Often the biggest problem facing fighters for strength & conditioning is what not to do.
Strength and conditioning for fighters is, by nature, ancillary to their actual training – it’s icing on the cake, not the cake itself. Our goal for all training, whether sparring, drilling, or lifting weights, is to perform better in an actual fight. For S&C, this means that there are a huge amount of potential things you could be doing, that would improve your physical fitness in some way or other, but that may not be relevant. In this case, all you’ll get from training is wasted time, effort & unnecessary fatigue.
This sounds like a deeper problem than it often is. For all but the most advanced athletes, effective strength and conditioning training does not have to be particularly complicated, and the pitfalls and errors people make usually take the form of the same few common problems & mistakes. This series of blogs will go through those common mistakes. I’ll explain the error, note any benefits or grain of truth, and suggest what you should do instead.
So with that said, let’s dive in.
You Are Not A Powerlifter
A big problem for fighters is that our training is usually multi-faceted. For MMA fighters, for example, they train wrestling, jiu-jitsu, striking, conditioning and strength all independently. This can make it very easy to stop seeing the woods for the trees and focus too much on one thing, to the detriment of overall performance.
This can be particularly problematic when it comes to strength training.
When we think of strength, our mind tends to pure strength sports, like powerlifting or strongman. 300kg deadlifts, 180kg bench presses, people lifting stones, axles, logs etc. There’s an immediate appeal to this kind of thing. It’s cool. It has its own technical, physical and mental challenges. The goal of getting to the largest number possible appeals to fighters’ competitive nature, and the idea of deadlifting insane amounts of weight or lifting crazy heavy objects appeals to our innate desire to prove ourselves.
Strength training is fun. The goal of getting to the largest number possible appeals to fighters’ competitive nature. And after all, we’re doing “Strength and Conditioning” here, aren’t we? Surely the goal is to become as strong as possible?
What Is Strength For Fighters?
Strength is a broad ass term, that’s often loosely defined if at all. It’s one of those things where “we know it when we see it”. A massive umbrella term covering a vast swathe of human potential.
An authoritative textbook on strength and conditioning (Supertraining by Mell Siff & Yuri Verkhoshansky) defines strength as:
the ability of a muscle or group of muscles to produce force under specific conditions.
This could mean potentially anything. For fighters, it will mean things like the ability to pick someone up, pin someone down, or throw knockout punches, kicks, knees etc.
This is generally either static strength (for pinning), strength endurance (think clinching or wall wrestling), or strength produced in short, fast bursts (striking).
While lifting 300kg off the floor might be cool, it bears little to no resemblance to any of those qualities in practice.
Powerlifters are concerned with maximal strength; how much force you can produce once and once only. Fights rarely if ever work in a way where we only need strength in one instance. Our goals are usually “power”, “repeat strength” or “strength endurance”. Increasing the amount of force we can produce quickly, over and over again.
Fights rarely if ever require the sheer levels of force you would need to win a powerlifting meet. In a sport that controls for weight classes, your opponent can ultimately only have so much mass for you to move around. Equally, opponents’ heads, necks torsos and limbs are all made of the same reasonably breakable stuff. If we have good technique and the ability to consistently sustain our strength, it just doesn’t take an insane amount of strength.
So What Is Strength Good For?
This all sounds a little like I’m badmouthing strength. I’m not. Strength is an essential part of the sport. What I am saying is you don’t need extreme levels of strength – ultimately you only need to be so strong.
If you find yourself being muscled around by people in your weight class, then chances are you need to get stronger. Often this is some of the lowest hanging fruit for fighters who have never strength trained. Beginners at strength training can see huge improvements in strength fairly easily. All it takes is consistent training with heavy weight a couple of times a week. Fighters I have worked with have seen significant improvements in strength that led to much better fight performance from just 8-12 weeks of strength training.
The Middle Point – Strength Standards For Fighters
The graph of this looks a little bit like an inverted U. If you’ve never strength trained, even a small gain will give you a big return performance-wise. As you get stronger, it takes more work to become stronger, and it translates to less of an improvement in your fighting.
Eventually, the amount of effort required to get stronger becomes too much to justify reasonably. Remember that as fighters we have limited resources in terms of time and effort, and the gruelling work to gain a little more strength means a sacrifice of time, effort and fatigue that would be better used on conditioning, technique or recovery.
To take the mystery out of this, I’m going to offer some strength standards for fighters. My source is I made them the fuck up. This isn’t based on scientific data but on my experience of working with athletes. Take it with a pinch of salt, but if you find yourself trying to shoot beyond these numbers, you might want to think hard about whether that’s a good use of time.
Strength Standards For MMA Fighters
- Squat – 2x Bodyweight
- Deadlift – 2.5x Bodyweight
- Bench – 1.5x Bodyweight
- Row – 1.25x Bodyweight
- Clean – 1.25x Bodyweight
Conclusion – What You Should Be Doing
Bearing in mind everything above, here’s a quick and easy set of guidelines to follow:
- The further away you are from fighting, the more time and effort you can devote to heavy strength training. Even off-camp, this usually would mean around 2 sessions a week, with 3 as an absolute upper limit. Any more will detract time and effort from more useful forms of training
- The closer you get to camp, the less you should focus on heavy strength training, the more time and effort should be devoted to power work and fight-specific conditioning
- The strength standards above are upper limits, not strict targets. These are not some prerequisite points you need to be at, they’re the points at which you will see little to no return in your fight training. If you can do around two-thirds of those numbers, you can still strength train, but chances are you’re plenty strong for fighting.
