What Makes a Successful Combat Athlete?
Mixed Martial Arts is the fastest growing sport in the world. This is great news for everyone reading this. However, for a lot of Strength & Conditioning coaches the new science of the sport is proving quite difficult. MMA is different to other sports because as far as specific fitness is concerned, a combat athlete must literally be the ‘Total Package’.
This article will outline the basic fundamentals of the fitness components that make a successful fighter’s strength and conditioning. Before worrying over insignificant details of your training (such as sets, reps and how many days a week you should train) you should ensure that the components below are ALL targeted in your conditioning program.
POWER:
Power refers to how quickly a fighter can apply his strength, or the Rate of Force Production if you want the posh terminology. Speed is imperative in delivering lightning strikes and shooting for takedowns. It is equally important to be fast enough to avoid your opponent’s attacks.
To develop some kick-ass power, include some plyometrics, medicine ball and other explosive exercises into your workout, before lifting heavy weights.
ENDURANCE:
THIS is the fitness component that causes the most controversy amongst coaches and fighters. This is mainly due to a long tradition of one type of training that is hard for many athletes to let go of, despite new advances and studies in exercise science.
Now, I’m not going to bore you with ‘a detailed look into the 3 main energy pathways’ or talk about ATP-CP production, mitochondrial activity, or any of that, as I know many other coaches and experts are fond of doing. I know you’ve heard all that time and time again.
I’ve had to write numerous essays on that jargon for my degree in exercise sciences, and it hurts MY brain cells! I can’t imagine how annoying it must be to hear for an athlete who isn’t schooled in physiology, so I’m leaving it out.
Look, here’s the deal. Forget energy pathways. Forget science. Forget what your local Personal Trainer reads out of one of his 20-year old textbooks. To find out which is the most effective form of endurance conditioning for a fighter during a match….then simply WATCH a fighter during a match! What do we see? Repeated bursts of high-power, with minimal rest. This goes on typically for 5 minutes, with 1 minute rest, for up to 3-5 rounds.
This tells us that POWER ENDURANCE is what we need. I don’t care about ‘aerobic bases’ or ‘utilization of oxygen’. If I see my fighter doing it, we train for it. Stop wasting time jogging for 10 miles every day, you are wasting hours of your life that you will never get back.
Train hard, train heavy. Get your rest. MEET THE DEMANDS OF YOUR SPORT.
FLEXIBILITY, MOBILITY & STABILITY:
Some of the joints in your body require MOBILITY, mainly your shoulders and hips. Move them around to see how mobile these joints are. Other joints need STABILITY, or to be stable. To demonstrate this point, try moving your knees through the same range of movement as your hips!
It is therefore important to ensure that the right joints are trained to develop good flexibility, and the right joints are trained to endure good stability when they are put under pressure. This is especially important in a sport like MMA, where your opponent is actually TRYING to misalign your joints!
Perform plenty of dynamic stretches and keep your body as mobile as possible without pain to ensure this usually overlooked component of combat conditioning is addressed.
CONFIDENCE:
Otherwise known as mental toughness or guts. This is of course vital to any competitor. As they say, if you do not believe you can win, then you have already failed. But is confidence something that can be trained in the WEIGHTS ROOM?? I believe so. Actually, I believe that it is my job as a Strength & Conditioning coach to prepare a fighter for competition MENTALLY, even more so than it is to prepare them PHYSICALLY. But how could that possibly be true?
In the build up to competition, my fighters are put through gruelling ‘combat circuits’ to test their power endurance. This involves going the time they’ll face in the cage or on the mat, but performing exercises at an intensity unmatched by anything their bodies will experience during a fight.
As a result, when it comes to fight time, they realise that their opponent cannot put them through anything worse than they put THEMSELVES through in training. To me, that’s confidence building, and that will increase a fighters chance of winning a match more than would improving his bench press by 10 kilos. Train hard, fight easy!
STRENGTH: I’ve kept strength until last as I believe it is the most significant physical attribute any athlete can posses. In essence, strength is the limiting factor of all other fitness components.
Any other physical attribute you can think of is determined by how strong your muscles are. Flexibility is based on muscle strength, so is power. So is endurance. Agility, and injury prevention are decided on whether your muscle is strong enough to endure the damage being done to it.
Strength is absolutely the most important physical quality any athlete can posses. Yes, other components are just as significant, but there can be none if strength is not first present.
Get yourselves stronger and watch ALL aspects of your conditioning skyrocket!
Take Action:
Take a good look at the above components of what make a truly well conditioned Combat athlete. Does your training develop all the above components? If not, then make changes today to include them all!
By Justin Devonshire, MMA-CSCC
Justin Devonshire, MMA-CSCC is a qualified MMA-Strength & Conditioning Coach who specializes in MMA and combat-specific fitness.
For more cutting-edge MMA Strength & Conditioning articles and tips, visit http://www.REALCombatConditioning.com/blog.
