You may have (read:never) wondered what my dreams and aspirations may be.  Recently, I had this crazy dream where Steven Seagal was lecturing a group of NBA players on martial arts – all the while playing ping pong with one arm because his other was holding a basketball signed by Lebron James.  He was actually kicking butt at both the ping pong and the lecture – I’ve set a goal to be as baller as dream-Seagal.

The point? I have bizarre dreams and so do you: you want to become a professional fighter. And I think that’s awesome. I know enough about the sport and profession to dissuade most interested persons from pursuing a career in fighting … but you know what?   If you have the spark to go for it, DO IT.  Dreams are a starting point of greatness; they’re an itch that need to be scratched.

What about the fear of failure? What if  you’re not cut out for life in the pros?

So what? Who gives a crap?

Sure, you’ll get knocked out and choked out and tired out from trying – but you’ll be more hardcore than 99.9% of the couch-dwelling mouth-breathers out there.

Your dream is a starting point to a journey and not every dream is the finial destination.  If the dream wasn’t exactly where you wanted to go,  maybe you’ll discover a better-suited goal along the way. Or maybe you find that your dream is exactly where you want to go.

Either way, I’d like to see more people set sail into the deep water.  Enough with the second guessing and the excuses.

Go out there, do your thing, see what happens.

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.