A guide to MMA training
Professional level of skill MMA training
Training for mma Is one of the most demanding sports you’ll ever do. It entails elite athleticism in addition to an endless range of skills to master during your MMA training.
Endurance
Fighting 3-5, 5 minute rounds, the sport requires high levels of endurance from an athlete who may be required to perform his deadly best from bell to bell.
In an era of high-intensity-interval-training (HIIT) and Tabata methods, endurance is surely an often overlooked aspect of MMA training, but possibly one of the most essential.
By endurance training we’re talking about aerobic capacity, and this is developed by roadwork, swimming, bicycling or triathlons. These are just some tips, but any activity performed within a 120-150 bpm range will build up your endurance ability, provided that that activity is carried out for between 40-90 minutes.
The target should be to have a resting heart-rate of between 45-50 bpm. This is demonstration that your body is efficient at utilising oxygen as energy and every heartbeat is delivering a large amount of oxygenated blood to your muscles.
Most fighters use regular roadwork – or long slow distance (LSD) runs, in order to produce endurance. It’s still common for many fighters to get up with the crack of dawn and go for their morning runs before MMA training actually begins. Such endurance work is actually excellent active recovery and primes the body for a day of work in the gym. Some fighters also use roadwork later in the day, or choose to swim, ride a bike, or skip or shadowbox instead. The key is to target the 120-150 bpm heart range, and stay in that range for approximately 1 hour 30 minutes three or four times each week. A heart monitor makes a great investment in hoping to maximise endurance.
Anaerobic
As much as having a good aerobic base is the foundation of your athleticism, most of your time competing will still be spent in the anaerobic zone. Anaerobic power relies upon glycogen reserves within your muscles and liver to fuel your body.
These types of energy stores, even though extremely powerful, just last a couple of minutes before being drained. Which is why you will often see a mma fighter throw a short flurry of punches and then gas out. It is then up to the aerobic energy system to break down fatty tissue and refuel the muscles with glycogen.
The simplest way to train anaerobic capacity is employing HIIT, Tabata protocols and also a variety of other short workouts which keep the heartrate between 150-171 bpm.
These are performed for brief bursts of activity with short rest periods. For example using one HIIT protocol, you can perform 30-40 seconds of hard sprinting alternated with 15-20 seconds of jogging or walking. Do that for 15-20 minutes.
The Tabata protocol is all the more demanding and needs 20 seconds of intense activity which gets your heart to 170bpm, then 10 seconds rest for 20 minutes. Anaerobic training is definitely not for the feint hearted and is most likely the hardest to endure for most aspiring combat athletes.
Strength
Strength can also be crucial to MMA training. For the reason that grappling is such an important part of the sport, having the capability to manipulate, manoeuvre and control your competitor frequently is dependent on sheer strength.
There are various methods to develop your strength, using barbells, bodyweight training, strong man training or even Olympic weight lifting.
The true secret to gaining efficiency in these aspects requires training with resistance all the way to 90% of the amount of weight you may lift for 1 repetition, using short cycles of 3-5 repetitions for 5 sets.
This may include 3-5 hand-stand push-ups for 5 sets, or 3-5 standing presses for five sets. Strength training is hard on your central nervous system so you needs to have a good amount of recovery between sets to make sure you hit each set fully fresh. This might be between 3-5 minutes of rest between sets.
Barbell training is an easy to measure and accessible approach to train strength. Use big compound moves that train your body proportionally making use of multiple muscles in sequence. The squat, bench press, deadlift and shoulder press or pull-ups are perfect.
The objective of the MMA fighter should be to develop strength such as you may squat 1.5-2 x bodyweight, bench press your 1.25-1.5 x bodyweight, deadlift 2-2.5 x bodyweight, and perform 10 pull-ups with 20kg of extra weight attached.
Skills
MMA is a perpetually growing sport and a number of unarmed combat disciplines have been incorporated by many fighters – from karate to sambo and from judo to taekwondo.
No matter which disciplines you’re considering to add to your own style, you need to pay particular focus on three key parts of the sport – the striking, the grappling, and the submissions.
All fights start standing up, and they sometimes end there. You need to develop skill in striking, be able to deliver knockout blows, and have adept footwork and hand speed to control the fight and throw combos at your opponent. Two of the best striking arts directly applicable to MMA are Kick Boxing and boxing – which often make up the foundation of most MMA fighters striking skills. Some also incorporate taekwondo in an effort to produce a less predictable striking style.
Grappling will also be essential, and probably the most dominant discipline within the sport. You must control your opponents body constantly, have the ability to fight in the clinch, control him against the cage as well as on the ground. The most beneficial skills for this purpose are wrestling – both freestyle and Greco-Roman, together with judo and Russian sambo. These skills permit you to take your fighter to the floor if you want, or prevent him taking you down should you choose to fight standing up.
A final skillset is submissions. Many may group this along with grappling, but the emphasis here’s not merely controlling your competitor, but finishing your opponent and winning the fight. Brazilian jiu-jitsu (BJJ) is among the most prominent form of submission fighting. It is a effective martial art form that dominated the sport of MMA in the early days. Catch wrestling can also be another option, but it is difficult to find good Catch wrestling schools.
Nonetheless, it is not adequate just to be a master at these skillsets. Its how you put them together within your MMA training and transition between each aspect of the fight which truly separates you as a mixed martial artist.