Dan Ige has decided to make use of an unusual method of preparation for his upcoming fight against Ryan Hall and has apparently signed up for access to Ryan Hall Online. It’s not something that any fighter has ever really revealed doing before, but the strange move actually makes a lot of sense. After all, Ryan Hall Online is basically a gigantic compendium of everything that the leglock wizard does, with him teaching you every little detail of how he does it. It’s actually a wonder that nobody has ever done this before, but maybe they have, and they just haven’t announced it publicly.
It makes even more sense when you consider how unique Ryan Hall is in the MMA world. His elite level leglock game and strange striking that’s built around keeping distance and setting up rolling leg attacks is notoriously hard to prepare for. That’s a huge factor in why Hall finds it so hard to stay active, as he’s not yet ranked that highly and doesn’t have much of a following outside of the BJJ scene, the benefit of beating him simply doesn’t match up to the difficulty in accomplishing that task. Especially since the world saw how frustrated Gray Maynard was when he couldn’t figure him out, and how much agony BJ Penn was in when he set the heelhook up perfectly.
Of course, Ige is a fantastic grappler in his own right and a well-rounded MMA fighter who can give Hall plenty of challenges. He’s an NCAA Division 3 wrestler with a brown belt in Judo and a legitimate BJJ black belt under Jeff Doner, but of course there’s always levels to the game and Ryan Hall has made elite black belts look like they have no business fighting him in the past. The news was announced online by Sucker Punch Entertainment on their official Instagram account, as they are the currently representing Dan Ige and will be at the time of his fight with Ryan Hall.