The Relaxed Fighter: Calm, Restraint, and the Fight Within

Bas Rutten is remembered as one of the most punishing strikers of the early mixed martial arts era, a Dutch fighter who became a three-time King of Pancrase, later won the UFC heavyweight title, and was inducted into the Hall of Fame. In a long conversation with Jon Brooks on The Stoic Handbook, published in August 2026, Rutten makes a case that the fighting is the least interesting thing about him. The talk moves from a sick, bullied childhood to a man who spent the second half of his life learning the harder skill of not being ruled by anger, fear, alcohol, or ego. Its spine is a single fight in Japan, where a moment of unexpected calm revealed two voices inside him, one urging speed and one urging patience. That discovery becomes a working philosophy of relaxation, restraint, and self-command, one that Brooks repeatedly sets beside the Stoics.

What changed when fighting stopped being about proving yourself?

Rutten does not begin with a theory. He begins with an admission. In his kickboxing days in Holland, he says, he was "a loose cannon." Of his nine wins, eight came in the first round and one in the second. He was powerful enough to get away with it, but he knew the approach would fail against a disciplined opponent who could control distance. "I would run out of gas for sure," he said. Pressure was the only tool he had, and he used it because he was too nervous to do anything else.

That is the detail worth sitting with. Rutten's early career was not a failure of technique so much as a failure of inner state. He was not the person he was in the gym. The anxiety in the ring was doing the fighting, and the talent was carrying the consequences. The story of his maturity, as the conversation frames it, is the story of learning to be the gym version of himself under the lights.

Why did a letter R on his fists matter?

The turning point came in Japan, and the setup reads like a tale told by someone who still finds it absurd. There were no weigh-ins. Rutten assumed the Japanese were honest and that the matchup would be fair. Then a tall man walked up to him. Rutten thought he was the promoter. He was the opponent, and he was 33 pounds heavier. When Rutten asked the promoter about it, the answer was that everybody fights everybody and there are no weight classes. Rutten's response was to act unbothered while, as he put it, inside he was thinking "What the heck?"

Then he learned the format: thirty minutes, no breaks, and rules he did not know. That should have been a panic moment. Instead, Rutten describes the opposite. He reasoned that if he started at full pressure, he would have to sustain it for almost half an hour against a much bigger man. He had one minute and a half of rage to spend and twenty-eight and a half minutes of work ahead. So he did something small and specific. He wrote a large R on each hand with a marker.

The letter stood for "relax." In Dutch, the word for the state he needed was rustig, and the first letter of it became his cue. The gesture is deliberately modest, and that is the point. A fighter who has spent years running on adrenaline does not need a grand philosophy in the corner. He needs a single reminder, visible on his own body, that tells him which mode to be in. Rutten was not trying to suppress his fire. He was giving it a instruction.

What were the two voices?

The fight itself is the best evidence for the talk's central claim, and Rutten tells it with the detail of someone who still replays it. The audience in Japan was silent, so quiet that he could hear two Australians in the front row discussing whether one of them should move from Melbourne to Sydney, or the other way around. He later asked them about it afterward, and they had no idea what had happened in the ring. Rutten was calm enough to overhear them, and that calm was the first sign something had changed.

Then his opponent threw a kick, and Rutten blocked it with his shin, a move he says he had never made before. He then opened with a high kick, which he describes as drawing the opponent's guard upward. He followed with a cross that landed as a palm strike to a taller man's jaw. The man went down with a cut. Here the two voices became audible. The angry voice wanted him to rush to his corner, because the faster you get there, the sooner they start the count. The other voice told him to slow down. Rutten went with the slower one.

"I literally thinking, 'What is going on?' And I took a beat. I looked at him because he was awake. I just stared at him for a moment and then I walked very slow to my corner like take all the time you need."

What makes this exchange more than a good anecdote is the reading of the room. Rutten understood that a fighter who runs to his corner looks afraid, and that a fighter who walks looks like someone who has all the time in the world. His calm was a message to his opponent, and it was also a message to himself. He was not the one who decided to walk. In his words, "It was like somebody else took it over." The knockout that followed was, in his telling, the moment when everything changed.

Rutten also admits the lesson did not hold perfectly. He describes a second fight where he lost control, and he links it to drinking two days before he got on the plane. He was sick on top of that. The fight that followed was the reminder that the calm voice is not permanent. It has to be chosen again.

Why does the relaxed fighter beat the aggressive one?

