Robert Drysdale recently addressed his long-standing reputation for opposing crosstraining during an episode of The Ageless Warrior Lab with Dave Camarillo.
Drysdale made it clear that while he disagrees with the practice, he has never outright banned students from training elsewhere.
“I have the reputation for stopping people,” Drysdale said. “I’ve never stopped a single student from crosstraining. I’ve never kicked a student out for crosstraining. I’ve never done that, not once.”
Despite that, he reiterated that he remains strongly against the idea.
“I’m against it because of a variety of reasons,” he explained. “For one, for performance reasons.”
When Camarillo asked whether he was referring to crosstraining between different martial arts styles or different gyms, Drysdale clarified that his issue was specifically with training across multiple schools.
“Schools,” he responded.
Drysdale then recalled seeing a young competitor at a recent California tournament wearing six different gym logos on his rash guard.
“He was going to six different gyms to train,” Drysdale said. “I know what his dad is thinking: I’m getting the best out of all six.”
According to Drysdale, however, constantly moving between academies comes at the expense of something more important than technical knowledge.
“What he’s doing is he’s preventing his son from having community,” he continued. “He’s preventing his son from growing a family. He’s preventing his son from having training partners that will have his back when he needs them.”
To illustrate his point, Drysdale pointed to the loyalty seen among Dagestani athletes such as Islam Makhachev and Khabib Nurmagomedov.
“In what world can you imagine Islam Makhachev cornering against Khabib or vice versa?” Drysdale asked. “What kind of money would you have to offer one of them to betray a brotherhood where they’ve been training together since they were children?”
He argued that those long-term bonds create a level of trust and support that cannot easily be replicated in gyms filled with temporary visitors.
“They bled and sweat and they’ve been through so much together,” Drysdale said. “They support each other in a way that is very difficult to create in an environment when you’re visiting someone’s gym.”
Drysdale also criticized what he sees as the lack of loyalty in modern crosstraining culture.
“And that person will give advice on how to beat you to the next person to come through the door,” he said. “There’s no loyalty in that environment. And I think this damages progress.”
At the same time, Drysdale acknowledged that elite competitors do need access to strong training partners.
“Yes, you need high-level training partners,” he said. “No one’s disputing that. The ideal model is where you have high-level training partners and you have unity and you have loyalty.”
Drysdale later suggested that much of today’s gym-hopping culture is driven less by improvement and more by social networking.
“A lot of it is socializing and making friends on Instagram and networking,” he said. “It’s a lot of high school politics. They’re not actually there for training. It’s more politics than training.”
He concluded by arguing that the overall environment ultimately hurts long-term development.
“I feel like it’s a bit of a slap in the face,” Drysdale said, “and it harms their performance long term because it’s a very promiscuous environment where no one’s really helping one another. They’re just using one another for social media followers.”
