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MMA Workout Basics: SpecificityFiled Under: conditioning

Most people understand that there is a difference between exercise for the sake of health and longevity versus exercise for the specific purpose of increasing sport performance.

Those who are interested in mixed martial arts and already have a dedication to working out should be commended. Your mental grit and willpower will make you a better fighter.

However, despite their good intentions, many would-be fighters are doing various exercises and performing work out routines that will have little or no impact on their performance in the ring. Worse yet, they may be doing things that are decreasing their MMA conditioning.

Ultimately, there are two questions that need to be asked for every exercise, drill and workout.

1. Why am I performing the exercise?
2. How will this exercise help my performance?

Body Building Vs MMA Training

I’ve heard it said that body building is the worst thing to happen to American strength training – and I tend to agree. In body building, your goal is to build a visually pleasing body – a sculpture. In MMA, any statuesque muscles and ripped abs are merely a by-product of training, not our goal. When we start the path of training to compete in fight sports, let us be careful to make sure we keep our goals in mind.

Muscles adapt to stimulus in some fairly predicable ways. It makes sense – do a few weeks at weighted bicep curls and you body will reorganize and change your body to be able to perform that exercise better. Not only do muscles respond to the weight lifted, but also the tempo of how they were lifted, the number of times lifted (sets/reps), the movement angles and the body positioning when lifted.

Now, in general, we don’t want to think about training body parts, but movements.  Kicks, punches, take down defenses – you know, the movements of MMA.

Be Specific

There are two definitive physical exertions in MMA – the burst of movement – like a flurry of punches – and the grind of strength-endurance  – like when a grappler is struggling to sink in a submission.

When you think of training the cardiovascular component of MMA, you need to think in terms of your expected output in the ring. Do you and your opponent have a foot race around the octagon before punching? More likely, there will be a few “feeler” strikes thrown, followed by a fast exchange of blows – possibly an explosive take down.

15-25 seconds of a ballistic fury of punches on your heavy bag, followed by 30 seconds rest models real cage fighting more than doing laps – especially from a energy output perspective. I’ve said it before, triathalon training isn’t proper cardio for MMA.

Also, in terms of the bursts of activity, MMA’ers want to be able to produce maximal power for their strikes. In part, the explosiveness comes from body’s ability to quickly recruit muscle fibers to help out with the action. On the flipside, maximal muscle contraction isn’t about quickly recruiting muscles fibers, but just about recruiting them period. Bench pressing your one rep max takes several seconds – and you know how grueling and slow that can be. However, that kind of exertion doesn’t really take place in MMA.

Now for the strength-endurance part. When you’re not striking, you’re grappling – clinching together, squeezing, pushing. Strength-endurance is the ability to exert your muscles at the higher ranges of tension for a length of time. This can be either one continious, long push, or a series of pushes in a lengthy series.

Two common tests of stregth-endurace are push ups and pull ups. “Drop and give me 20″ is just the start. It’s reported that Ken Shamrock had to perform 500 hindu squats to get into the Lions Den.

How Specific?

Certainly, we could argue that you should only be doing the exact movements present in the sport – sparring, heavy bag punching, weighted grappling.  That would be pretty specific wouldn’t it?

Well, there are problems with the “only do ultra specific exercises” mentality. Two come to mind immediately.

First, overuse injuries. Our bodies just can’t do the same exact thing every day for months on end. Rock climbers and tennis players alike know this. Carpal tunnel syndrome anyone?

Second, muscles and bones don’t grow to reach their max potential without multidimensional strength development. Plus, muscles can also develop synergistically in groups – like the biceps and triceps.  Strength in one body area can be throttled by lack of strength in another.

The truth is that there is a range of specificity – exercises that are close enough to the movement increase your proficiency. Earlier I mentioned about the speed of lifting your one rep max – I didn’t mean to imply that building your 1RM won’t be helpful – because it can – but that it isn’t the topic right now.

Body Positioning

The [study] results stress the importance of selecting exercises in which the posture closely resembles that of the movements they are attempting to facilitate.

- From the article The specificity of strength training: the effect of posture ; European Journal of Applied Physiology; Volume 73, Numbers 3-4 / May, 1996 (link)

For the purpose of skill enhancement, you want to perform exercises in the same body position in which you’d see them in the ring. Again, this makes sense. Even though it works the quadraceps, the seated leg raise doesn’t influence the squat max like a front squat does. You are pushing the weight in an entirely different plane, one against gravity one perpendicular to it. Seated leg presses should be good for your butterfly guard sweeps and up kicks – but not as much so for your standing kicks and knee strikes.

The study cited above did some work along those lines of thinking.

Specific Doesn’t Mean Isolation

Don’t get too hasty now – remember that your body is like a team of muscles. When the muscles are coordinated, they will all help each other out. Take punching, for instance. If you want to puch harder, you’re going to need to specific shoulder, lat, arm and chest muscles to move the fist to another dude’s face. However, if you have a weak base, your punch will lack the back up power to knock out opponents. Pushing from your legs increases the punching movement’s speed and power.

Some Odds and Ends

• Free weights model MMA much better than weight machines. When fighting, you’ll have pressure exerted on you in all different directions – training in one static plane is … let’s leave it at “bad”.
• Multiple joint exercises are a great way to go. Not only are they an efficient use of your time, but activities like punching use muscles from your feet all the way up to your shoulders. Squats, bent presses, side presses, turkish get ups, dead lifts, kettle bell swings, etc.
• Explosive movements should be done with care, under good supervision. I love plyometrics – box jumping, medicine ball throws, snatches, clean and jerks, etc – just make sure you’re trained to do them right or expect injury pains.
• You need some wit to add weight to certain movements. If you wear wrist weights when boxing, in what direction does this add resistance? Hmmm… how would you add non-ballistic resistance to those punches in the opposite direction of the punch?
• If you’re competing in a match with 3 rounds of 5 minutes, train accordingly. Training in a circut that has 5 sets of 3 minutes wouldn’t do the trick, nor would one continuous exertion of 15 minutes.

Of course, this is a throwback to basic goal setting. I am reminded of an exchange between Alice and the Cheshire cat from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
The Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to
Alice: I don’t much care where.
The Cat: Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go.
Alice: …so long as I get somewhere.
The Cat: Oh, you’re sure to do that, if only you walk long enough.

For further reading, check out the NSCA’s article of specificiity for sport – those guys know their stuff. Another good read is The Physical Needs of MMA part 1 and part 2.

If you can spring for it, below is an excellent book. Dense, serious, and scientific. I got my copy from the University of Utah library.

Other posts you may enjoy:

• Pull Ups For Fighters
• Better Than Cardio
• Your fitness is a technique

Tags: conditioning, mma conditioning, mma workouts