Mixed martial arts Is among the most demanding sports you’ll ever do. It can take elite athleticism in conjunction with a never-ending volume of skills to learn in your MMA training.
Endurance
Fighting 3-5, 5 minute rounds, the sport calls for high levels of endurance from an athlete who is required to perform his lethal best from bell to bell.
In an era of high-intensity-interval-training (HIIT) and Tabata protocols, endurance can be an often overlooked facet of MMA training, but most likely one of the most necessary.
By endurance training we’re speaking about aerobic capacity, and this is developed by roadwork, swimming, bicycling or triathlons. These are just some pointers, but any activity performed in a 120-150 bpm range will build up your endurance ability, assuming that that activity is practiced for between 40-90 minutes.
The goal would be to have a resting heart-rate which is between 45-50 bpm. This is demonstration your body is efficient at utilising oxygen as energy and each heartbeat is delivering a substantial amount of oxygenated blood for your muscles.
Most fighters use traditional roadwork – or long slow distance (LSD) runs, to build up endurance. It is still common for a lot of fighters to get up on the crack of dawn and go for their a. m.. runs before MMA training fully begins. Such endurance work is actually perfect active recovery and primes your body for a day of work in the gym. Some fighters also employ roadwork in the evening, or would rather 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 up to 90 minutes 3 to 4 times a week. A heart rate monitor makes a great investment in seeking to improve endurance.
Anaerobic
As much as having a good aerobic base is the foundation of your athleticism, most of your time fighting will still be spent in the anaerobic zone. Anaerobic power relies on glycogen stores inside your muscles and liver to fuel your body.
These particular energy stores, while incredibly powerful, mainly last a couple of minutes before being used up. This is the reason you will often see a mma fighter throw a fast 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 as well as a selection of other short workouts which keep the heart rate between 150-171 bpm.
These are performed for short bursts of activity with short rest periods. As an illustration using one HIIT protocol, you may perform 30-40 seconds of hard sprinting alternated with 15-20 seconds of jogging or walking. Do this for 15-20 minutes.
The Tabata protocol is a lot more demanding and needs 20 seconds of strenuous activity which gets your heart to 170bpm, then 10 seconds rest for 20 minutes. Anaerobic training is certainly not for the feint hearted and is probably the hardest to endure for most aspiring combat athletes.
Strength
Strength can also be essential to MMA training. For the reason that grappling is such a crucial part of the sport, being able to manipulate, manoeuvre and control your adversary frequently depends upon sheer strength.
There are plenty of approaches to develop your strength, using barbells, bodyweight training, strong man training or even Olympic weight lifting.
The key to gaining efficiency in these facets requires training with resistance all the way to 90% of the amount of weight you may lift for one repetition, using short cycles of 3-5 reps for 5 sets.
This might include 3-5 hand-stand push-ups for 5 sets, or 3-5 standing presses for five sets. Resistance training is hard on your central nervous system which means you needs to have plenty of recovery between sets to ensure that you hit each set fully fresh. This could be between 3-5 minutes of rest between sets.
Barbell training is an easy to measure and accessible method to train strength. Stick with big compound moves that train your body proportionally using multiple muscles in sequence. The squat, bench press, deadlift and shoulder press or pull-ups are great.
The aim of the MMA fighter should be to develop strength such as you’ll be able to 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 consistently evolving sport and a range of unarmed combat disciplines have been integrated by many fighters – from karate to sambo and from judo to taekwondo.
No matter which disciplines you’re looking at to include in your own style, you must pay particular focus on three key elements of the sport – the striking, the grappling, and the submissions.
All fights start standing, and frequently end there. You will need to develop skill in striking, be able to deliver knockout blows, and have skillful footwork and hand speed to control the fight and throw combos at your challenger. Two of the most suitable striking arts directly applicable to MMA are Muay Thai and boxing – which generally form the basis of most MMA fighters striking skills. Some also incorporate taekwondo so that you can produce a less predictable striking style.
Grappling is also essential, and possibly the most dominant discipline in the sport. It’s essential to take control of your opponents body continuously, have the ability to fight in the clinch, control him against the cage and on the ground. The most beneficial skills to do this are wrestling – both freestyle and Greco-Roman, combined with judo and Russian sambo. These skills mean you can take your competitor to the floor if you want, or prevent him taking you down if you would rather fight standing.
A final skillset is submissions. Many may group this in with grappling, however the emphasis here is not simply controlling your opposition, but finishing the other guy and winning the fight. Brazilian jiu-jitsu (BJJ) is regarded as the predominant kind of submission fighting. It is a reliable martial art form that reigned over the sport of MMA in the early days. Catch wrestling can also be an alternative, but it is difficult to get good Catch wrestling schools.
However, it is not enough simply to be good at these skills. Its how you would put them together during your MMA training and transition between each part of the fight which truly distinguishes you as a mixed martial artist.