more from my friend, Bud Jeffries

I've spent a lot of time in the last year or two training MMA type
fighters and thinking about what they should be doing. Drawing
from my own experience and that of others and experimenting on the
guys I train and on myself. I've also surveyed the landscape of
what passes for strength and conditioning for most people in the
MMA and Martial Arts worlds. I'm going to be frank with you about
my conclusions. It's a mixed bag with which about 10% is really
excellent and leads the way for the rest. Another 10% is okay but
is often stuck in so much traditionalism that they "get by" but
aren't even close to what they could be. The remaining 80% is pure
junk. At best - time wasting useless and at worst downright
counterproductive. Here are some of the biggest mistakes in this
training.

1) No real strength work - Steve Bacarri said that what most
fighters use for strength training is really just conditioning
work. This couldn't be truer. For some reason most fighters are
convinced it's bad to lift heavy things. Their sessions are all
high reps clinging to old myths about strength work making you slow
and muscle bound. That's crap. In fact it limits their total
physical potential in fighting as well as endurance and injury
prevention. At some point technique and endurance will equal out
and strength will be the missing component.

2) Over repletion of effort - This plays right along with mistake
number one. Lots of real MMA (especially competitive guys) and
martial arts guys are workaholics when it comes to training and in
some ways rightly so. Almost no other sport takes as much total
time and effort to properly prepare for. It requires a
tremendously wide variety of skills that require great deal to
learn. That leads to multiple sessions a day (often) to learn and
practice what you need to do. Strength work however follows
different rules especially when mixed with the necessary endurance
work and total volume of training. There isn't a limit of how
strong you should get but there is appoint of diminishing returns
about how often and how much strength and conditioning work you
should do. You probably need to drill techniques with lots of
volume almost daily but you can't do the same with strength and
conditioning. Doing that training more or more often won't get you
stronger or fitter faster. When your program is built correctly
you'll get strong fast, but doubling it doesn't make it happen
faster. The body adapts as fast as it can and no faster.

3) Not considering the whole enchilada - Again this plays in with
the previous points. Often the training programs for MMA guys are
Frankensteined together by taking whole or nearly whole programs
from other sports and simply slapping them together without any
real thought to how they mix or contradict each other. The athlete
is just expected to recover from the programs of a bodybuilder,
endurance athlete, boxer and grappler together. It's often too
much. When you've got to train for all the above points and make
it work simultaneously you've got to pare down to the really
important and effective things and say no to the rest. Everything
needs to have a legitimate reason for being in your program and if
it doesn't then most likely its taking away from the important
things. For example your legs will get as strong as possible from
just a few properly done sets of heavy barbell squats. Four more
exercises in the same workout or training cycle pointed toward leg
strength is wasting time you could be using to recover, heal or be
practicing actual fighting and not actually adding to your
strength. How then can you justify them in your program?


God bless,
Bud Jeffries