Mike Budnik is the recently crowned Combat MMA champion, adding the title to the XFO lightweight belt he won in 2011. The 39-year-old Budnik is also a former professional skater, appearing in the first 10 X Games competitions – long before he turned to punishing his body inside an octagon. Budnik is the owner and lead instructor at Triton MMA School in Woodstock.

Skating is pretty brutal – it’s different than fighting. When I was coming up, if you wanted to learn a trick, you threw it and you fell 100 times before you actually got it. I heard Tony Hawk refer to the falls we take being the equivalent of a good car accident, which meant I spent 10 years getting into car accidents every day.

I never took fighting seriously, I never thought it would turn into anything. I took a fight for fun, won that fight, and never looked back. Honestly, I’ve been sore for 20 years straight. It’s not something I want. It’s not something that I sit here and say, ‘Man, I need to be sore or I need to be banged up.’ But I think [fighting is] just something that I’ve easily been able to excel at because it really doesn’t bother me. I spent so much time beat up from skating. The type of training you’re doing with fighting, you’re getting beat up all the time. The beatings you take in an actual fight are nothing compared to what you go through in training. To be successful, you have to push through all of that intense training and so I think all the years I spent skating kind of numbed me to how bad that actually can be.

What hooked me is that I had this little guy who weighed 135, 140 pounds who invited me to try out his jiu jitsu class and I was a pretty accomplished wrestler when I was younger before I started skating. I’m looking at this guy and I’m saying, ‘You’re not going to be able to do anything to me – this is ridiculous.’ The first day of class, I rolled with him and I think he arm-barred me 57 times. It was hands-down the most humbling experience I had ever been through in my entire life. Some people might look at that as a bad thing, but I was pumped. I loved it and all I wanted to do is learn everything these guys knew.

You get these big guys who come into the gym, they’re all roided out – gym rats that are these big, strong, tough guys who sucker punch people in bars and they think they’re going to be able to come in and be the next UFC champion. I’ve got this little 140-pound guy who I always sic on people because he can hold his own with anyone and so (learning) can be very humbling. But you see this little guy who looks like a 12-year-old boy and when he gets a hold of (the tough guys) and tangles them all up and does what he wants with them and knocks them out, it’s pretty satisfying.

When I got into teaching, I wanted to take it seriously. I didn’t want people to train with me just because I had credentials behind me – because that has nothing to do with teaching. I guess there’s a lot of gyms out there but I really consider my place a school. I think I could take someone and make them tough or fast or strong in a few months. If I trained them and just had them spar every day and lift weights every day and train hard, after three to four months, they’re going to be pretty tough and they’re going to be pretty strong, but they’re not going to be skilled. That’s my focus – I really like working with people who want to come in and really want to focus on developing a skill set.

I’m Just Saying is a regular Sunday feature. If there’s someone you’d like to see featured, write to me at jarnold@shawmedia.com or send me a message on Twitter @NWH_JeffArnold.