Stephan: I’m here today with my friend,Adam Singer, who runs The HardCore Gym in Athens, Georgia.  He is probably best known for being Forrest Griffin’s MMA coach during the formative years of Forrest’s career. He’s also a jiu-jitsu black belt and has trained tons of fighters.

 

I’m really looking forward to picking his brain about MMA and jiu-jitsu and the relationship between these things. He’s an outspoken guy, so I’m sure we’ll have a good conversation. So thanks for talking to us today, Adam.

 

Adam: Hi. It’s a pleasure to be here.

 

Stephan: So, you're driving around town as we do this interview?

 

Adam: It's hard for me to find any place where I’m not going to be bothered by people. And so I figured, I’ve got the air-conditioner on in the car and I’m just going to drive around. We have what is called “The Loop”. It’s about 10 miles long and I’m just going to drive around “The Loop” with cruise control on and talk to you.

 

Stephan:  Okay. Well, hopefully we don’t have the first live car crash on a podcast. I’m all about firsts but that’s one I’d prefer to avoid.

 

Adam: That'd be a 'snuff-cast?'

 

Stephan:  Yeah, the snuff-cast. I think that might be a very, very niche thing...

 

Before we get too heavily into this, tell us a little about about your background in martial arts, how you got started and where you’re at now.

 

Adam: Sure. Yeah. I took traditional martial arts as a kid, tae kwon do, karate, and then I wrestled in high school and wrestled a little in the navy.

 

And as soon as I saw the first UFC in ‘93, I immediately fell in love with it. I knew that that was what I wanted to do. I came down to Georgia to go to engineering school, and my brother followed me down here and we just started getting more involved in the martial arts. We got really into Jeet Kune Do for a long time. We travelled to California as much as we could and did a lot of seminars. The good thing about the Jeet Kune Do community in the early ‘90’s was they were big into Brazilian jiu-jitsu as well.

 

Stephan:  They were merely an adopter of BJJ for sure. That and Shootwrestling as well...

 

Adam: Right. Well, there were Ralph Faulkner and Paul Vunak. Paul was the first Jeet Kune Do person we trained with - we used to train in his house. He understood immediately when he saw the Gracie’s how much they had to offer. There are stories that he actually took the Gracie challenge and lost, but never ended up in any of the videotapes. But he encouraged all the students to dive into jiu-jitsu and we did that.

 

And after a few years with Paul Vunak, we started training with Matt Thornton, who runs the Straight Blast Gym. Matt is incredibly important to me, an important figure in my growth in the martial arts.

 

We were doing jiu-jitsu and we opened the gym. We started at the university and then we opened a gym up off the campus probably 12 years ago, maybe a little more, and now the Hard Core Gym has grown into what it is today.

 

Stephan:  And when you say “we”, that’s you and your brother?

 

Adam: Right. Most people don’t separate Rory and I. I’m the older one. I am the one that never fought in the UFC. My younger brother fought in the UFC and was on TUF. So whenever I say “we”, I’m speaking of myself and Rory. Even when I say “I”, I’m usually speaking about myself and Rory.

 

Stephan:  It’s the royal “I”.

 

Adam: The Singer Brothers, that’s how we’re known.

 

Stephan:  Perfect. So maybe tell us a little bit about some of the fighters that you guys have trained and have come up through you guys. Obviously, there’s Forrest Griffin, he’s probably the biggest name, right?

 

Adam: Right, When we first started to doing this, Rory and Forrest came to the conclusion one afternoon that they wanted to fight. And I really had no interest in fighting, so I said, alright, '