Greg Nelson

Greg Nelson is the Head Instructor at Minnesota Martial Arts Academy located in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota. He has trained some UFC veterans such as Brock Lesnar, Sean Sherk, and Brock Larson. As seen by the previous three names, Nelson has been great at transitioning wrestlers to MMA.

He started martial arts training in 1983, training in both Wrestling and Thai Boxing.

"I would have to say that our school was really ahead of the curve," Nelson said. "We started training mixed martial arts in, well, it was 1992, but even before I had my own school we were already mixing Thai-boxing and shootwrestling, and I wrestled for the University of Minnesota. We just always had been putting stuff together and combining. That's kind of how I did things.

"When people say, 'mixed martial arts,' we've been doing that since day one. Having a background and wrestling and then doing Thai-boxing since 1983, that was a good structure. Then we started doing submission stuff, and guys started coming in. We started fighting, literally, in 1993."