I like to think we all have a warrior within us. For me, that saying “you don’t know how strong you are until being strong is the only choice you have,” rings true when one day you’re feeling on top of the world, and the next you’re diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. This moment forces you to pause, slow down, pay attention to your body, and learn more than ever before. For UFC veteran and world champion Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt, Alberto Crane, that moment came when he was diagnosed with the autoimmune condition, multiple sclerosis (MS), in 2012, and he was told he had to stop fighting.
With MS, the immune system attacks the central nervous system, like the brain and spinal cord, as well as the protective myelin sheath that covers nerve fibers. Alberto Crane has competed at the highest levels in MMA and BJJ and founded the influential Legacy Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu training academy. He chronicles his journey with MS in his new book “All In: Lessons On and Off The Mat” (released on March 24th, 2026), and he hosts his podcast The Alberto Crane Show.
In the face of adversity, Alberto Crane found a new sense of purpose and a regimen that helped restore his health, including the power of tactical fitness. Alberto had to step away from the cage, and I can relate to this as a singer/songwriter who had to step away from the stage for some time when diagnosed with the autoimmune bone condition Ankylosing Spondylitis (AS) many years ago. With AS, my immune system attacks my eyes and my bones, mostly in my spine, shoulders, neck, and SI joints. After years of dealing with the ebbs and flows of autoimmune, I was excited to interview Alberto and discuss what strength looks like when your body no longer cooperates and lessons from combat sports that apply to everyday life. Let’s just say Crane is a true fighter.
Preparing for a UFC fight
The Manual: What first drew you to MMA?
Alberto Crane: I never thought I would be fighting MMA. I fell in love with Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and I loved how it made me feel and what it did for me as a young man. I was 18, and I set my goal and just kept going. It was a process. One of my friends went down to Brazil and learned from the source, the Gracie family, and then I started to watch the Ultimate Fighting Championships on TV. One thing led to another, and I wrote down some big goals. I wanted to be the best in the world. I read a book called “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill, and the next thing I knew, I was living in Brazil and going for it.
TM: Where did you grow up?
Alberto Crane: I’ve grown up in different places, but I always say I’m originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico. When I was a kid, I lived in Germany for about seven years. In high school, I lived in New York City for about five years. After high school, I moved to Brazil on and off for about three to four years, but my home has always been New Mexico. Now, I’ve lived in Los Angeles for the last 18 years.
TM: How did you physically and mentally prepare for a UFC fight in peak condition? Walk us through a typical fight camp. What did a perfect training day look like, from morning to bedtime?
Alberto Crane: When I first started fighting MMA, I had a great coach called Greg Jackson, who was voted MMA coach of the year. We did a lot of training in the mountains because New Mexico has high altitude, especially in Santa Fe and Albuquerque. So, for example, we would get up in the morning, and depending on the day, we would train and look at our techniques. On certain days, we would do conditioning, like sprints, runs, and weights at a really high altitude, which burned our lungs. You felt like you couldn’t move anymore, but you kept putting one foot in front of the other. That made you tough physically, mentally, and spiritually as well. One of the conditionings has been on TV over the years, with the guys training on top of the mountain.
Redefining strength after the diagnosis
TM: What was the first sign that something was different in your body, and what prompted you to seek a diagnosis?
Alberto Crane: I was diagnosed eventually in 2012, but five years before that, right before I was going to fight in the UFC, the first sign I had was when I was cutting weight for a tournament, and I started to feel numbness in my whole body. I just thought it was me training and going too hard for too many years, and now my body was saying, “screw you”. I just ignored it. You have to keep moving forward.
When I was about to fight in the UFC, they found some lesions in my brain. In Nevada and California, they make you do a brain MRI to get your fight license, so they did a brain MRI and found little lesions. They said they would keep an eye on it, but they let me fight. So I fought, and five years later, I was going to fight in a local show here in Los Angeles, and they did another brain MRI for me to fight, and the lesions had grown. They called me into the office the day before the weigh-ins and said they needed to do more testing, but they couldn’t let me fight. They did more testing and neurotesting, but no spinal tap because I didn’t want to do that, but I did everything else. They diagnosed me with multiple sclerosis.
TM: You’ve said strength had to be redefined for you after your diagnosis of multiple sclerosis in 2012. Fighters use their strength, muscles, and control over their bodies to command the cage. What does strength look like to you now?
Alberto Crane: That’s a great question. I think my background with martial arts, mind over matter, and those kinds of things have given me the gift of resilience and never giving up. Less is more. I’ve definitely redlined my whole life, and it made me go another way. Because I started being open to different types of training, I found tactical fitness, the functional training system for longevity and mobility called ‘The World’s Smartest Workout’, so it made me go a different way. I’ve been on this path for almost 14 years since the diagnosis, and I’ve been doing all kinds of courses on neuroscience, fascia, and how the body works. I’ve even done a human dissection down to the bones of a cadaver just to understand how things work.
What is a nerve? You can see the picture of little blue lines on paper, but what is a nerve? So you start to touch a ligament, a tendon, and a nerve, which has the consistency of pudding, like liquid. Nerves are surrounded by fascia, and usually, with MS, the immune system attacks the myelin sheath. You have fascia around the myelin sheath and the nerves inside. So, when your body isn’t sure, it restricts and gets tight, and things go out of whack. You get inflamed, and you get MS, and you’re totally disconnected because of these autoimmune issues.
