Zari
Yesterday was day 1 of training camp for my sister Sade's upcoming fight vs Billie Morgan at Combat Queens Rivals 1. For the first part of this camp, we really want to work on combating the "Snyder Style" of fighting; which is, from my and my father Baba's analysis, fighting in explosive bursts. Ashley Snyder herself fights like a freight train, lays off for a few moments to give her opponents a false sense of security, and then reintroduces the pace. While technique is the most important part of their success, they train their fighters to overwhelm and overpower their opponents.
Yesterday in training camp, Baba paired Sade with Irene Aldana, Keihana Vogue, Ilia Topuria, Jovana, oh and ANDERSON BLOODY SILVA for training sessions.
Keihana's wrestling and her fast pace made her an ideal training partner for this juncture of the camp. she's good to have around; her infectious energy makes every hour in the factory more entertaining. her jiu-jitsu, though, is her highlight. We needed both a decorated and skilled grappler to push Sade to her limits in scrambles and defensive scenarios, and Kei delivered.
Sade will be the naturally smaller fighter in there come fight night, so we needed to bring in the big girls, too. Bantamweights. Featherweights.
Irene was a completely different problem.
Where Kei wanted to drag Sade into chaos and make every transition a race, Irene was much more patient. She spent a lot of the session making Sade work at long range, forcing her to deal with that tall frame, the jab, the right hand behind it, and those horrible little intercepting shots whenever Sade tried to close distance too eagerly.
That was important because Billie (if she's intelligent) isn't somebody we expect to just stand directly in front of Sade and have a firefight for twenty-five minutes. There are going to be moments where Sade has to manufacture her own openings without getting frustrated. Irene was brilliant for that.
Baba kept shouting at Sade to stop chasing. "Make her come back to you." Every time Sade got impatient, Irene would punish her for it. Every. Single. Time. By the end, you could actually see Sade beginning to understand what Baba wanted. Instead of following Irene around, she started cutting the cage, touching the body, taking little half-steps backwards to tempt Irene into answering, then firing off the response.
That is probably the biggest thing we're focusing on when we talk about fighting the Snyder Style. You cannot allow yourself to become emotionally attached to their pace. They WANT you reacting. They want you thinking, "Okay, she's slowed down now." Then suddenly you're eating six punches, getting driven into the fence, somebody is attacking your hips, you're fighting hands, you've got a knee coming up the middle, and you're wondering where the hell all of this came from. You have to remain disciplined during the quiet moments.
Then came Jovana. And if the goal was to make Sade miserable, Baba succeeded spectacularly. Jovana knows Sade already. They have fought before, so there was no introductory feeling-out process between them. No polite technical sparring. Jovana knows how Sade moves, Sade knows where Jovana is dangerous, and both of them are competitive enough that "light work" starts becoming noticeably less light after about thirty seconds.
That familiarity was exactly why we wanted her here.
Billie Morgan is 5'6". Sade is 5'2".
That four-inch difference becomes much more significant when the taller woman isn't trying to stay at range.
Billie wants to get her hands on you.
She is aggressive, physically strong, willing to crash through strikes to initiate contact, and once she gets underneath somebody's centre of gravity, she's looking to put them through the floor. She doesn't wrestle exclusively for control. She wrestles to create impact. Slams, mat returns, hard finishes from the body lock. Then she follows you down and starts hitting you. That is the part of Billie's game that I think people still underestimate. She swings hard. She pressures. She likes ugly exchanges. She'll bite down on the mouthpiece and turn a technically clean fight into something horrible if she thinks that benefits her. So Baba made Sade live there.
Jovana spent entire rounds forcing her backwards, making Sade work exclusively off the backfoot. It became less about "winning" the round and more about making Sade solve the same problem repeatedly while tired. But Jovana and Sade have great chemistry together and Jovana knows exactly how to push Sade into an uncomfortable place. Sade knows how to work her way out of that place, and with that we have a great duo between the two of them.
And then we unleashed the boyfriend.
