Perhaps you’ve heard this quote before.
When I was in university, I was enrolled in the co-op program, which means you alternate
between one term of school and one term on a work placement.
I spent two placements at the Ontario Police College, where new recruits go
for 12 weeks of intense training.
My role was as a Physical Training Instructor, where I led workout classes,
runs and helped the cops get in top shape (only to lose it by eating pounds
of donuts and downing gallons of coffee once they graduated).
There was an instructor there who was a pro bodybuilder named Rudy.
He was in his 40’s, but JACKED.
I mean JACKED. This dude was huge.
I used to ask him how to train to get bigger, since that was my main goal at the time.
He actually didn’t tell me too much, but he said one thing that has always stuck with me, “Less is
more.”
Less is more.
That’s what this 240 lb bodybuilder gave me as muscle building advice.
I guess he used that philosophy for giving advice too!
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Anyway, I trusted him and his results spoke for themselves, so I made a leap of faith and took it
to heart, since it was the opposite of what I’d believed up until then.
My workouts shortened to 30 minutes from 60 minutes.
I worked one body part per workout, 5 days a week.
And after being stuck around 168 lbs, I reached 175 lbs by the end of the term.
All by following those 3 simple words!
So how does this apply to your strength and conditioning workouts?
Well it’s quite simple, really.
First of all, if you’re doing more than 3 days/week of strength and conditioning, you’re wasting
your time and energy and you’re not progressing as fast as you could be in your MMA skill
development (depending on the phase, 2 or 3 days/week is optimal).
I can tell you this for a fact because I know that the human body can only adapt and learn so
much at a given time.
So if you’re pushing yourself in your weight training and conditioning workouts more than 3
days/week, your body will be adapting to those workouts as opposed to developing the
neuromuscular patterns needed for efficient strikes, submissions, takedowns, etc.
Secondly, if you’re trying to develop more than 2 or 3 physical abilities in your workouts, your
body won’t know what to do.
The easiest example is if you’re trying to get as strong as possible, yet you’re also trying to run a
marathon.
Obviously you can’t do both at the same time and trying to do so will only confuse the body and
you’ll quickly hit a plateau at which point nothing improves anymore.
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What I’ve seen a lot of is that because MMA is such a complex sport, guys will try to train their
anaerobic conditioning, aerobic conditioning, maximal strength, explosive strength, agility,
quickness, recovery, etc. all in a single workout!
[Note: for a comprehensive list of the physical qualities needed in MMA, click here]
This is the ultimate confusion and if you don’t get hurt trying to do too much at once, you’ll
plateau sooner rather than later.
So what’s the solution?
I can sum it up in one word – PERIODIZATION.
Periodization is the specific structuring of different phases of
training, where each phase builds on the previous phase to reach
an ultimate goal – in your case, to peak explosiveness and power
endurance for a fight, all while avoiding hitting a plateau, injuries
and overtraining.
Even if you’re not competing, you still must incorporate
periodization in your strength and conditioning program to make
continued progress and avoid plateaus and injuries.
In each phase, you’ll focus on different abilities using different
exercises that will set your body up to make maximal gains in the next phase.
For example, farther away from a fight or soon after you’ve already fought, I often recommend a
phase that I call Base Conditioning.
In Base Conditioning, your resistance training workouts are focused on muscular strength
endurance, joint, ligament and tendon health so that when you progress to the Strength phase,
you won’t encounter any injuries.
This is just one example of the logic behind periodization and how it ensures you make continued
progress, avoid overtraining and peak at the right time.