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.

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.

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.