Set inside Milpitas Health and Fitness Club, you will find Unlimited MMA. A gym that offers mixed martial arts, kickboxing and crossfit. Rudi Ott, the owner and head coach of Unlimited brings his intensive martial arts background to the fore front to teach his students to become strong and well respected fighters in the martial arts community.

We had the pleasure of witnessing a day of training at Unlimited. The class first started off with a crossfit circuit, to enhance the fighters’ cardiovascular endurance, build stamina, strength and explosive power, along with increasing speed, agility, balance, and coordination. After the crossfit circuit the students practiced light sparring with gear and progressed into full force, full contact sparring. Please keep in mind that all students that were there on that particular day were highly skilled and experienced fighters. Unlimited does offer classes for beginners, where sparring is not allowed, and from there the student would progress accordingly in their own training.

Unlimited MMA is known to build champions in the kickboxing arena as well as MMA. They have three amateur kickboxing champions and one MMA fighter currently competing in MMA and Kickboxing events.

Unlimited MMA offers, a great deal to their students, they learn discipline, conditioning, martial arts and competitive skills by having the opportunity to test their skills in the ring or cage.

Coach Rudi Ott
- World Champion Kickboxer
- 3-TIME NATIONAL AMATUER CHAMPION
- 3-TIME NATIONAL TEAM MEMBER
- IKF US PRO MIDDLEWEIGHT SAN SHOU CHAMPION
- ISKA US PRO SUPER MIDDLEWEIGHT SAN SHOU CHAMPION
- IKF INTERCONTENINTAL SAN SHOU CHAMPION
- IKF SAN SHOU MIDDLEWEIGHT WORLD CHAMPION

When did you open your gym?
In November 2005

How many students do you have?
Over 250 students and with crossfit around 350

What do you expect out of your students who fight?
I basically expect them to work hard and to fight with heart and passion.

I noticed you have a lot of amateur fighters that are winning titles on a consistent basis now, as a coach what is it that you are doing to help them achieve this?
I think as far as coaching at the gym, when I first opened I wanted to make sure our gym was going to be successful so I had to concentrate more on what makes a gym successful by getting multitudes and masses. Not everyone is going to be a fighter so you create classes that general public are going to enjoy but also be able to learn aspects of real fight training so through that process you can then start building them into the fight process so the first couple of years that was my focus. It was after that I started people in fight training and I started putting my energy into the fight training. The most important thing in any fight program or in any fighter or any coach is to believe in what you are doing then that confidence comes out in you. When you train your fighters and tell them this is going to work, then their confidence is going to come out of that. Fight gyms do not have a great difference in what they do. There are only so many different types of punches, different kicks and different types of submission that you can do. The difference is the energy you put into those individuals. So the first couple of years my energy was really based on growing the business and having a successful gym. Now I am at the place I can start putting more energy into my individual fighters and I think that within the last year its starting to show within my fighters, which is my challenge as a coach is be able to do all those things not just run a business and have a successful gym but to also have champion fighters. Not every coach and gym can do that, some gyms are very good having fight programs and they produce big fighters but they lack being able to train the ordinary person on how to condition themselves and how to train as a fighter and vise versa. There are gyms that have very good conditioning programs but have no fighters whatsoever. That’s a great challenge, how do you do both? And I think we have a great element within our program that allows for both of those programs.

I noticed that you have a background in Wu Shu, Kung Fu, San Shou, Internal Martial Arts and Kickboxing, is there anything else you want to do in martial arts?
I think no matter what you do within martial arts, martial arts is a physical expression of you internal expression of your internal manifestation, we all have that in us and we want to bring that out of ourselves. Creativity is in every human being; how we do we bring that out? I started off in traditional martial arts because that’s all that was out there at that time and then when I came back to martial arts at a later age that’s when I wanted to make it real and there’s no other way to make it real than to fight so through Wu Shu and traditional Kung Fu I found San Shou which is Chinese style kickboxing,….I fell in love with the sport mainly because San Shou meant free fighting. San Shou allows for throws, it allowed me to be dynamic within the fighting arena. Now in mixed martial arts, there’s even a greater expression of that.

At some point, my body is going to fail me and I’m not going to be able to punch and kick people with maximum intensity, I will be older. At that point my energy will start coming back in and I will have to go back to some of the internal martial arts I did before as far as Tai Chi and Qi Gong to keep myself strong and to keep that expression alive within myself.

What are the three things that makes your coaching different from everyone else?
Those are always hard questions because you don’t know what each coach brings. I think what I bring as a coach is passion for what I do, one, intensity… intensity in what you do, within that passion and then lastly, understanding….. is being understanding that every person is an individual and there is an individual process about bringing a fighter out in most people.

What’s the most difficult thing about being a coach?
It’s a thankless job at times. As a coach you are supposed to give and as people we want to feel like we’re giving to get it back but that’s not always true. Sometimes you give and there isn’t a reward for all that giving but you can’t stop doing it because of that. Its my duty as a coach to give those people as much as I can and get involved because that’s what’s going to make those people successful whether they are successful or not.

In the next five years where do you expect yourself to be in your coaching career?
I don’t look that far into the future. I focus my energy on the present to maximize the potential of things to come.

www.unlimitedmma.com