Conditioning for MMA and Combat Sports

this is interesting because um i guess block the kind of eastern style block periodization is was traditionally you know really popular um i guess maybe you could say that conjugate is or the west side thing is almost it's got some of that to it but then obviously you have this undulating nature to it but um that concurrent training became much less popular um in kind of the last I don't know 10 or 20 years um but it seems to be coming back now and I think um a chap who I interviewed for the podcast a couple of weeks ago Chris Myers sent me an excerpt from a Dan Baker interview and he was kind of talking about the way maybe MMA is starting to change the way we look at training or strength and conditioning for sports in terms of in MMA we need to use you know aerobic fitness, alactic, lactate, all your you know your energy systems are all going to be heavily needed as well as that max end strength you know and we're they're able to generate and and train all those things seemingly concurrently maybe we can apply that same kind of methodology to the weight room and it seems to be building popularity now just training everything at once and maybe just increasing or decreasing the amount we're focusing on different um you know uh aspects of that yeah i mean that's that's the thing right we we've got different categories of what we're trying to build and what you need to be looking at is what am i the weakest at okay so um if if let's look at like strength let's look at speed and power let's look at conditioning aerobically let's look at anaerobic conditioning so we can we can section that off as force. We can section, section off as velocity. We can section that off as aerobic, um, your aerobic reserve. And then we can section that off or VO two max. And then we can section that off as lactate threshold. Those four things are inherently incredibly important, especially for MMA and fighting arts. You know, a lot, you, you walk into any, um, walk into any jujitsu club and you talk to every single person in there and they're going to say, oh, jujitsu is anaerobic. You don't need to be aerobic. Well, I hate to tell you this, but once you exceed two minutes of activity, it's massively aerobic at that point. This is why you're getting gassed when you're training. If we think about a match is going to be at minimum probably five minutes, okay, what happens if you don't have the stamina to go past two or three minutes? And that's kind of at my last jujitsu tournament, I went into it saying, okay, I'm going to be the strongest, fastest, most well-conditioned fighter. And I'm also going to be the best well-fed because I'm going to plan appropriately. And I dominated it, not because my technique's great, because it's not. My technique, I'm a pressure player. I don't know a lot of chokes. I'm not good at setting things up. I'm not good at submissions. What I'm good at is if I get on top of you, you're screwed because I can get real fucking heavy and I can wear you down until you make a mistake and I'll just score points until the time I'll run the timeout I'm a I'm one of those shady dudes it'll ramp up 21 points on you and then I'll just lay on your ass until the time goes out because you're you're breathing so hard you can't do anything anymore right I love it it is you've got to play on your strengths and I know my strength is strength and conditioning and and nutrition my strength is not my technique um so you know now going forward when we can start doing jujitsu again, my next thing will be getting better at actual jujitsu instead of just using my, uh, my physical abilities to wear, to grind people down. Right. But that's one thing I see too, with a lot of the MMA guys, they're very strong on the mat, but then you take them in the weight room and they're really fucking weak. Like imagine what would happen if you were actually decently strong in the gym and how much that would translate onto the mat, especially if we think about strength being the mother quality for power and speed. Well, if you're the type of fighter that's a very proactive fighter, speed and power is to your benefit. You're not going to be able to produce a lot of speed and power without building a base level of strength. And then you're not going to be able to repeat that strength, power and speed over and over

you don't have the conditioning to survive that. So if you've got, if you got eight fights in a day, you might have two or three really good fights and then you're destroyed. If your conditioning and your, and your nutrition isn't up the par, you're going to have a horrible end of the day fights, which is what I observed at the last tournament I went to. Well, all of these guys were doing massive weight cuts to try to cut down into their category. I actually planned my weight cuts six months out. And so I cut down for six months and I cut down below where I needed to be And then I fed up into my tournament, which was a massive benefit for me. You know, and that's kind of what they need to start. That's what they need to start thinking about. Like the MMA strength conditioning industry is just horrendous. Like you've got a couple of people that actually know what they're doing, but the majority of it's still really old school. And, you know, they're still standing on BOSU balls and, you know, throwing around a fucking band instead of just getting very good at the basic foundational lifts and then throw the silly shit in there once you're decently strong. So it sounds like the value in S&C for combat athletes would be building that aerobic base, building that max-in strength, and then where appropriate or where time appropriate, building some power. And those three things probably being where you're going to get the most return for your investment, really. Yeah, I feel that way. And I mean, that's my competition coach is really about, you know, he's really a very proactive fighter and kind of his method of how he coaches us to fight is to at whatever level your competitor is at, you stay just a little bit higher than that. And when you see them fade out, then you just turn it up because they're done. Like you've ground them into the ground. So if I'm walking into a fight and I'm well conditioned and I can maintain just a little bit more energy than the other person the minute they start to falter they're going to start making mistakes and i'm going to capitalize on that um and then you have to think sorry so just just to go back to your condition like looking at someone being well conditioned what are your markets for with being well conditioned you know what are you looking at when when you sort of get someone in front of you