Why Private Striking Coaching Works Best for Beginners.

4 min read · Aug 14, 2026 · Beast Mo

Walking into an MMA, kickboxing, Muay Thai or boxing gym for the first time can be pretty intimidating (I know it was for me). You’re surrounded by people who clearly know what they’re doing, you hear numbers being called out, and somehow everyone knows exactly what they mean. Before you know it, those numbers turn into punches and kicks and everyone’s moving in sync, while you’re still trying to figure out where to stand or how to put the gloves on.

It can make you feel like you’re supposed to know something before you’ve even started.

But you’re not.

Nobody walks into their first session knowing how to move, throw a proper punch or defend one.

That’s the whole reason you’re there.

Private striking coaching gives you the chance to learn from the beginning, without worrying about keeping up with a full class or feeling like everyone else is ten steps ahead.

You Learn at Your Own Pace

One thing I learnt pretty quickly is that everyone picks up striking differently.

You might understand a movement straight away but struggle to get the timing right. You might naturally have power but need to work on your balance. Or we might spend half the session getting one punch to feel right.

That’s completely normal.

If something isn’t clicking, we slow it down. If we need to repeat it ten times, we repeat it ten times. If you pick something up quickly, we keep moving.

There’s no class waiting for us to catch up and no person next to you that you need to compare yourself to.

That’s probably one of my favourite things about one-on-one coaching. I can actually coach the person in front of me instead of expecting everyone to learn the same way.

It’s Much Easier to Build Good Habits Than Fix Bad Ones

A punch looks pretty simple from the outside.

Then someone teaches you how to actually throw one and suddenly you’re thinking about your feet, hips, shoulders, hands, chin and balance all at once.

It feels awkward at first.

It’s supposed to.

The little things matter, especially when you’re starting out. If your stance is off or you’re constantly dropping your hand after a punch, I’d rather stop and fix it with you now than let you repeat it hundreds of times until it becomes second nature.

I’m not interested in having you throw punches for an hour just so you leave exhausted.

You’ll definitely get a workout, but I also want you to leave knowing a little more than you did when you arrived.

You Don’t Need to Get Fit Before You Start

I hear this one a lot:

“I just want to get a bit fitter before I start.”

But that’s a bit like saying you need to get strong before you go to the gym.

You get fitter by training.

I’m not going to put someone who has never trained before through the same session as someone preparing for a fight.

Your first session is about seeing where you’re at, what you’re comfortable with and what we need to work on.

We build from there.

Your fitness improves as you train, and before long, the things that had you completely out of breath in your first few sessions start feeling a lot more manageable.

There’s a Lot More to Striking Than Hitting Pads

Hitting pads is fun.

I’m not going to pretend it isn’t.

But good striking is about a lot more than how hard you can punch.

It’s learning how to move without losing your balance. Knowing when you’re too close or too far away. Getting comfortable defending yourself instead of panicking when something comes back at you. Learning how to stay relaxed and think while you’re tired.

And everyone has a different reason for wanting to learn.

Maybe you want to compete one day.

Maybe you want to feel more confident defending yourself.

Maybe you’re bored of normal workouts and want to learn an actual skill while getting fit.

Or maybe you’ve just always wanted to try it.

All of those are good enough reasons to start.

You don’t need to want to fight to learn how to fight.

And I’ll Come to You

Sometimes the biggest hurdle is literally just getting yourself through the door of a gym.

That’s a big reason why I offer mobile coaching.

I train clients across Sydney at their home, a suitable park or another training space that works for us. You don’t have to walk into a room full of experienced fighters or figure everything out before you arrive.

We start where you are.

I coach striking for MMA, kickboxing, Muay Thai and boxing, and I work with everyone from people putting gloves on for the first time through to experienced strikers and amateur fighters.

So if you’ve been thinking about starting but keep telling yourself you need to get fitter first, learn the basics first, or build up the confidence first, you don’t.

Show up as you are.

Group classes, private or semi-private striking coaching?

