8 months in Pakistan

Mixed Martial Arts Pakistan will be adding a recurring blog by the owner of Shaheen MMA Academy and President of PAKMMA. If you read some of the older posts you will see that we used to have this personal blog of his experiences while traveling and training in Thailand. As things progressed we changed things up and have moved full circle again 🙂 Enjoy.

Hopefully this blog can become a regular part of the Mixed Martial Arts Pakistan website. It’s going to be a very personal account of the happenings and development of Shaheen Mixed Martial Arts Academy. It’s also going to be a bit of a rant regarding Martial Arts and Combat Sports in Pakistan in general so please forive me for the rambling nature of some of these blog posts. These are as much for me as they are for the readers of PAKMMA :).

So on to the post…

It’s been a full 6 months since I started Shaheen Mixed Martial Arts Academy. Actually more like 7 now. 7 months ago I was running all over the city of Lahore to find the materials I needed to make our boxing ring. Fast forward to today and our gym is now by the grace of God, looking beautiful. If one were to see the gym 7 months ago and see it now, the change it has gone through is amazing. I doubt there is a dojo or martial arts institute in Lahore or even Pakistan that is privately run that has everything one needs for proper combat sport training.

Although the facility of Shaheen Mixed Martial Arts Academy is a source of pride for myself and all my students it a sad statement regarding the sorry state of martial arts and combat sports in Pakistan in general. Yes, there are facilities run by WAPDA and Railway and other government departments that may have the required equipment for proper training such as mats, heavy bags or possibly a ring but the fact of the matter is, other than the departments teams, how common is it for private citizens of Pakistan to have regular access? I don’t think it is many although I could be wrong. For a small private dojo to be one of more well equipped facilities in the country means we have a long way to go before Pakistan can start churning out numerous world champions in combat sports. But I guess this can be a whole other topic that we can get into with another blog posting.

Before Shaheen MMA Academy was official I was conducting training out of my apartment. Now that’s an interesting story and I guess I will stick to that for this post.

I arrived in Pakistan from the States in December for the promotion of MMA and in fact ALL combat sports in Pakistan. After getting into Martial Arts I had a burning desire to see a Pakistani in the top levels of the fight game. When I mean top levels of the fight game I don’t mean the All Punjab Hopkaido Championship, or some obscure “World Championship” held in Kyrgyzstan. I mean the UFC, I mean K-1, I mean fighting in the top levels of Japan. I want to have Pakistani fighters to be up there with the top names of fighting. Known to all those who are truly educated about who the best fighters in the world today are. Sorry, they don’t include Jackie Chan or Jet Li, as good as their movies are.

So I arrived in December with the intent that I would be here for two months, set up a small gym, get some Martial Artists on board to teach their own disciplines and create an all rounded fighters. After the two month set up period I would go back to Thailand, continue with my own training and continue coordinating the Mixed Martial Arts Pakistan project from overseas. I thought I could get a karate guy, a wrestler, a judo player and a boxer all on board the MMA train and work together to produce a quality fighter. I thought anyone who saw how big MMA had gotten and how clear cut it was that MMA fighters were most probably the best fighters in the world of Combat SPORT (we are talking about sport not actual life and death combat) different martial arts styles would jump on board and want to work together, just like is happening in the developed world. But no, everyone (except for a few forward thinking people) was still adamant that their style was the “best.” So…not so easy as I had thought.

Well, I got a small apartment in Defense, had absolutely NO furniture. My living room had a 7 foot heavy bag and my bed room was covered in makeshift grappling mats. That was it. I lived in the “gym” for 8 months. I slept on the grappling mats next to my servants. If you don’t call this sacrifice for the sport than I don’t know what you can. Individuals who had contacted me via the website before I came to Pakistan were my first students. The ones who started out in that crappy apartment/gym are still with me now and are the ones whom I am assured are gonna stick with this for a long time. From there I started getting more students through word of mouth and after my two months were up I decided it was time to plant my roots and get a proper set up. I had realized that I was going to be here for the long haul. Thailand would have to wait. My MMA career would have to wait. I had to make to do with where I was and what I had. And that led me to the start of Shaheen Academy.

Man, it’s a longer story that I thought. More to come later.

Thanks for reading guys!

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