I genuinely think Ilia enjoys these camps more than Sade does. He walked into the gym smiling like he had been personally invited to ruin her afternoon. Sade saw him putting his gloves on and immediately went, "Absolutely not." Baba said, "Absolutely yes."
😂
Ilia's session was probably the closest thing we had yesterday to replicating the overall problem Billie presents. Different fighters, obviously. Different levels of technical sophistication. Different habits.
But Ilia understands aggressive pressure better than almost anybody, especially pressure that doesn't rely on simply throwing endless combinations.
He takes space away from you.
That's what we wanted Sade dealing with. People sometimes misunderstand pressure fighting. They think pressure means constantly moving forward.
It doesn't. Good pressure is making somebody feel trapped before you've actually trapped them.
Ilia would step into Sade's space, get her thinking about the right hand, then suddenly change levels. Next exchange, same entry, no takedown. Then he'd hook off it.
Then he'd back her toward the fence, stop completely and make her decide whether she wanted to leave. The moment she tried, he'd meet her. That uncertainty is exhausting. And because Ilia knows Sade so well, he knows all her annoying little habits. Every time she dipped her head too far while exiting, he threatened the front headlock. Every time she widened her stance expecting the takedown, he went upstairs. Every time she tried to explode out of the pocket after landing, he made her work through another exchange before she could leave. At one point Sade caught him with a beautiful right hand, which got a pop out of everyone in the gym.
Ilia just grinned, nodded at her, and immediately started crowding her again, which was probably the most Ilia response possible. He knows when she gets comfortable, he knows when she starts admiring her work a little too much, and he knows exactly how much pressure it takes to make her fall back into bad habits. That familiarity is useful in camp, even if Sade spends half of their rounds calling him annoying and threatening to kick him out of the house.
Their chemistry is funny to watch because it never really feels like traditional sparring. There is a lot of coaching happening between the two of them without either one actually stopping to coach. Ilia will give her a look after she bites on a feint, Sade will roll her eyes, and then two exchanges later she will make the correction. She catches him with something clean, he raises his eyebrows like he is impressed, and then he spends the next minute making her work twice as hard for every inch. Somewhere in between all of that they are also arguing over whether he stole her electrolyte drink from the fridge, so it is very serious professional preparation over here.
That session was useful because Billie is going to try to make Sade feel physically crowded. She wants people reacting to her size and aggression, and once she gets somebody giving ground, she becomes much more comfortable opening up. Ilia kept forcing Sade to find exits without panicking, and more importantly, to make him pay while he was entering. If Billie wants to crash distance recklessly, Sade cannot just concede the space and hope to reset later. She needs to jab her on the way in, stab the body, meet her with the knee, pivot off, or at least make Billie hesitate before she throws herself forward again.
We spent a lot of time talking about that during the break. Baba had the pads tucked under one arm while he was eating fruit out of a plastic container, Ilia was sitting on the floor stretching, Sade was lying flat on her back complaining that everyone in the building was conspiring against her, and Kei was somehow still bouncing around like we had only just started training. I genuinely do not understand where she gets that energy from. I had been standing there holding a camera for most of the morning and even I wanted a nap. Sade eventually sat up and started asking Baba questions about some of the sequences they had been working through. That is one thing I love about watching her in camp, because once the complaining stops, she becomes obsessive. She wants to know why something worked, why something failed, whether she could have taken a different angle, whether she should have framed first or thrown first, and Baba will sit there and go through every little detail with her until she is satisfied. He never lets her get away with saying, "It felt wrong." He wants her to explain exactly what felt wrong.
Then Anderson arrived.
I need everyone to understand that both Sade and I grew up idolising Anderson Silva.
I am not using that word loosely either. Idolising.
There are old photos somewhere of us trying to copy his stance in the living room while watching his fights back. Sade used to do that little shoulder feint in front of the mirror, and I am fairly sure there was a period where both of us thought leaning backwards with our hands down was a legitimate defensive system for two children with absolutely no business attempting it.
Baba hated that phase.
We loved it.
So when Anderson Silva actually walked into the factory, Sade suddenly became about nine years old again.