4 min read · Sept 11, 2026 · Beast Mo

Is private coaching worth the extra money? It’s a fair question, especially if you’re already enjoying a group class.

I coach all three at Beast Mo, and there are good reasons to choose each. Before suggesting one, I’d want to know what you’re hoping to learn, how you’ve found training so far and what you can comfortably afford.

GROUP CLASSES

A good class gives you people to train with, a regular time to turn up and a coach to guide you. Getting to know the people around you can make training something you look forward to.

Working with different training partners is useful too. Training partners with different fighting styles or attributes, say taller with a longer reach, will give you a different challenge from the person you trained with last week.

In theory, you should still receive feedback in a group setting. How specific to you that feedback is, will depend on the number of people, the coach and how the session is organised. The coach has to watch the whole room, so there may be times when you need to put your hand up to ask for help or wait while they work with someone else.

If you enjoy the atmosphere and leave feeling happy with your progress, a group class may give you exactly what you need.

PRIVATE COACHING

The main advantage of a private session is having time to work through your techniques properly. It’s all about you.

Say you’re losing your balance after a kick. We can slow it down, look at your stance and weight transfer, and practise the movement before adding it back into a combination. If my first explanation doesn’t help, I can try another way of teaching it.

It’s harder to focus on the details when a whole class needs your attention.

You also have more say in the pace. We can spend a session on something you’re struggling with without worrying about keeping up with anyone else. You don’t have to save your questions until the end and habits holding you back will get corrected then and there.

For a beginner, that might mean getting comfortable with the basics before joining a class. For someone experienced, it might mean working on a particular punch, defensive movement or habit that keeps showing up.

SEMI-PRIVATE COACHING: TWO PEOPLE

If you’d like more intimate coaching but prefer having someone with you, you can book a semi-private session with a friend, partner or training mate.

There are only two of you, so I can still watch each person, give individual feedback and set up drills you can practise together. You share the cost and have someone to keep training with between sessions.

You don’t need identical experience. I can adjust the drills and what I ask of each person. Having compatible goals helps, though. If one of you wants a relaxed introduction and the other is preparing for a fight, we should talk about whether training together will give you both what you need.

HOW I’D CHOOSE

Think about what you want more of from your training.

If you enjoy practising with different people and a regular class schedule fits in your week, group training is a sensible choice. If you keep leaving with questions about your technique, a private session gives us time to work through them. If you and a mate want to learn together with closer guidance, try semi-private coaching.

Your budget matters as well. Choose a path you can maintain comfortably. Consistency gets you results.

You can mix formats. You might attend classes most weeks and book a private session when you want extra help with something specific. There’s no need to commit to one way of training forever.

For competition, we’ll also need to discuss suitable partner work and sparring. Private coaching can be part of that preparation, but you’ll need opportunities to practise against other people.

TRAINING WITH BEAST MO

I teach beginners through to experienced strikers. In private and semi-private sessions, we’ll talk about what you want to work on and plan the coaching around that. I also check in between sessions to see how you’re going.

If you’re interested, send me a message with your training experience and what you’d like help with. If you’re bringing someone, let me know a little about them too. We can work out a starting point that suits you.

Does Hitting Pads Help With Stress, Anxiety and Depression?

5 min read · Sept 3, 2026 · Beast Mo

People come to me for all sorts of reasons. Some want to compete. Some want to feel like they could handle themselves if things ever went sideways. Some are bored of normal gym workouts and want to learn a useful skill while they train. For many of my clients, they don’t want an audience while they’re still figuring it out.

But there’s one reason that comes up more than you’d think, and it’s usually said quietly, like they’re not sure it even counts.

“I just need to get out of my head for a bit.”

Fair enough. Try holding onto whatever’s weighing on you while you’re also trying to remember if that combo was jab-cross-hook or jab-hook-cross. You can’t do both. Something has to give, and it’s never the combo.

And you know what? The clients who show up even when they’re barely holding it together are the ones I think about long after the session ends. Watching them put themselves back together, one session at a time, is the best part of what I do.

