An excerpt from “Ultimate MMA Conditioning”…
No matter whether you’ve only had a couple of fights or you’re a seasoned veteran in the fight game, you know that getting ready for a fight is one of the most mentally and physically challenging things you can ever put yourself through. Not only do you have to work to fine tune your technical skills and develop a strategic game plan, but you also have to get yourself in the best possible condition so you can be prepared to fight.
There is little doubt conditioning often plays a role in the outcome of a fight and the last thing you ever want to do is feel yourself starting to gas while your opponent is coming on stronger. Regardless of your individual ability, training experience or opponent you might face, the right fight specific conditioning program will help you be as physically prepared as possible when you step in the ring or cage. Just the same, a poorly designed or executed conditioning program can leave you ill prepared, sucking wind, and vulnerable to an opponent who is better conditioned.
Win or lose, the only thing you can really have total control of in a fight is how well prepared you are for it. I can guarantee that if you follow the basic principles and strategy laid out for you in this chapter, you will square up against your opponent knowing you did everything possible to get yourself physically ready to fight.
Principles of Specific Conditioning
To begin the discussion on developing fight specific conditioning programs, it’s imperative to start by making sure you’re clear on what getting in “fight shape” is really all about in the first place.
The following principles will give you an overview on the specific conditioning process and how you should go about preparing for a fight. Your conditioning program leading up to a fight should always follow all of these fundamental principles and guidelines.
Principle #1: You should never be completely out of shape
As I touched on in previous chapters, the last weeks before a fight is not the time go from being totally out of shape and poorly conditioned, to being ready for the grueling demands of a fight. Far too many have this idea that it is okay to be in relatively poor condition in between fights and that getting ready for a fight is just a matter of doing some extra cardio work.
This approach is exactly why fighters often gas out and end up face down on the canvas. It is also the same reason why certain fighters never seem to get better over time and basically look the same in every fight. You should consider fight specific conditioning simply as the natural extension of the general strength and conditioning work that you’re doing year round.
Principle #2: Specific conditioning bridges the gap between general conditioning and a fight
Your conditioning program in the weeks leading up to a fight should not be designed to just get you in shape, it should be designed to teach your body how to take the energy production you are capable of, and specifically apply it to the demands of fighting. You should look at the MMA technical side of the equation leading up to a fight in much the same way. If it’s three weeks out from a fight and you’re working on learning completely new MMA skills you’ve never trained before, you’re in big trouble.
Getting ready for a fight is not the time to learn new skills, it’s the time to put all the skills together that you have developed through your training, and work on applying them within the context of a specific game plan. Remember, your skills are ultimately only as good as your ability to use them in an actual fight. You can be the most technical fighter in the world when it comes to hitting pads and heavy bags, but if you can’t use this technical ability in an actual fight then it doesn’t do you any good.
Along those same lines, your fight specific training program needs to build on the energy system development you’ve trained so hard for and make sure you can use this development up to its maximum potential in a fight. There is nothing worse than feeling like you had a great training camp and you’re in great shape only to end up completely gassing out in the second round, wondering what went wrong. This is the difference between general conditioning and specific conditioning and this is where a lot of fighters make mistakes in their training.
Principle #3: Specific conditioning must be as specific to your fight as possible In order to make sure you’re able to use every last ounce of energy your body is capable of producing, your fight specific conditioning program needs to be exactly as the name implies and “specific to your fight.”
The closer you get to your fight, the more specific it should become. This means that rather than spending all your time and energy doing general exercises like sprinting or strength training and such for conditioning, you should be focusing on specific exercises like MMA technical drills and live sparring. Although there is a time and place for using methods and exercises that aren’t completely specific to MMA while getting ready for a fight, everything you do must serve the purpose of preparing you for your fight.
You should not be 3-4 weeks out from a fight and working on improving your max strength, for example. Not only do you not have enough time left to really see much of an improvement, but this type of training will take away time, energy, and adaptation that your body needs to be focused on the specific needs of your fight. Far too often, I see fighters wasting time and energy trying to train something that there is just not enough time to really improve.
Leave this type of developmental training to another time when you don’t have an upcoming fight and you have enough time to really concentrate on it properly. Specific conditioning requires you to focus all your training efforts on the specific needs of your fight.
The closer you get to the fight, the more time you must spend in training trying to match the work rate and round structure of your fight. If you remember back to the discussion on the brain and nervous systems role in fatigue, it’s clear that the most effective way to maximize your energy production in a fight is to simulate the exact energy system demands as close as possible.
In order to do this, you have to use the same round length, rest intervals, and total fight duration in training. If you are going to be fighting for 3×5 minute rounds with 60s of rest between rounds, then you need to start building your training sessions around this structure and matching this work: rest ratio. Later, we’ll discuss how to do this properly.
Principle #4: Test and Track Your Conditioning Heart Rates
This is a very important principle that I rarely see anyone implementing in their fight prep process. While using heart rate monitoring in your conditioning is not a completely foolproof or 100% precise gauge of conditioning, it does provide you with a very good overall objective feedback tool that you can use to measure progress Without any specific analysis, you are essentially just going by subjective measures of how your conditioning “feels” and this can be deceiving.
Using a heart rate monitor is an absolute must. You should use your heart rate monitor in two ways. First, you should be using it in your conditioning specific drills as a feedback tool to monitor heart rate recovery time. You should use specific heart rates, as suggested in the sections on energy system development, as your guide to when to begin the next set. Second, you should be using your heart rate monitor to get a gauge for your specific conditioning by measuring average heart rate, max heart rate, heart rate recovery between rounds or sets, etc.
When your heart rate comes down faster or you can maintain the same work rate at a lower average heart rate, it is a clear indication your conditioning is improving. If you have my suggested heart rate monitor for MMA, the Polar RS100, you can use it to generate fight specific profiles of your sparring rounds. The reason I highly recommend this specific heart rate monitor is because it gives you a lap function and this allows you to keep track of average and max heart rate for each round or set you do.
From there, you can use this information to build graphs in excel that give you a profile of your heart rates profile. In the graph below, you can see an example of what one of these heart rate profiles look like. From the Polar watch, you will want to record and write down the max heart rate and average heart rates in each round and rest interval, as well as what the heart rates were at the time you pressed the lap button.
As your conditioning improves, you will see your average heart rates per round going down, as well as your heart rate recovery improving between rounds. Later, we’ll discuss the details of this further, but the important thing is that you take the time to use a heart rate monitor and track all the information it gives. This is an essential part of making sure you’re ready to fight.
Summary
Getting ready for a fight can be extremely challenging but anyone who has ever fought before and gotten the win knows all the hard work and hours spent in the gym are worth it when you’re standing at the end with your hand raised. Making sure you are in the best shape of your life when you step into the ring or cage will go a long way towards making sure you have the energy to use all the MMA skills you’ve spent so long working on.
Nothing is worse than feeling like you lost a fight to a less skilled opponent simply because you gassed. In order to make sure this doesn’t happen to you, the best place to start when designing your conditioning program in the weeks leading up to the fight is with the four principles above.
They may seem like common sense, but I’ve seen many programs over the years, even some being used by well known pros, that failed to follow one or more of these important principles. Follow all four of these principles in the weeks leading up to your fight and I guarantee the only one who will be gassing will be your opponent.
For more specific information and everything you need to know to get right ready, make sure to check out Ultimate MMA Conditioning