Inside Gym – Ultimate Martial Arts

Ultimate Martial Arts started out as a small gym built into the basement of a family home. Twenty years on, it has eight branches around the Toronto area and is a very successful franchise. Gary Goodridge represented the team in his PRIDE and K-1 years and now ‘Bazooka’ Joe Valtellini is doing the same in GLORY.

Head coach Paul Minhas took up martial arts training as a youngster in the 1970s because he was being picked on by other kids in the neighbourhood. “I used to have a turban because I’m Sikh originally and in the 1970s in Toronto that wasn’t as common as it is now,” he recalls. “Things were a little more difficult back then. So I turned to the martial arts for self-defence.”

He could never have known how far that quest for self-confidence would take him. Minhas went through a lot of styles - “karate, kung fu, jiu jitsu, judo, all of those” - but it was kickboxing and Muay Thai which became the core focus of his attention. Minhas found himself blown away when he first encountered leg-kicks and realized their effectiveness. The technique forms the bedrock of the UMA style.

“I truly believe in the low kick. Hands alone will get you so far, but a boxer will beat you. But if you become a specialist in the low kick you can beat a high-level boxer even. It totally changes the game. It’s all about footwork and positioning,” he says, the enthusiasm clear in his voice.

“People say there is just a low kick but there’s like, nine different variations of low kick to the outside leg alone. Variations of power, placement and hip-rotation. The way I teach them, there are different kicks because there are different points of attack and different hip rotations you can do. You’ll have A,B,C for a level on the leg, for example, and then 1,2,3 for degree of hip rotation.

“So you have all these variations, giving you quick kicks for the start of the fight and the middle of combinations, heavy ones for when you’ve got your distance and timing down, and so on. That’s why we classify them, just to break it down more.

“Our light sparring sessions are harder than some teams’ hard sparring sessions, seriously. We have guys limping out of here all the time. But we also concentrate a lot on protecting the head, we keep a very tight head guard and our guys don’t get hit clean in the head very often at all.”

Minhas’ passion for the low kick led directly to him picking up his first big-name fighter as a coach. Gary Goodridge had established a reputation for huge power and brutal finishes in the Vale Tudo and Mixed Martial Arts world. Signed to Japanese organizations PRIDE FC and K-1, he was facing the world’s best heavyweights and wanted to add to his game.

“He came to me and wanted training. He had a K-1 fight lined up with Musashi. It was funny because I had played as Gary on the K-1 videogame and I always wanted to go to Japan,” Minhas explains.

“When he came to us he had never done low kicks, he was the Canadian heavyweight boxing champion. I was 160lbs and he was like 300lbs. We sparred and I stopped him with low kicks and after that he was like ‘Wow, if someone this size can stop me with low kicks then I need to learn this.’ So we evolved the style to look more for a finish.

A young Joe Valtellini would cross paths with Goodridge when he wandered into Minhas’ gym in 2004. By that stage Goodridge wasn’t setting the best example for young fighters to look up to though, as he was taking multiple fights on short notice and putting financial gain before personal health. Minhas tried deterring him but to no avail, and these days Goodridge is paying the price physically.

“Joe Valtellini came to the gym around the age of 19, just as Gary was starting to slide. Gary was taking a lot of fights and taking a lot of them on short notice - he would fight Jerome Le Banner on a few days’ notice, he’d take Fedor Emelianeko on six days’ notice,” Minhas sighs.

“That’s not the way I like to do things and I didn’t agree but I would end up standing beside him anyway. But I would say to him ‘This isn’t technical fighting any more, you’re just going in there to brawl.’ The last fight we did together was when he faced Pat Barry, when Barry was under Ernesto Hoost, and got a really big bad cut. That was in 2007.”

For a good coach, all things are a learning experience. No fighter of Minhas’ would ever again be allowed to put himself through such a punishing and self-detrimental schedule. While he has some regrets about the experience, overall the time with Goodridge was when Minhas felt himself really blossom as a martial arts instructor.

“It all came from when I was around K-1 in Japan with Gary. I was around all these fighters and coaches and I was just watching and listening all the time, writing notes constantly. Keeping what works and throwing away what did not. You’re never an expert but you can always get better,” he says.

“Coaches like Thom Harinck of Chakuriki, I idolized him. When I first went to Japan and he was there with Peter Aerts that was one of the best moments of my life. And all I could say was ‘Hi!’ ha! He is one of the godfathers of this thing. He started Peter Aerts out, Badr Hari too.

“And Cor Hemmers is amazing as a coach as well. Lucien Carbin too, I met him one time in Amsterdam and trained at his gym that was good. And sometimes you also learn from coaches what not to do, because you’ll see things that express them as a coach which isn’t necessarily how you express yourself as a coach.

“Japan taught me a lot. It exposed me to a lot of high-level fighters and coaches at a young age. It really helped me understand that our technique can work at this level. Back home we travelled a lot to get fights and usually our guys would have a lot less experience, so our technique had to be a lot better.”

Better technique doesn’t necessarily mean complicated though. Minhas is a fan of keeping things simple. He does four training sessions a week with the fight team, plus one-to-one sessions, and the fighters do one day a week with the strength and conditioning coach.

“We practice very simple training really, nothing very spectacular. We work a lot of basics and a lot of defence. I try to keep them thinking and keep them focused by giving them things to work on without giving them too much time to ask questions about it,” Minhas reveals.

“They have to get on it and start working it, which means they learn how to process things quick. You can give guys like Joe Valtellini and Troy Sheridan (winner of national and international titles) something and they will pick up on right away.”

Minhas has twenty years’ experience as a coach now but he is an eternal student, always looking to learn and very careful not to fall into complacency. He feels revitalized by Valtellini’s presence in the GLORY ranks as once again he is around the high-level coaches and international fighters who first inspired him.

“GLORY is the closest thing to PRIDE FC I’ve ever experienced,” he says. “It feels like an organization which has fighters and fighting arts at the centre of it, it’s not just a money-making machine. It’s a great thing, all the best fighters and teams are here, and I love it.

“I started at 1993 in the basement of my father’s home and in 1994 opened my first location. Now we have eight. But It’s not all about making money. Money comes and goes. We are all of us here to do something with our lives and that has to be about more than money.

“We are here to contribute and keep building, to inspire people and to make people’s lives better. Originally it was negativity that brought me to the martial arts, some of those early days were a nightmare. But now, after many years, it has turned out that I’ve actually lived a dream.”