MMA Conditioning Part 2

MMA Conditioning Part 2

In the previous installment of our MMA conditioning series we looked at increasing VO2 max to improve aerobic fitness. In this instalment we’re going to focus on muscular endurance.

Muscular endurance is basically the measure of ability your muscles have to continue contracting and working over an extended period of time. Obviously this is going to help with MMA, I almost don’t feel it’s necessary to explain why it’s important to train for muscular endurance, but I will.
Think about throwing your punches, your kicks, grappling for takedowns – the amount of time you will spend contracting muscles, especially in a prolonged grappling exchange, is going to be pretty massive. If you don’t have the endurance to continue that muscular contraction, well you’re going to get put on your ass, frankly. So it’s pretty important.

As I’m sure you will know, training for muscular endurance is going to boil down to ensuring you’re contracting your muscles for an extended period of time, so you’re looking at rep ranges of 20+ (generally regarded as ideal for muscular endurance – Campos, et al., 2002) in weight-bearing exercise. This is the sort of rep-range most trainers will have their athletes work in, and they will often introduce them in the form of circuits and circuit training. Now this is a perfectly acceptable way to do things, and if that’s how you’re going to choose to work on your muscular endurance then that absolutely will work for you. My suggestions for implementing this would be to tailor the workout to whatever specific goal you’re trying to achieve in your periodized plan, for instance:

Boxing Speed Circuit – 20 reps per exercise, 1 minute rest once the whole circuit is complete; 5 total rounds.

• ·         Resistance-band press-ups
• ·         Bench press
• ·         Cable oblique twist
• ·         Resistance-band punch press
• ·         Med ball throws

Another way to look at training for muscular endurance, however, would be to look at the energy systems you are engaging when working for this goal – anaerobic glycolysis and oxidative. For those who don’t know, anaerobic glycolysis is essentially the medium power/medium duration energy system that is used once the ATP-PC system has run its course, and the oxidative energy system is the system that kicks in once results continue to decline, it’s a low power/long duration energy system. That’s a pretty basic way of looking at it, but that’ll do for the purposes of this short article.
Essentially, muscular endurance means working for 45+ seconds at <60% of 1RM, which will, to put it simply, tread the line between your anaerobic glycolysis and oxidative energy systems.
So with this in mind, it may also be worth considering using time as a way in which to measure your workout, as opposed to rep ranges which can be misleading. If you’re going to use time then you’ll want to push each exercise to, or beyond, 45 seconds. So using the same example as above, instead of doing the set amount of reps on each exercise in the circuit, you would simply work for 45 seconds for each exercise, and then once the exercises are complete you have your rest  and then resume as normal.
Some people espouse the use of higher-resistance type exercises at a lower speed when working for a specified duration of time, as they state this lowers the risk of injury, and this could work for you – utilising things like bench press, push press, etc.
I personally wouldn’t utilise this method of training for muscular endurance because utilising an anaerobic exercise, such as high-resistance bench press, for a long period of time will just be too taxing for the body and could actually inhibit the development of muscular endurance you would be trying to get.

Well, that’s enough for now - I’ll be putting up the next article soon enough and then tying it all together with an example of how to make a training schedule that brings it all together for your athletic conditioning goals!

See you next time…

References

Campos, G, Luecke, T., Wendeln, H., Toma, K., Hagerman, F., Murray, T., Ragg, K., Ratamess, N., Kraemer, W., & Staron, R. 2002. Muscular adaptations in response to three different resistance-training regimens: specificity of repetition maximum training zones. European Journal of Applied Physiology, 88, pp.50-60.