Cardio is mostly mental. I’ve believed this for years but I’m finally able to articulate why.
Watch some of the best wrestlers in the world right now. Bo Bassett. Mitchell Messenbrink. Jax Forrest. These guys look like they have unlimited gas. People assume it’s some elite VO2 max, some superior aerobic engine. That’s not what’s happening.
Pay attention to how they move. They’re playing.
Every shot isn’t life or death. Every scramble is an opportunity rather than a life or death crisis. They attack from bad positions. They back out and reset without hesitation if the feeling isn’t there. There’s a looseness to everything they do that looks almost casual, but on the other side of that casual posture is devastating effectiveness.
That looseness isn’t a technique quirk. It’s a performance state. It’s the reason their cardio looks supernatural.
Here’s what I think is actually going on:
Tightness is metabolically expensive. When you’re stressed aka afraid, afraid of giving up position, afraid of losing, afraid of looking bad, your body begins to brace for impact. Muscles that shouldn’t be working are working overtime. Your breathing changes. Your movement loses fluidity. Every action costs more than it should. You’re not gassing because your lungs are small. You’re gassing because fear has a fuel cost.
The playful athlete doesn’t have that overhead. Their nervous system isn’t running a threat response in the background. This makes movement much cheaper. It makes decisions come faster. They can sustain a pace that looks impossible because for them, it actually is easier.
This is why you can’t just coach someone to “attack more.” Coaches can tell their guys to go out and attack. That’s good solid advice. But if the athlete isn’t in a playful state, if they’re tight, if every offensive sequence feels like a high stakes gamble, the instruction won’t translate. The body can’t cooperate. The mind will second guess everything they do. They’ll gas early with no idea as to why.
The fighters that seem to have infinite endurance have trained themselves, or were born with a different relationship to competition. They reduce competition from a high stakes battle to a simple game.
I’ve watched this in myself for years doing jiu jitsu and boxing. The only time I get tired is when I leave that state. When I’m loose, playing, experimenting, being creative, my energy expenditure is different. I do things I didn’t know I could do. Time moves differently. The round ends and I’m surprised it’s over. The moment I get tight, whether it’s ego, whether it’s fear, bad position, someone catching me off guard, my gas disappears almost immediately.
That’s not a coincidence. That’s the mechanism.
And here’s where it gets deeper: some athletes have to almost die to find that state. You’ve seen it in fights. A guy gets badly hurt, nearly finished, he survives and then something releases. The fear burns off. The body stops bracing. And suddenly the guy who looked dead comes back to life and starts performing at a level he couldn’t access before getting dropped.
That state was available the whole time. He didn’t need to get hurt to find it. He just needed to let go of what was costing him.
The best athletes don’t need the near death experience. They walk out already there.
Ali boxed like Ali talked, light, taunting, dancing, impossible to hold. Tyson boxed like Tyson looked, coiled, explosive, total predator. The ring doesn’t create a new person. It reveals the one that’s already there.
Which means the real question isn’t “how do I build more cardio.” It’s “who am I when I compete, and is that person loose enough to play?”
The future of grappling and combat sports belongs to the athletes who figured out play is the highest performance state. Not getting hyped up. Not being ultra aggression. Not discipline grinding through pain.
Play. Loose. Passionate. Present.
Train your nervous system to live there and your “cardio” will take care of itself.
