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Not only that, but more muscle especially in the lower body provides you with a lower center of gravity, which means that you will be more likely to dictate where the fight is going to take place. Think of your muscle as armor, protecting your body from nasty injuries.
The more muscle you have, the more armor you have protecting you. Like it or not, weight cutting is a part of combat sports.
More muscle gives a fighter the opportunity to outweigh his opponent sometimes by a significant amount come the night of the fight. The reality with these situations is that you can have a significantly heavier guy, who cuts weight really well, facing a guy that walks around daily at the weight of his division, and on fight night there could be lbs of difference between them.
GSP is reported to have his walk around weight being near on 20lbs heavier than his weigh in weight. They all cut significant amounts of weight to ensure that they stay at the top of their weight division, and never allow another fighter to have a weight advantage.
The role of the strength and conditioning coach for a combat athlete is to perform a needs analysis in which both the fighter as an individual and the sport itself. But here is an exceptionally important point that often gets lost when combat sport athletes do a strength training program: his sport is grappling.
Remember, as as coach, your goal is always to make them a better fighter - it just so happens that sometimes this means packing on the pounds. Resistance training phase or metabolic circuits 5. We train movements, not muscles. Because this is a sport of weight classes, relative body strength and endurance are paramount.
Obviously, technique is an important piece. They may have a marketing meeting at 8: When putting these MMA type workouts together, we must keep this important point in mind. They can be challenging, inspiring, and fun as long as we keep in mind that safety is first and foremost in our approach. Regardless of level and background, we include the same phases that we use with our professional athletes see the five phases listed above. The movements and intensity level will vary from our professionals.
Vertical push, vertical pull, quad dominant and horizontal push, horizontal pull, hip dominant 30—35 minutes. The purpose of this article was to give you a brief look inside the growing trend of strength and conditioning for the MMA athlete. I hope you finish with a little insight into this rapidly growing sport. As I continue to research and experience, I will be sure to pass more information along.
My philosophy for strength and conditioning program design and not just for fighters is based on 3 principles that come in a clear hierarchy of importance. Namely, these principles are:. Strength and conditioning is supposed to be a means of general physical preparation GPP with the aim of developing and managing traits that will feed back into the performance of your sport in a positive manner. As such, perhaps the most important foundational principle to start from is weighing up of the risk of potential injury with the potential reward of doing a given intervention.
This concept would apply to factors such as exercise selection, exercise range of motion, the technique employed, etc. He is cleared by his physiotherapist to train as normal in martial arts, as there are no plans for surgery and the joint structure itself will not get any better. He is small for his weight class and wants to get stronger so that he can better deal with his bigger opponents.
When it comes to program design, the first port of call is to take a mile-high-view; taking factors in account such his training history, how often he can train in the gym, his mobility restrictions, his overall training schedule etc.
Once the basic structure of the plan is in place, it is time to select the exercises that will be used to stimulate the training adaptations we desire. As part of the program it is decided to include some horizontal pressing variation. This is because the inherent nature of the movement means that the floor decreases the range of movement and keeps his shoulder in pain-free ranges. Of course, simply avoiding full range of motion pressing is not a desired long-term goal.
In an ideal scenario we want athletes working through full ranges of motion at least some of the time and they have potent effects that partial ranges cannot offer. So as we were to work together with this athlete over the longer-term, the ability to bench press over a full range may eventually be reached as the strength and stability of the shoulder improves.
But as this is not the case right now, we need to work to get the most out of what we have in front of us. We need to meet the athlete where they are at.
Taking this context-specific decision making process, we select the floor press at this time point, so that we do not aggravate his shoulder in the gym thereby taking him off the mats. But here is an exceptionally important point that often gets lost when combat sport athletes do a strength training program: And so getting better at the barbell bench press specifically is not the priority; being better able to bend opponents limbs and strangle people is.