Mike Winkeljohn

The striking complement

Mike Winkeljohn is the striking-coaching partner to Greg Jackson at Jackson Wink MMA Academy. Where Jackson's specialty is strategic game-plan architecture, Winkeljohn's is technical striking refinement — the specific techniques and timing that execute the strategic vision. The two coaches have operated as a unified head-coach pair for over 15 years, with neither claiming primary authority over the program. The Jackson–Winkeljohn pairing is the closest thing in modern MMA to a true co-head-coach partnership.

Winkeljohn's competitive background was in kickboxing — he was an active K-1 and Muay Thai competitor in the late 1980s and early 1990s, fighting on the Japanese kickboxing circuit and several US regional cards. He has held black belts in multiple striking disciplines, including Kenpo and traditional karate, before settling into the kickboxing tradition that defines his MMA coaching today.

The transition to MMA coaching began in the late 1990s when Winkeljohn operated his own striking-focused gym in Albuquerque. The formal partnership with Jackson was announced in 2009 with the creation of Jackson Wink MMA Academy — by then, the two had been collaborating informally for nearly a decade through cross-camp work.

The lineage

Winkeljohn's coaching influences:

• Bill Wallace: legendary American kickboxer and longtime Albuquerque-area striking instructor; Winkeljohn trained under Wallace in the early 1990s.
• Dutch kickboxing tradition: through international cross-camp exposure during his K-1 competitive years.
• Traditional karate: Winkeljohn's earliest combat sports training, which influences his footwork and distance-management coaching to this day.

The blended influences produced a coaching style that emphasizes distance control and timing-based countering — the karate-style "in and out" footwork combined with Dutch-style combinations.

The athletes

• Jon Jones — UFC LHW + heavyweight champion. The most-decorated MMA career under Winkeljohn's striking refinement.
• Holly Holm — UFC women's bantamweight champion. The UFC 193 KO of Rousey was a Winkeljohn-coached technical execution.
• Carlos Condit — UFC interim welterweight champion.
• Donald Cerrone (formerly) — UFC's most-active fighter; departed Jackson Wink in 2017.
• Andrei Arlovski, Keith Jardine, Brian Stann, Diego Brandão — various Jackson-Wink alumni across the 2010s.

The Winkeljohn-coached striking is responsible for some of the iconic UFC technical contributions:

• Jon Jones's oblique kicks: developed under Winkeljohn as the disruption strike that defined Jones's LHW reign. The kick — directed at the opponent's lead-knee joint — became a signature Jones technique and was widely studied (and criticized) across the MMA community.
• Jon Jones's spinning back elbows: refined as Winkeljohn-system clinch finishers. The most-iconic deployment was the UFC 165 spinning elbow that opened Alexander Gustafsson's eyebrow in round 4.
• Holly Holm's head kick KO of Ronda Rousey (UFC 193): the timing-based counter-striking that exploited Rousey's forward-pressure entry. Holm pivoted off the back foot and threw the kick at the exact moment Rousey committed to a right hand.
• Donald Cerrone's body kick attack: developed as the Winkeljohn-coached cumulative-damage strike. Cerrone's body kicks ended multiple bouts via late-round TKO during his Jackson-Wink era.

The coaching philosophy

Winkeljohn's coaching emphasizes four principles:

Timing-based counter striking. Reading the opponent's strike loading and countering before it lands. The Holm UFC 193 KO is the textbook example — Winkeljohn drilled the specific pivot-and-kick sequence for the full camp, and Holm executed it on the first opportunity.

Distance management. Footwork patterns that produce the right range for the planned strike. Jon Jones's career-long distance control — keeping opponents at the precise range where his reach advantage was maximized — is the most-cited Winkeljohn coaching contribution.

Technique refinement. Extensive repetition of specific strikes for championship-level precision. Winkeljohn famously requires fighters to drill techniques in single-strike isolation for hundreds of repetitions before integrating them into combinations.

Strategic integration. Striking development that supports the broader Jackson game-plan vision. The Winkeljohn striking and the Jackson strategy operate as a unified system — neither coach develops techniques independently of the other's strategic context.

Signature corner moments

• UFC 193, Holm vs Rousey, November 2015: Winkeljohn's pre-fight instruction emphasized the head-kick counter specifically — "she'll commit on the right hand; you'll have the head kick for that 90 seconds." Holm landed the kick at 0:59 of round 2 for the KO.
• UFC 165, Jones vs Gustafsson 1, September 2013: Winkeljohn's between-rounds instruction in round 4 ("the spinning elbow is there on the cage") preceded the elbow that opened Gustafsson's eyebrow and turned the fight.
• UFC 182, Jones vs Cormier 1, January 2015: Winkeljohn's gameplan focused on oblique kicks to compromise Cormier's takedown setups. The strategy held across all five rounds.

The Cerrone departure

Donald Cerrone's 2017 departure from Jackson Wink included public-facing critique of Winkeljohn's striking program. Cerrone's complaint — that the technical-refinement focus produced predictability — reflected the broader Jackson Wink coaching-style tension that drove multiple roster departures.

Cerrone's post-Jackson-Wink coaching with various other camps produced mixed competitive results, which influenced the broader MMA commentary on whether the Cerrone-Jackson-Wink split was a coaching disagreement or a more-fundamental athletic decline. Winkeljohn's own public response was characteristically restrained — he wished Cerrone well and acknowledged that the structured-camp template wasn't a fit for every fighter.

The legacy

Mike Winkeljohn's striking-coaching legacy is most-visible in the specific strikes he developed for championship-level athletes. The Jones oblique kicks, the Holm head-kick KO timing, and the Cerrone body-attack catalog are technical contributions that have influenced subsequent MMA striking coaches.

The Jackson–Winkeljohn coaching partnership is the most-decorated strategic-and-technical pair in MMA history. The combined title-defense math of their roster (Jones 11, Holm 1, Condit interim) plus the depth of contender-tier athletes across the past 15 years makes Jackson Wink the most-credentialed coaching program in the sport's history.