by coach Richie Cranny, the course trains normal people in MMA for six months. At the end, they fight. W2W was televised as a reality show in Australia and has garnered the attention of UFC greats locally. Conor McGregor’s coach John Kavanagh, who leads W2W in the U.K., recently guest coached in Vegas.
“My goal was to demonstrate what MMA had to offer the average [person] and break down the negative misconceptions surrounding our sport,” Cranny emails from Australia. “I’ve seen firsthand over the past 25 years as a coach what martial arts can give to people and how empowering it can be.”
It has certainly worked wonders for the inaugural Las Vegas class. “From all these months and training and hard work, I kind of feel like a little beast,” Rashaad says. Since April, the group has followed a strict regimen of 90-minute training sessions every weekday. His mom has lost 30 pounds and feels stronger, physically and mentally. She plans to continue training after the mid-September fight, just because she loves it so much.
Wimp 2 Warrior Las Vegas head coach and pro MMA fighter Jessy Clark (aka Jessy Jess) sounds proud of her students. “They’ve all grown so much,” she says. “Every single one of them looks like a different person.” Clark found her own transformation through MMA, using it to work through anger and addiction issues. “There’s something about this controlled level of violence that really centers me.”
