Respect and Devotion: Interview with Ivan Salaverry

August 11, 2008 | in Fitness | 0 Comments

UFC veteran and all-around good guy Ivan Salaverry talks about fitness, mixed martial arts, training and managing a busy schedule.

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Ivan Salaverry has been a long-standing fan-favorite mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter. In a sport full of glowering monsters, Ivan is all charm and smiles—frequently celebrating victories by blowing kisses to the audience and performing a cartwheel, or even clicking his heels together like giant pugilistic leprechaun. An exciting, strategic fighter, he picks apart his competition with his striking and submission wrestling—not in a panicked flurry, but methodically and on his own terms.

I was disappointed to learn of his recent retirement, but knew he had also opened a brand new gym in Seattle and was taking students. If anyone would make a perfect MMA instructor, it would be Ivan Salaverry. I was lucky enough to get a moment to speak with him about his philosophy, his experience and balancing his fitness, family and athletic business life.

Interview

Hella Sound: I've read the bio on your site as well as other interviews, and my first question is how does a nice guy like you get in a sport like MMA?
Ivan Salaverry: (laughs). Wow. Well, slowly. I've been doing martial arts—western style martial arts, like wrestling—and from there I went over to jiu jitsu. From jiu jitsu I went over to MMA through AMC and started my career from there. Once I got to see what MMA was all about in the early 90s I just fell in love with it. Watching Royce Gracie was an amazing situation for me.

HS: The whole "smaller man crushing the larger man" thing was, I think a big draw early on…
IS: Well, and doing it through wonderful technique. People thought fighting was brutal, and you had to do either flying aerial kicks or doing the… the martial arts was thought of as holistic instead of realistic. And it turned out that it was the absolute opposite. You had to be technical and athletic, and you had to have a big heart to do it. It definitely called to me.

HS: I know you were involved with Team Punishment for a while; what trainers and gyms have you been involved with over time?
IS: I've been very fortunate that I landed early in my career with a bunch of guys that were world caliber, and we trained together as young men and through our careers. I started out with Josh Barnett, Jeff Monson and Dennis Hallman, and they're all high, high-caliber athletes. A bunch of other guys from there that we just chiseled our steel with, and I was just fortunate for those guys to become who I am.

Later on through my career I attached myself with Maurice Smith, Bob Sapp, and through that also Tito Ortiz. And Tito Ortiz…he's a stud, man. He's got his things together. Most people when they first see him think he's brash and dramatic, but he's not. He's really a cool guy, and he's someone who's very into the sport and always tries to innovate the sport in many capacities—not only athletically. Throughout my career he's helped me out trying to find sponsors, trying to push me in getting camps together, so he's been a really, really good guy to me.

HS: That's awesome. I think the persona he shows most fans is probably ultimately part of the business of hyping a fight.
IS: He's told me that so many times. "You've gotta be a little more boisterous" or something to that effect. And I'm like "no, bro, that ain't me." He's like "you gotta bring in the game and give them a show…" I guess in one capacity, yes, but I couldn't force myself to be that guy. Tito has that capability and that talent, and I don't. My hat's off to him in that capacity. He is who he is because he's put out that persona, and challenged people with that persona, and won through that persona; but he's really not a bad guy whatsoever. He's a sweetheart. He's truly a cool guy.

HS: That's awesome.
IS: Don't tell nobody that! (laughs)

HS: (laughs) So how's your gym going?
IS: Fabulous—I should have done it years ago. It's a great situation. It's a gym I started out about 2 years ago in the Seattle area. We started out small, and now we have about 170 students. So it's really, really nice. My wife's happy as hell, so…

HS: (laughs) Right!
IS: …so it's going really well. We have a nice program of boxing and kickboxing and wrestling and submission wrestling, and also MMA guys, so it's good.

HS: I was going to ask you, as far as submission wrestling, is it a hybrid approach instead of formal jiu jitsu? Or is it catch wrestling-based? Or…?
IS: Well, the thing about it is I came out of all those. I came out of a jiu jitsu background from Carlson Gracie with Marcelo Alonso. Then I came out of the pancrase style with AMC Matt Hume. Me and Josh have been grappling forever, it definitely gets influenced by the catch wrestling and the old Japanese pro wrestling style. Yeah, it definitely is a hybrid style, but I do read up on the old school judo moves, I always try to keep up with different submission stuff. I love Eddie Bravo. Eddie Bravo to me is a genius—a flexible genius for that matter. I think the moment you start getting stagnant in your game is when you start not learning. That's the key thing. I also believe that things come in trends—someone does them, then everyone else starts to do them, then it dies out and something else pops up. It's almost like fashion (laughs).

HS: (laughs) I think it's a trip that guys like Abraham Lincoln were competing in that style of wrestling—catch wrestling—historically.
IS: People don't realize that there's a lot of history behind American wrestling, and it's not just collegiate or freestyle greco—there's a lot of submission wrestling and catch wrestling. And not only that, but throughout the world, truly. It's been going a lot longer than people think. And going well, strong and vibrant. The ancient Greeks, Persians, Babylonians, Egyptians, MMA, pankration has been going on for a long time.