The chapter list for the conversation promises an answer to a bold claim: that the relaxed fighter beats the aggressive one nine times out of ten. Rutten's argument, as it emerges in the conversation, rests on a distinction between anger and aggression. Anger is the state in which you lose control of your own body. "Anger, you can't control yourself anymore," he says. "You start loading up." A fighter who is angry telegraphs every move, because the tension that powers a punch also announces it. Aggression, in his practice, is a more deliberate pressure that the fighter can still modulate.

He gives a concrete example from his own habits. He never looked at his opponents' eyes, because a stare meant to intimidate would push him over the top. He wanted to keep his anger out of the equation entirely. That is an unusual tactic for a fighter with his reputation, and it shows how carefully he managed his own emotional weather. The opponent's intimidation was an input, and Rutten refused to let it set his internal state.

Brooks presses on this from a Stoic angle. The relaxed fighter is not passive. He is someone who has separated what happens in front of him from how he responds to it. That separation is the same move the Stoics asked of their students, and it is the reason the conversation keeps returning to self-command rather than toughness.

What does a Stoic practice look like in the life of a fighter?

The conversation brings in Epictetus directly. Brooks refers to the Enchiridion, the short handbook of Epictetus, and Rutten's own remarks show how the idea of controlling only what is within your power has shaped his thinking. He talks about the difference between what he could control and what he could not, and how that difference became more important as his fighting career ended. The lesson he draws is not about winning arguments. It is about spending attention on the things that actually belong to you.

The video description adds a detail the transcript does not fully reach: an evening practice he has run almost every night for twelve years, which the description says Seneca would recognise immediately. Without that practice in front of us, it would be a mistake to guess its contents. What the conversation does show is a man who treats self-examination as a discipline, not a mood.

That is also the thread that connects the fight to the rest of his life. A fighter who learned to pause in the ring is a man who has learned that the pause is a skill, and skills can be trained away from the cage.

How do the drinking and the vices fit into the story?

The intro to the conversation lists what Rutten has had to master beyond the ring: anger, fear, alcohol, painkillers, and ego. He is not framed as a man who conquered them once. In the excerpt, he speaks about letting go of certain vices and how that process differs from one habit to another. "There are certain vices that there's," he says, before the conversation moves into how relapse and recommitment work. The description notes that a single word ended his drinking. The transcript material available here does not state that word, so it should not be guessed.

What stands out is the honesty of the framing. He is not presenting sobriety or restraint as a finished identity. He is presenting it as repeated choice. The same logic that made him walk slowly back to his corner applies to a glass in his hand.

What do the childhood chapters add?

Rutten's childhood, as the video outline lays it out, was defined by illness and bullying. The chapter list names a nickname, "the leper," and a story about Spider-Man and trees that the transcript excerpt does not reach. It also includes a school reunion and a reframing that the episode puts directly: "What I thought was a curse, I saw as a blessing." That line, as the chapter title renders it, carries the logic of the whole talk. The childhood that made him vulnerable is the same one that taught him how to watch his own mind.

The conversation then moves to parenting and, in a chapter titled "From bullied to bully," to the uncomfortable question of how the wounded become wounding. Brooks and Rutten trace that transition with the same honesty they apply to the ring. The concern is less about toughness than about who gets to decide how a person treats others when fear is driving the choices.

Where to go from here

The video is a long, unhurried conversation, and it rewards viewers who come to it with a specific question. If you want the fight itself, start with the Japan chapter and the two-voices moment. If you are interested in anger management, the sections on anger versus aggression and on the bouncer's approach to defusing a situation are the strongest. If you are drawn to the Stoic frame, watch for the Epictetus reference and the evening practice Rutten describes in the outline.

• Watch for the moment Rutten describes writing a single letter on each fist before the Japan fight, and ask what cue you could place where you will see it under pressure.
• Notice the difference between tension that powers a movement and tension that announces it. Rutten's test is whether you can still choose your next action.
• Consider the Enchiridion of Epictetus, the text Brooks invokes, and the distinction it draws between what is within your power and what is not.
• Treat the childhood material as a reminder that the difficulties that shaped you can also become the source of your discipline, as Rutten frames it.

Rutten's own summary, as best it can be reconstructed from the conversation, is that the hardest opponent was never the man across the ring. It was the voice that wanted to rush. Learning to hear that voice, and to choose the slower one, is the skill the talk keeps circling back to.