So here’s some research behind why hitting pads does more for your mental health than you’d expect. Forget the vague “exercise is good for you” line. It comes down to something more specific: your hands are doing something that redirects your focus.

What Does the Research Say About Exercise and Mental Health?

This isn’t a new wellness trend. Human biology has been wired this way a lot longer than we’ve had the science to prove it. In 2023, Singh et al. reviewed basically every major study done on exercise and mental health: close to 100 systematic reviews, more than 1,000 trials and over 128,000 participants.¹ The overall finding was clear. Exercise is associated with meaningful reductions in symptoms of depression and anxiety, with the evidence rated highly in terms of confidence.

The bit I find most relevant for my clients: intensity seemed to matter. Higher intensity training tended to produce larger improvements than lower intensity movement.

Ever walked out of a session completely gassed, fighting for breath, but somehow lighter than when you walked in? That feeling isn’t just in your head. It’s not a coincidence. There’s growing research showing that exercise can have a real effect on how we feel mentally.

Does Boxing Specifically Help With Anxiety and Depression?

Yeah. It’s not just exercise in general. Boxing and striking keep showing up in mental health research as something more specific than “movement that happens to help.”

One review, published in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, looked specifically at non-contact boxing and found improvements across areas including anxiety, depression, mood, self-esteem and focus. There’s also early evidence that boxing-based interventions may help people experiencing trauma-related symptoms, although that evidence is still limited and some studies combine boxing with other forms of support.

The researchers described non-contact boxing as potentially providing a “cathartic release” of things like stress and anxious energy.² If you’ve trained with me at the end of a genuinely bad week, this probably isn’t news to you.

There’s something different about hitting pads that gives you an actual outlet, rather than just burning calories. You’re doing something with whatever you walked in carrying.

Why Do Your Hands Matter?

This is the part most people never think about, and it’s the bit I find most interesting.

Neuroscientist Kelly Lambert has spent a big chunk of her career studying what she calls the “effort-driven rewards circuit”, essentially a proposed connection between effortful, hands-on activity and the brain systems involved in motivation and reward.³

She first developed the idea through her academic research, then explored it for a general audience in her book Lifting Depression.⁴

Worth saying upfront: this isn’t one massive clinical trial proving that your hands have a special switch for mental health. It’s a theory built from research and clinical observation.

But it does line up with something I see happen with clients all the time.

On the bike, your body is working, but your mind can still wander.

On the pads, your hands are working through a problem in real time.

Your attention gets pulled into what’s happening right now.

Your brain isn’t necessarily switched off. It’s just pointed somewhere else.

And for someone who’s spent the entire day stuck in their own head, that can be a pretty valuable 45 minutes.

Is It Just Striking, or Does Any Hands-On Activity Help?

Here’s what makes the idea even more interesting: striking isn’t the only place this shows up.

There’s a study that surveyed more than 3,500 people who knitted, about as far from MMA as you can get, and found that people who knitted more frequently tended to report greater feelings of calm and happiness.⁵

That doesn’t prove knitting causes happiness, but the association is interesting.

And the more regularly people did it, the stronger the relationship appeared to be.

I’m not about to start a knitting circle in my backyard, but it says something, doesn’t it?

The same basic pattern keeps turning up in completely unrelated fields: repetitive, hands-on, skill-based effort can give people something to focus on and may contribute to feeling better. We just happen to do ours with gloves on and someone calling out numbers.

What This Means If You Train With Beast Mo

I see this play out week after week.

Someone turns up after a rough day or week, barely puts together a full sentence, and by the end of the session they’re a completely different person.

And it usually isn’t because I said anything particularly wise.

It’s because for 45 minutes, their hands and their head had to work on the same thing.

For a little while, whatever was happening outside the session didn’t get much of a say.

And maybe that’s the real value of it.

You don’t have to fix everything you’re carrying when you walk through the door.

You don’t even have to talk about it.

For 45 minutes, you just have to hit the next pad.