The Big Picture
Setting goals is by far the most important thing you can do when constructing an MMA workout. If you don’t have a clear picture of where you need to go, you won’t know how to get there, how long it will take, or when you’ve arrived.
Are you doing MMA workouts to prepare for an organized fight? Are you just doing them to get in shape? What exactly are you looking for in your workout?
If you’re like me , you probably already have a long mental list of things you want from your workouts. Do you want to develop knock out punches? Learn to dominate the clinch positions? As a mixed martial artist, the workout is your vehicle to achieve these goals.
It Is Not A Goal Unless It’s Written Down
By now, you’ve got a mental list of some things you’d like to have as a fighter. Now comes the brain work. Write your goals down, and prioritize them as best you can. Take the top two or three goals and for now, file away the rest. Later, you’ll need to choose exercises and drills that advance these goals, construct specific workouts, loads, rest periods, cycles … but like I said, later. My goal in this article is to talk about goal setting, capeesh?
Note:
If you’re starting out in MMA, exercising, or just martial arts in general, you’ll need to review your goals and adjust pretty often. You’re in a state of unconscious incompetence – you don’t know what you don’t know. It’s okay – we’ve all been there – but be prepared to shift gears often. It’s hard to determine how important something is, especially in relation to everything else … because you don’t know everything else.
SMARTY Pants
One way I’ve improved my goal setting is by using the SMART goals method.
“SMART” is acronym: that means your goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely.
This works with the meta-goals in MMA and the workout sub-goals. A meta-goal could be, “I want to be the light-heavy weight UFC champion” and “I want to be a superb striker” would be the chosen sub-goal you’d like to focus on. But both of those goals are a tad too lofty – perhaps something like “I’d like to increase my leg power by 30% as measured by the squat and deadlift in 12 weeks” is “smarter”.
Certainly, you may not have enough knowledge to construction something like that yet, but wait grasshopper. It will come. Just remember: The workout is a vehicle to the ultimate goal.
If you’re trying to loose weight by doing MMA, pick and choose your activities to maximize that. If you want to be a great striker, your goal could be to increase hand speed.
If you know where you want to go, everything down the line will be much easier to figure out.
Tags: conditioning, goal setting, workout, workouts
I often ponder what makes a certain workout routine good for mixed martial artists. While a workout may be good for general fitness and include fight type exercises, it doesn’t mean it’s a good MMA workout. In fact, I am becoming increasingly aware that the body of internet knowledge isn’t really helping guys understand MMA workouts at all.
Googling “mma workout”, I noticed that you get no less than 14 bazillion results. There’s an article where one fighter tells one of his routines, a youtube video of Bas Rutten or Ken Shamrock doing their thing, a link to a forum discussing some hot new MMA exercises. But all in all, it wasn’t helping.
What I seek to set forth in the MMA Workout Basics series is a collection of fundamental workout principles – sport specific information that may help you from becoming a collector of techniques and programs. Instead, my hope is that you get enough know-how and wisdom to guide yourself on how to put together an exercise program (long term) and an exercise routine (one workout).
Along the way, of course, I’ll post different factoids about someones training regimes, or I’ll give my two cents on specific exercises, just like I did with pull ups. However, within the posts titled “MMA Workout Basics” I’m going to stay true to my goal – to help you understand the fundamentals of mixed marital arts workouts.
As usual, if you have any questions or comments, I’d love hearing from you.
Tags: conditioning, workouts
Pull ups are a measure of your toughness – and lets face it, a barometer of your true manliness – whether you’re a fighter or not. Nearly since the dawn of time, the US military has been using pull ups to de-sissify recruits and weed out wimps. If you are a mixed martial artists, the pull up definitely needs to be in your rotation of exercises.
The Reasons
But why should you do pull ups in favor of other exercises? Glad you asked. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: conditioning, mma conditioning, mma workouts
For a long time now, I’ve harbored the belief that spending an hour on the treadmill is retarded. For MMA’ers, I think there are better things to do with your time. Personally, I love to hate fast as possible, puke-your-guts-out, sprinting.
It’s not that this notion is new, or without it’s detractors and misinformed proponents. An article that bring up the basic idea was put up recently at Men’s Journal, titled Cardio is Bunk. Essentially,
As opposed to aerobics, this type of exercise [anaerobic exercise] involves maximum-effort training, such as sprinting and lifting weights, in which the intensity of the exercise exceeds the body’s ability to supply oxygen to muscles. “Shorter, high-intensity workouts burn off glucose much faster than long runs, so you start burning fat at a much higher rate, your heart beats so hard that it becomes stronger, and you’re pushing yourself to such extremes that anything else you do feels easier.”
.. [I]n terms of sports performance, endurance training is no longer seen as the key to being a better athlete.
Now, I don’t agree with everything said there, but it’s a decent introduction to the idea.
For fighters, developing a bigger gas tank (IE having more fight endurance) is crucial. If you are considering fighting competitively, consider this: How long will you be fighting – total rounds, duration, and rest periods. Are your current workouts modeling the body workload and energy expenditure of a real fight?
If you’d like to ponder over endurance a bit more, I’d suggest reading a few articles at Gym Jones including Endurance V.2 Using Short, High Intensity Circuits and Intervals to Sharpen an Endurance Base and Strength for Endurance How Increasing Strength also Improves Endurance.