HS: It's cool that it's surfaced recently in American culture as a big sport, too. As a fan of the sport, I feel like all the faders are being turned up at the same time: fighters' technical levels are going up, their conditioning is going up, their grappling ability is going up, striking…is it overwhelming as an competitive athlete?
IS: Well, it is for me now… (laughs)

HS: (laughs)
IS: At 37 it became that way for me. When we started it was sort of a brand new thing—a brand new page of new stuff. But guys now have grown up on UFC-style fights and PRIDE and old K1. Kids, when they were 8 years old, 10 years old, watching in '93, watching Royce Gracie, how old are they now? 20-something? 24? 25? Those are the kids that have grown up in MMA now. So they have a library of UFCs and PRIDEs, they have a library of Abu Dhabis, they have all kinds of technology from the internet and YouTube to help them out. They have a huge library of techniques out there to help them out. And I think it's wonderful because that's part of it—you should never stop learning and doing more and better for the sport.

HS: You say Eddie Bravo, and looking up his techniques like "the twister" is so easy to do now with YouTube. I saw one where you and he were doing a session together.
IS: I try to bring him up (to the gym) as much as I can. The thing about it, he's the "small man" style, you know what I mean? He brings out a unique way to look at things that people's traditions…the Brazilians traditionally look at as "this is the way you're supposed to do it, and that's the only way". He's innovated quite a few positions into great styles of grappling. And fighting. Look at it right now—there's a bunch of guys in the UFC using the rubber guard.

HS: Yup.
IS: A bunch. You bring that flexible leg up and you're able to punch without getting punched. He's very innovative, and I think he doesn't get as much credit as he deserves.

HS: I think he gets a lot of props from Joe Rogan, and that's a help, but a lot of people might not necessarily know what's happening. But to Joe Rogan's credit…
IS: Eddie Bravo has influence all across—look at Aoki, the top level in his weight category in Japan. Look at anybody that's out there, throwing up the leg over the shoulder, is influenced by the rubber guard style. Before that the rubber guard was not really used; maybe the high guard to a certain extent. But Eddie Bravo…if you watch his videos he's got a series of submissions off his rubber guard, off his twister, off his spider web. All kinds of stuff. He's a great guy.

HS: In terms of cardio, is running a standard part of a fighter's regimen? How many miles do fighters generally log in a week?
IS: It all depends on the fighter. It all depends on the fighter. For me, it was a situation where I used to do like 3 miles… Because it's Seattle, it rains so friggen much so we run on the treadmill a lot. I used to do a lot of treadmilling with Maurice Smith; we used to go to the Sports Institute and basically do sprints and long distance and intervals and all kinds of things off the treadmill. Little by little as I got older I had to push that down a little bit into different ways of running because my hips and knees. I had to tone it down a little bit, so I started using bands. That helped me a lot. I would do sprint runs and different types of runs with the bands in the wrestling room.

You have to run. Running is…come on bro, you have to do it. To bring up your cardiovascular, you have to bring it up.

HS: Has training fighters and owning a gym cut into your own fitness? How is balancing fatherhood, business and fitness?
IS: It's a balance game, really. Now that I'm not in competitive mode, it definitely has cut back. It's not as intense. But I do have to maintain, especially to keep up with the guys in the gym. It's different. It's a maintenance workout more than it is for peak performance at a competition. My game is to balance everything—being a father, being a business owner, being able to coach different sports in my gym itself. You gotta juggle (laughs).

HS: (laughs) From the marathoners and ultrarunners I talk to, to you guys, it's the same story. Finding the time to train, you just gotta do it.
IS: You gotta grab onto whatever help you can get. Other fighters, your family, just make sure that you keep on doing it and doing it well.

HS: One last question: I read in an interview that you sometimes look to unusual sources for new moves—like catch wrestling and japanese pro-wrestling. What's the craziest thing you guys do in the gym that might some day show up in the cage?
IS: (laughs) Well, one of my submissions—the figure 4 bodylock that I did with Fryklund…

HS: Yup!
IS: …it's stuff that Josh and I used to mess around with in the gym. All kinds of pro wrestling moves and catch wrestling moves. We'd play and have fun. We'd be grappling and…he's a big dude! So he'd kind of play with Dennis and I and other guys in the gym. We'd do double dragons and all kinds of pro wrestling moves, and we'd throw each other. Out of there we'd think "oh yeah, these can be used!" Flying leglocks, all kinds of different moves caught into our arsenal of submissions that traditionally we were already put into the armbar and the triangle—things of that nature. We started using other stuff that was really nice that we incorporated. It just caught on from there. And really, it was just playing and having a good time.

HS: (laughs) Poor Tony Fryklund… Two of my favorite highlight shots are you doing the triangle on him, and Anderson Silva knocking him out with that upward elbow…
IS: Elbow, yeah. Poor guy, man (laughs).