The power of tactical fitness
Alberto Crane: When I started doing TACFIT®, things started to come back online for me. I understood stress in the body and how things work, and things got better for me. Every time I have inflammation or pain, now, I kind of know what to do. Pain is in the brain, and I can give awareness to the brain of where I am in space to give my brain understanding. It’s kind of like when you’re driving, and you don’t have WiFi or internet, so you can’t zoom in on your map to see where you are. As soon as you have the internet, you can zoom in. Basically, TACFIT® helped me connect with where I am in space instead of everything being cloudy. That’s how everything started to get connected, and that’s what lays down the myelin sheath coating around the nerves.
Little by little, things came back online for me because of this type of training. You want stress, but not too much stress. It’s that goldilocks zone, which is 60-80% of your max heart rate. It’s been about 10 years of going all in with this type of knowledge and training.
TM: How has your warm-up or mobility routine changed from your UFC years to now? What do your active days look like today?
Alberto Crane: I wish I had known all of these things I’ve learned with tactical fitness. It’s based on circular strength training (CST), and basically, I move all of my joints in circles, from my neck all the way down to my lower back, my shoulders, elbows, knees, and fingers. Most people don’t really know how to move their joints. When you do that, you get connected to the body, and I say to people it’s like changing out the oil of your joints. You move the ground substance and synovial fluid. It gives feedback to the brain about where you are in space, too.
We move our joints and do like a moving yoga, and then we do strength training, and our main tool is the Clubbell®, which looks like a bat, but we use kettle bells and other tools and principles behind TACFIT®. That’s the functional training and longevity system for life. That keeps me in the game, and I try to educate all of my students about it, and they all do some form of it. Some people don’t want to do jiu-jitsu, but they can do this. That’s what helped me and brought me back: TACFIT®, jiu-jitsu, the community, and the mindset. If I have issues, I can always fall back on those things to help me get better.
Legacy Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu
TM: How did you get started with Legacy Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu? Could you share that story with our readers?
Alberto Crane: Legacy Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is my jam. We celebrated our 25th anniversary last year. I needed a place to train when I came back from Brazil, and I wasn’t sure where I would end up. I thought if there’s any place in the world I’d like to be, it’s Santa Fe, New Mexico, which wasn’t a great market because it’s a small town without a lot of money, but I loved it there. I set up shop and first rented out a space out of a Karate school, and it grew from there. I worked hard, I guess I was doing a good job, I got the word out there, I kissed babies, and let everyone know I was there. They came and told other people about it, and that was 25 years ago. Here we are today. I’ve taught thousands of people, which is something I’m very proud of. It’s so rewarding for me to be a part of their lives and help people for all these years.
TM: What are your favorite benefits of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and why do you think more men should try it?
Alberto Crane: When you’re a kid, everything is in the present, for men and women. As you get older, everything is either in the past or the future. Training in Jiu-Jitsu brings you to the present moment and back to your childhood. However long you’re training, even 30 minutes or less, gives you that balance and grounding for the rest of the day. For men specifically, I think it’s important to have other men around you, and it gives you that environment of men training together. Men bond when they fight with each other, so it’s a beautiful thing. The Buddhist monks and those monks who invented this martial art knew what they were doing.
The power of the mind
TM: What was the hardest mental adjustment when your body wasn’t cooperating the way it always had?
Alberto Crane: Humbling myself. Martial arts does that for me, so that helped. There’s always somebody better or stronger than you, and you have to know how to deal with that and deal with somebody beating you. Fall down nine times, but get up ten times. I asked the doctor when they diagnosed me, “Can I still do Jiu-Jitsu?” The doctor said, “Sure, there’s no brain damage”. I was wondering what if I can’t do this in six months? I covered this in my book, and I signed up for a tournament and ended up going on a world tour for a few years and traveled all over the world, like Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Brazil, and the Amazon. I was like, if I can’t do this in six months, I’m just gonna give everything I have.
Now, I have challenges, but I can always get value and keep doing it in a certain way, so I think it’s about being okay with that. No matter what, everything will be okay because I’ll keep doing what I do and find a way to get that value and help people.
Tools for recovery
TM: How important are recovery tools, like sleep, mobility work, and nutrition?
Alberto Crane: If you don’t sleep enough, your body will be tired, and your nervous system will be stressed and taxed. Sleep is number one; it’s non-negotiable. Your nutrition is so important. If it’s not, it’s going to cause inflammation, and your body isn’t going to work as well. Your brain and body — that’s the base. Movement is also key. We all sit down too much, and we don’t move enough. I do martial arts and jiu-jitsu, but I still don’t move enough. We’re not in nature anymore, like when we were cavemen.
Lessons on and off the mat
TM: Especially for men, performance (in the gym or at work) is a priority and provides a sense of worth and accomplishment. From your new book, All In: Lessons On and Off The Mat, what’s one lesson from combat sports that applies to everyday life that you can leave our readers with today? Could you tell us more about the book?
Alberto Crane: One lesson: run toward the bullets. Go all in, no matter what you’re doing. It’s a mindset. Don’t back up, don’t give up, and keep showing up. If there’s one thing in all of my stories, it’s wins and losses. When I first began competing in jiu-jitsu when I moved down to Brazil, I lost for the first three years and my first thirteen tournaments. It’s something I’m most proud of because I kept going. I definitely felt like I was going to die after every tournament that I lost, but when I finally won, I was one of the best in the world. I would never have known that if I had stopped before that.
When people ask me what I’m most proud of, I’m most proud of not giving up in those first three years because it’s given me so much confidence in everything I do. The lessons I learned over those three years will stay with me, and I want to transfer that to other people, and hopefully, you can read that in the book, and it resonates with you.
TM: Yes, we definitely get disheartened by those early failures.
Alberto Crane: Especially when you don’t have anything to show for it, and you’re a teenager or young man trying to prove yourself. The lesson is in not giving up.
