A guide to MMA training
Mixed martial arts Is regarded as the most demanding sports you’ll ever do. It will take elite athleticism as well as a never-ending volume of skills to learn as part of your MMA training.
Endurance
Fighting 3-5, 5 minute rounds, the sport needs high amounts of endurance from an athlete who might be required to perform his dangerous best from bell to bell.
In an era of high-intensity-interval-training (HIIT) and Tabata protocols, endurance is definitely an often overlooked facet of MMA training, but probably one of the most necessary.
By endurance training we are speaking about aerobic capacity, and this is developed by roadwork, swimming, bike riding or triathlons. These are merely a few recommendations, but any activity performed in a 120-150 bpm range will develop your endurance ability, so long as that activity is performed for between 40-90 minutes.
The goal is to possess a resting heart-rate which is between 45-50 bpm. This is demonstration that your body is efficient at utilising oxygen as energy and every heartbeat is delivering a great deal of oxygenated blood for your muscles.
Most fighters use common roadwork – or long slow distance (LSD) runs, to build up endurance. It is common for many fighters to wake up with the crack of dawn and go for their morning runs before MMA training actually begins. Such endurance work is good active recovery and primes your body for a day of work in the gym. Some fighters also use roadwork at night, or would prefer to swim, ride a bike, or skip or shadowbox instead. The key is to target the 120-150 bpm heart range, and remain in that range for as much as 90 minutes 3 or 4 times weekly. A heart monitor is a good investment in needing to maximise 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 energy depends on glycogen supplies inside your muscles and liver to fuel your body.
These kinds of energy reserves, though incredibly powerful, mainly last a couple of minutes prior to being exhausted. Which is why you will frequently see a competitor 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 easiest way to train anaerobic capacity is using HIIT, Tabata protocols including a number of other short workouts which keep heartrate between 150-171 bpm.
These are typically performed for brief bursts of activity with short rest periods. For instance 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 far 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 also most likely the hardest to endure for the majority of aspiring MMA athletes.
Strength
Strength is also vital to MMA training. For the reason that grappling is such an important part of the sport, the capacity to manipulate, manoeuvre and control your competitor sometimes depends upon sheer strength.
There are various 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 of up to 90% of the amount of weight you may lift for 1 repetition, using short cycles of 3-5 repetitions for five sets.
This may include 3-5 hand-stand push-ups for 5 sets, or 3-5 standing presses for 5 sets. Strength training is hard on your central nervous system and that means you should have plenty of recovery between sets to ensure that you hit each set fully fresh. This might be between 3-5 minutes rest between sets.
Barbell training is a simple to measure and accessible route to train strength. Stick to big compound moves that train the body proportionally utilizing multiple muscles in sequence. The squat, bench press, deadlift and shoulder press or pull-ups are perfect.
The goal of the MMA fighter should be to develop strength such as it is possible 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 continuously developing sport and a range of unarmed combat disciplines have been incorporated by many fighters – from karate to sambo and from judo to taekwondo.
Regardless of which disciplines you’re considering to incorporate in your own style, you need to pay particular attention to three key areas of the sport – the striking, the grappling, and the submissions.
All fights start standing up, and frequently end there. You will have to develop skill in striking, be capable 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 frequently form the basis of most MMA fighters striking skills. Some also incorporate tae kwon do so that you can produce a less predictable striking style.
Grappling will also be essential, and possibly the most dominant discipline in the sport. You need to control your opponents body at all times, be ready to fight in the clinch, control him up against the cage as well as on the ground. The best skills for this are wrestling – both freestyle and Greco-Roman, along with judo and Russian sambo. These skills let you take your mma fighter to the floor if you want, or stop him taking you down in the event you opt to fight standing.
A final skillset is submissions. Many could lump this along with grappling, however the emphasis here is not simply controlling your opponent, but finishing your opponent and winning the fight. Brazilian jiu-jitsu (BJJ) is a very superior type of submission fighting. This is a very effective martial art style which dominated the sport of MMA in the early days. Catch wrestling can also be another option, however it is difficult to find good Catch wrestling schools.
Nonetheless, it is not sufficient purely to be good at these skill-sets. Its how well you put them together with your MMA training and transition in between each aspect of the fight which truly differentiates you as a mixed martial artist.