Adesanya Leaves City Kickboxing: What 'Individual Training' Really Means for Martial Artists

After 17 years at Auckland's City Kickboxing and four consecutive UFC losses, Israel Adesanya has gone solo. His reasoning touches a tension every serious grappler and fighter eventually confronts.

The Split That Shocked MMA

On July 9, 2026, former UFC middleweight champion Israel Adesanya announced his departure from City Kickboxing, the Auckland, New Zealand gym that shaped him into one of the most technically precise strikers in UFC history. The announcement came on his YouTube channel, where he described the decision as bittersweet and expressed genuine gratitude for what CKB built in him while being clear that a chapter had closed.

The context makes the decision understandable, even if the finality is still jarring for fans. Adesanya has lost four consecutive UFC bouts and five of his last six appearances. He is no longer the dominant champion who dismantled opponents with surgical precision at middleweight. The four-fight skid, which included multiple stoppages, prompted a hard internal reassessment. Per ESPN's reporting, Adesanya told longtime CKB coach Eugene Bareman face-to-face in May that he would not return.

What he said next is the part that resonates beyond his specific situation. He stated that what he needs is focused, individual training. Not a different team, not a larger gym, not a new training partner. A fundamental shift in how he prepares: coaching attention structured around his specific deficiencies rather than shared across a room full of world-ranked teammates.

The High-Level Team Dilemma

City Kickboxing is one of the finest MMA gyms in the world. It has produced multiple UFC champions and title contenders, and the quality of its competitive room is exactly what made Adesanya's rise possible. But high-level training environments create a specific structural challenge: coaching attention is inherently shared. When a room contains several ranked fighters across multiple divisions, each with their own competition timeline and game-plan needs, even the best coaches cannot give individualized focus to everyone simultaneously.

This tension is not unique to CKB or to Adesanya. It applies in elite BJJ academies, wrestling rooms, and boxing gyms. The teammate who pushes you hardest in sparring is also competing for the same hours of technical coaching time. At a certain career stage, particularly when a fighter is trying to correct specific technical problems or recover from a prolonged losing run, the generalist energy of a large competitive room can work against the focused rewiring needed to improve.

Individual or semi-private training offers something group environments cannot: the ability to drill one specific position or movement pattern for an entire session without the flow of a larger class. For a fighter who needs to overhaul a specific defensive response or sharpen a particular submission entry, that targeted repetition is worth more than five additional rounds of open sparring.

The BJJ Angle: Drilling vs. Sparring

For grapplers and BJJ practitioners, Adesanya's choice translates directly into the individual-versus-group training debate that runs through every serious martial arts gym. Group classes provide variety, the challenge of unfamiliar training partners, and volume. Individual drilling or private instruction offers specificity, corrective feedback in real time, and the ability to isolate exactly the part of your game that is weakest.

Practitioner experience consistently points toward deliberate, targeted practice as the fastest route to skill improvement in technically demanding disciplines. An hour spent drilling a specific sweep from closed guard with a skilled training partner who corrects your hip angle and weight distribution produces more lasting change than an hour of open rolling where you default to what already works. The high-output, high-variety environment has its place, but it must be balanced with intentional technical work.

Adesanya's decision puts a public and high-profile face on something coaches and serious students understand: knowing when your current training structure is not what you need anymore is its own form of intelligence. It requires enough self-awareness to override the social comfort of a familiar gym and the loyalty to teammates who have pushed you for years. That decision is hard. He made it anyway.

What Las Vegas Grapplers Can Take From This

You do not have to be a former UFC champion for Adesanya's reasoning to apply to your own training. If your current gym is giving you volume but not the specific feedback you need to break through a plateau, that is worth examining. If group classes are covering positions that are not your sticking points while leaving the ones that actually hold you back unaddressed, targeted private work is worth considering alongside your regular sessions.

Las Vegas has a genuine and growing BJJ community. Whether your goal is competition, self-defense, fitness, or the challenge of learning a demanding physical skill, the path matters as much as the destination. Individual attention is built into how we coach, because the best training is the kind actually designed for you. Come try a class and see where you are.

7 Signs It Is Time to Add Private Training to Your Martial Arts Practice

Whether you are a competitor chasing a plateau or a recreational student wanting faster progress, private or semi-private sessions can complement regular class training powerfully. Here is when the investment pays off.

1. You keep losing the same position in sparring: If a specific sweep, guard pass, or submission keeps catching you repeatedly, targeted drilling with focused coaching corrects the underlying mechanics that group sparring alone cannot fix.
2. You are preparing for a specific competition or challenge: Pre-competition preparation benefits enormously from game-plan-specific drilling tailored to your likely opponent profiles, weight class demands, or ruleset constraints.
3. You have hit a clear performance plateau: When progress stalls despite consistent mat time, the variable that needs changing is often not volume but specificity. A skilled coach can identify what you cannot see in your own movement.
4. You are coming back from an injury: Returning to live training after injury requires careful load management and technique modification. Private sessions give a coach the time to monitor your movement and guide adaptation safely.
5. You want to deeply understand a specific position: Some areas of the game, like deep half guard, leg lock entries, or back-take sequences, reward dedicated study sessions far more than casual exposure in open rolls.
6. Your schedule limits group class attendance: Private sessions can make limited training time far more productive for students who cannot attend multiple weekly classes due to work or family commitments.
7. You are brand new and want to build foundations correctly: Early habits in BJJ are difficult to unlearn. Starting with at least some private instruction accelerates correct movement patterns before bad habits take root in open sparring.

← More from the Las Vegas Jiu Jitsu blog