Interestingly enought, at the University of Utah, a friend of mine is beginning a study involving hypoxic training, ATP production and lactic acid thresholds. Essentially, try doing a round of shadow boxing/heavy bag hitting breathing through a snorkel and see how that effects you. Hopefully, this study will further develop a body of research to help fighters train better.
Tags: conditioning, mma conditioning, workouts
Between stand-up and ground fighting, there is clinching. Maybe you’re a judoka looking to improve your throws, or an MMA’er trying to beat strong wrestlers – maybe you just want to be able to disable relatives with a fierce bear hug. These exercises will improve your ability to gain, control, and break clinch positions.
Basically Speaking
Clinch control is about controlling and manipulating balance. Without it, your strikes lose power, throw attempts fail, and your opponent can take you down to the mat with ease. If I had to give a highbrow explanation, I’d say that balanced clinching comes from having a dynamically strong, rooted stances that allow for you to actively manipulate your opponent’s balance. As such, clinch control primarily relates to three strengths: leg power, core stability/sensitivity, and griping/pulling. Perhaps a judo master could expound more – I’ll ask Vladimir Putin about it.
But enough about that, lets get to exercises that develop muscular strength and skill to control the clinching positions.
Tire Flipping
Old-school and awesome. If you’ve never done them, make sure you read about the saftey pointers and proper technique from the guys over at EliteFTS here. They’re not deadlifts, and doing them like a deadlift can injure you. Don’t give up on deads, I think they’re great – just different.
The transfer of power from your legs helps you sprawl with strength, as well as push through a sprawl put on you, among other things.
Car Pushing
Again, old-school. This will help you get rooted and keep a good stance while working for clinches like “over/under control” (you have one under-hook and over-hook at the same time). Also, when you compete it is important to be able to drive your opponent back while clinched up. Once their back is on the ropes/cage, you can use that lack of mobility to your advantage.
If you have the access, train some drills with football linemen – the ones where they slam into each other and push right after the hike of the ball.
Crush Curls
I learned about this one over at the DragonDoor forums, and think this is a mighty nice exercise. Normally, I hate bicep curls, partially due to the immature fascination of body builders with the biceps and partially because bicep curls don’t translate really well to most sports and performance. These are a tad different.
They’re great to produce full body tension, which you need to keep your root and stance while struggling in clinches. Think about it – if you have great chest power from bench pressing, but while standing you can’t back up that strength with a rooted core body, you’ll just get pushed over to your back.
This curl can be done with medicine balls, kettlebells, or rocks. Anyway, Chris Smith describes the exact process of doing them in an article on EzineArticles.com,
To perform the kettlebell crush curl, you simply grasp the kettlebell on each side with a palms-facing grip. Squeeze as hard as you can, like you would with a box of valuables while moving. This will serve to keep the kettlebell from falling to the ground. I perform the kettlebell crush curl with the handle on top, this seems to be easier for me.
Starting at the bottom position, your elbows will be fully extended and the kettlebell should be in front of the thigh area. Keep your back straight throughout this exercise. While squeezing the kettlebell, slowly curl the kettlebell up. Pause at the top and lower the kettlebell in a controlled manner, all the while “crushing” the kettlebell.
Also, if you have shoulder or elbow problems, this curl is friendly to your joints.
Pull Ups
Pull ups are challenging – they engage a lot of muscles to do them right. As a general rule, MMA training exercises should be compound, multi-joint movements that incorporate many muscle groups and link them cohesively together, mimicking some specific movement from the sport ( isolation training is a no no!). You want to be able to use your body as a whole, integrated unit instead of a collection of parts.
Anyway… you can do these with either grip – as shown above or by gripping the bar palms facing you. The key to good pull ups is to keep stabilized and don’t cheat kinetically. Cheating is when you swing your knees to help you pull on the way up, or other such shenanigans.
If you can’t muster one full pull up yet, don’t fret. Over at The Art of Manliness blog, there’s a article on how to do more than one stinking pull up. If you look at the picture there, you’ll notice a fun variation that I give two thumbs up.
**Update**
Due to popular demand, I’ve put together a huge resource about pull ups called pull ups for fighters.
Beating Tires
Primarily, this exercise is used to gain rotational core strength. That core strength will help you pull opponents off balance and keep yourself rooted, not to mention it’ll help punching power. Fedor Emelianenko and his team, the Red Devils, beats the crap out of tires with sledgehammers – its a big part of their training. Enough said.
Suitcase Lift
The suitcase lift is like a deadlift, but you are only picking weight on one side of your body. It strengthens the core. Just like the photo, squat down like you’re sitting in a chair and drive with your hips on the the way up. Keep your shoulder girdle parallel to the floor – you should stand erect like you don’t have any weight in your hand. The opposite side obliques will be hit hard! Additionally, it can increase your grip strength.
Sand Bags
Oooo…. this is just the tip of the iceberg. You can shoulder carry and practice body slams, put it on the ground and do over head throws (like a back suplex), or just bear hug squeeze for all you’re worth. Front squats, turkish get ups, it doesn’t end. Also, you can use medicine balls.
One I enjoy is the partner drill where you are in sit up position (at the top), back to back, and pass off the medicine ball to the side to your partner. If you’ve got Pavel Tsatsouline’s book, Bullet Proof Abs, his combat twist is awesome too.
For further reading, I’d sugguest Pavel’s Naked Warrior and Randy Coutures Wrestling for Fighting.
Tags: clinch, conditioning