Luttrell has lived his whole live in New Mexico. He wrestled on the varsity team all four years at Manzano High School in Albuquerque. Throughout his teenage and young adult years, Luttrell trained in judo, which is how he met and befriended Mike Winkeljohn. Winkeljohn recruited him to start working with his kickboxing students, to teach them grappling skills, and in exchange he received instruction in various forms of striking It was also through his judo classes that he met one of Greg Jackson's students and eventually Jackson himself, later introducing Jackson to Winklejohn. He went to college at University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where he obtained his bachelor's degree in criminal justice.
Chris was the principle figure in developing the system Jackson's system martial arts which is known as Gaidojutsu system,. Chris introduced Mike Winkeljohn to Greg Jackson and eventually talked Greg into converting his self defense gym into an MMA gym. They then needed to develop a system that they thought had the most effective, fight proven techniques. Luttrell did this by traveling the country as a flight attendant, finding every fight gym or serious martial arts dojo and requesting to train for a night. Chris trained with everyone from Royce Gracie and Pat Militech to Megaton Diaz with whom he had epic roll at his academy. City by city, as his travels took him, he trained, learned, and recorded, Chris would return to his hotel and take notes in a journal on every technique he'd learned at each academy and bring it back to Albuquerque. These techniques would then be tested in the gym, in the bars, streets, and wherever was necessary to verify the legitimacy of the technique and what didn't work was discarded. When cage matches or Vale Tudo matches first began happening in the southwest, Chris was the first to compete. Along with Jackson and Winklejohn, the three organized a belt system for Gaidojutsu, and in 2000 Luttrell was the first to obtain a black belt in the art. The original team was made up of the following: Chris Luttrell, Brad Ahrensfeld, Tom Vaughn, Josh Groves, Chad Lemoine, Keith Jardine, Diego Sanchez, and Kyle Seals. He was approached in 2011 by Keith Jardine to help establish a school to teach mixed martial arts as both a form of fitness training and self-defense. Two years later, Luttrell took over as owner and head coach and renamed the gym Luttrell's MMA, and in 2015, he partnered with long-time acquaintance and colleague Ray Yee, to form Luttrell-Yee MMA.
