Professor Alex Huddleston Leading Others in a Life of Martial Arts
Sometimes, even the most iconic members of our community find martial arts by accident. Easton’s Director of Martial Arts, Professor Alex Huddleston, didn’t grow up on the mats or dreaming of becoming a professional fighter.
Growing up in a small town in Missouri with a high school of 1,000 people, there weren’t a lot of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) gyms or martial arts academies. Instead, he played basketball and continued to do so when he went to college for psychology. Realizing college basketball wasn’t what he expected, Alex turned his attention to school. While in school, he began work as a personal trainer in Jefferson City.
It wasn’t until 2009, when a client who happened to be a local MMA fighter invited Alex to a training session in his living room that Alex first experienced martial arts. Three months later, Alex stepped into his first amateur MMA fight.
At the time, MMA in Missouri was still largely underground with only three schools in the entire state doing any kind of fighting. Regulation hadn’t caught up to the sport’s fast-growing popularity, and fighters often pieced together their training from whatever resources they could find – mostly UFC footage they’d take notes on and practice in the living room together. Fights mostly went down in strip club parking lots and dive bars downtown.
“Amateur MMA is kind of the wild west,” says Alex, who turned pro in 2011. “It’s kind of like how the Muay Thai fighters can sign up for a smoker somewhere or a fight card with Sparta. If you’re an amateur, you don’t need to be signed, you can just work with a promoter.”
While still an amateur fighter, Alex got recruited off of MySpace for an All-American Heavyweights Boxing Camp in L.A., where he proceeded to box full-time at a live-in academy for a couple of months, with fights every weekend. However, this opportunity coincided with having just gotten married to his wife and high school sweetheart, Beth, and since he couldn’t bring her with, he opted to move back to Missouri to be closer and focus solely on MMA.
Turning pro in MMA
By 2011, Huddleston turned professional and began fighting in promotions like Bellator and Titan FC, where he met Bobby Lashley, a WWE wrestler who was fighting on the same card and who invited Alex to come out to Colorado, where Bobby became his manager. By that point, Alex had had nine amateur fights with MMA and a few with boxing and Muay Thai.
Alex tells us that unlike other sports, turning pro in MMA doesn’t come with a long-term contract or getting drafted by a league. For professional fighting, you fill out paperwork and go find a contract to fight on a specific card. From then on, you can no longer take unpaid, amateur fights.
This means that turning pro comes with much fewer opportunities, and every fight – and loss – counts. The more losses you have as a pro, the less opportunities you get. The ones you do get, Alex tells us, are the ones where the promoter is trying to bet against you.
“The idea would be to get your experience as an amateur fighter,” says Alex, “and be pretty close to cooked as far as skill set once you turn pro. Once you turn pro you have to be very careful of your wins and losses.”
The fighter narrative became very important as a pro in MMA as well – the way you get built up with storyline, a creative process where your lore proceeds you. When he was home, he would train with American Top Team (ATT) at their main gym in Florida for six weeks at a time for fight camp.
Now based in Colorado with Bobby Lashley and training together with American Top Team, they’d spend six weeks before each fight doing fight camp in Florida. The majority of Alex’s time lay in Colorado, but training in Florida constituted about 30 to 40 percent of his year. Alex’s pro fights took him all around the globe to places like Guatemala, India and Japan.
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Joining forces with Easton
While he and Beth moved out to Colorado in 2012, Alex first came out to visit Bobby in 2011 – also the first time he trained with him at the old Easton Boulder (where he remembers getting beat up by Amal Easton. Once he moved permanently, when he wasn’t doing fight camps in Florida, Alex would cross-train at the Easton academies.
After a fight in Japan, Alex came back with the determination to get his Jiu Jitsu game up. That’s when he started taking Jeff Suskin’s class in Denver; this was an open class, and Alex didn’t have to be part of Easton to join.
Over the years, when he was home, Alex continued to train with the Easton BJJ Program at various schools, from Jeff Suskin’s class to the Centennial and Castle Rock classes. However, that trajectory came to a halt in 2015 after he suffered a severe concussion during a fight with Bellator. Doctors told him the risks of continuing MMA were too high, and Alex had to make the tough decision to step away from professional fighting. (He did continue competing in BJJ, winning the F2W Pro Masters title against Gabriel Gonzaga in 2018.)
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He also had to make another decision – move to Florida to continue working for ATT or choose to stay in Colorado where his wife, Beth, a registered nurse, had developed a career over the past six years. Alex chose Colorado. Having created a connection with Easton over the years, in 2016 he began teaching Brazilian Jiu Jitsu at Easton’s Castle Rock academy.
With over 25 fights under his belt between amateur and professional experience, along with a brown belt earned through ATT, Alex quickly became a key asset, teaching all levels of Jiu Jitsu classes. When he met Mike Tousignant in 2019, he got invited to come work at Easton Boulder as the BJJ Department Head.
As Mike continued developing Easton’s vision and implementing new structure through department heads for every aspect of Easton, including Muay Thai which Sean Madden was already running, and the Kids department, he wanted to create an overarching role that would support all of these. Mike created the Director of Martial Arts role and placed Alex in it.
As the Director of Martial Arts, Alex oversees the consistency and quality of all programs across Easton’s eight academies, developing coaches, designing curriculum and heading up quality assurance and long-term planning. He also gets to impart his deep understanding of the training lifestyle in both competitors but also everyday people, as he teaches and mentors students and coaches.
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Challenges or turning points?
What sets Alex apart isn’t just his experience as a fighter – it’s his ability to zoom out.
For much of his early career, Alex viewed martial arts through the lens of competition. Fighting was a personal, individual journey – one focused on sharpening his skills, turning pro, and building a livelihood. His introduction to martial arts came through MMA, not traditional Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. He didn’t train in the gi for the first five years, and he didn’t receive a rank in BJJ until he turned professional.
The biggest turning point came when he began shifting from a fighter’s mindset to that of a more complete martial artist.
“I had an instructor who explained it to me,” says Alex. “There are three lenses that you can look at martial arts through: self-defense, the sport and the art. The most complete lens is when we treat them like a venn diagram and view them as the overlap of all three.”
This framework helped Alex transition from the more sport and competition-oriented view to a more holistic approach that the average person could benefit from. While MMA was great self-defense, he realized that it wasn’t the sort of self-defense that a normal person could use.
The same thing went for the martial arts side, viewing a more wholesome approach to how training can help people. For Alex, this broader understanding, which incorporated the artistic and philosophical approaches, was new – and transformative.
“Easton does such a great job of utilizing martial arts as a vehicle of personal development for everyone,” says Alex, “not just fighters and competitors. I needed that.”
In many ways, Alex’s story mirrors Easton’s: a journey from raw beginnings to thoughtful, intentional structure. As the organization continues to grow, his role is central to keeping the martial arts side sharp, ethical, and impactful – both on the mats and beyond them.