She tried to act normal, obviously, because she is a grown woman, a world champion, and she has trained with plenty of famous fighters at this point. She lasted maybe thirty seconds.
Then she looked at me.
I looked at her.
And that was it.
We both started laughing.
Anderson noticed immediately and started laughing too, which somehow made everything worse.
Baba, naturally, enjoyed every second of this and introduced Anderson as though we had never heard of him before. "Sade, this is Anderson." Thank you, Baba. Very helpful. I am sure she was wondering who the six-foot Brazilian man standing in front of her was.
What I loved about Anderson's session was that it slowed everything down after so much physical work. Kei had made her scramble, Irene had made her think at range, Jovana had forced her to work under pressure, and Ilia had spent a good portion of the afternoon trying to erase every comfortable inch of space around her. Anderson came in and worked on rhythm.
That sounds simple until you watch him do it.
He was constantly changing when things happened. Sometimes he would give Sade an obvious opening and take it away as soon as she committed. Sometimes he would wait just long enough for her to get impatient, and then he would touch her with something while she was trying to force the exchange. He would show the same movement three times and give her three different answers from it, and after a while you could see Sade becoming less concerned with what he was doing and more interested in why he was doing it.
That is exactly what we need from her against Billie.
Billie is aggressive, but aggression still has rhythm. Everybody has tendencies. Everybody has moments where they load up, moments where they become overeager, moments where they reset, and moments where they expect you to react a certain way. If Sade can start recognising those moments instead of just responding to the physical threat in front of her, then Billie's pressure becomes much less overwhelming.
Anderson kept telling her to watch everything without trying to react to everything, which is much harder than it sounds. He would feint, Sade would start to move, and he would stop her and make her reset. Then he would feint again, she would stay put, and he would actually attack. There was a lot of laughing involved, mostly from Anderson, because every time Sade thought she had finally figured him out he would change something again.
At one point she actually caught him clean with a kick to the body after drawing out one of his reactions, and I swear she looked happier about that than she did after some of her actual wins.
She immediately looked over at me too.
I already knew what she was thinking.
"Did you see that?"
Yes, Kayin. I saw it.
Everybody saw it.
You can calm down now.
Of course, Anderson then spent the next few exchanges making her miss by inches, so the universe restored balance very quickly.
The best part was after the session, though, because once the gloves came off and everyone relaxed a little, Sade turned back into a fan again. She was asking him questions about old fights, about how he used to read certain reactions, about timing, about how much of his movement was planned and how much was instinctive. I was trying to pretend I was above all of this until Anderson started talking about some of the fights we used to watch growing up, and then I ended up sitting right beside her asking questions too.
Baba just stood there looking at both of us with this smug expression on his face.
I hate when he knows he has done something nice.
He becomes unbearable.
By the time we finally wrapped up, Sade looked completely finished. Her hair was everywhere, both knees were red from the mat, she had ice wrapped around one shin, and she was sitting on the floor eating rice straight out of a container because she could not be bothered finding a chair. Ilia was beside her stealing pieces of chicken while she kept slapping his hand away, Kei was still talking at full volume, Jovana had somehow started an argument with Baba about football, and Anderson was standing near the cage talking to one of the coaches like this was all perfectly normal.
That is probably my favourite part of camp.
People see the hard rounds and the pads and the wrestling and all of the serious stuff, but there are hours in between where everyone is just existing together. Somebody is complaining about the music. Somebody has stolen somebody else's towel. There are gloves everywhere. The floor smells like disinfectant and sweat. Somebody is always making food, somebody else is always asking when we are leaving, and then Baba says we have one more round and everybody starts shouting at him.
Then we do the round anyway.
Day 1 gave us exactly what we wanted. Sade got different looks from different body types and styles, she had to work from bad positions, she had to deal with pressure, she had to create space, and she had to learn how to stay mentally switched on even when the pace dropped. More importantly, she got to start feeling the difference between simply surviving somebody's aggression and actually controlling what happens inside it.
If day 1 was anything to go by, Baba intends to make the preparation worse than the fight.