UFC 125 is only a couple of days away and Gray Maynard is looking to take the lightweight title away from Frankie Edgar.  Maynard as you know is the only fighter to have beaten Edgar in his career.  Both men are pretty evenly matched coming into this title fight.  Both are excellent mixed martial artists and both are well conditioned.

All week I have brining you strength and conditioning videos from many of the fighters on the card at UFC 125.  Today’s focus is on Gray Maynard.  In this video you will see Maynard using the Battle Ropes to perform some conditioning for his fight against Edgar.  You have seen myself use the Battle Ropes with many of my fighters as well as in my own training before.

The ropes have many benefits.   A combat athlete can use the rope to enhance their conditioning level.  To see for yourself put together a bunch of rope exercises in a circuit where you go for 30 seconds of work and 10 seconds rest and you will see how your heart rate is elevated in seconds.  Another great aspect of the rope is the development of power.  Some of these ropes can weigh 75 pounds or so and moving them the way Maynard does in the video shows how much power is needed.  If you watch Maynard you will see how explosive he is when doing the movements.  That is how explosive you should attempt to be when working with the rope.

The Battle Ropes are a great tool for training use them the right way and you will see your strength, power and conditioning go to another level.

As you have seen in the past on my site I give an inside look at some of the conditioning protocols I use with my fighters.  Be it in the weight room or out on the field you have seen protocols put together using different implements.

When I design these protocols I use the equipment at my disposal.

The object of the conditioning circuits are to challenge the fighter to be able to continue to exert power for a long period of time, very similar to the conditions they will see in a fight.  In designing these circuits I also like to make the training conditions much more difficult than what the fighter would see in the fight.  I have found that pushing the limits of the fighter during these conditioning sessions has a dramatic improvement in their conditioning. Also when they step onto the  Jiu-Jitsu mat or cage, conditioning is not an issue because they have trained harder than what the conditions are during the fight.   A note on recovery between sets, at the start I allow the fighters to take a little longer than a minute to recover, as we get closer to the fight recovery drops to a minute in between each circuit.  Mimicking the times in a fight goes a long way in challenging the fighter during training camp.

The following circuit was performed for five minutes for three sets. It incorporated the use of sledgehammer, battle ropes, an agility ladder and kettlebell cleans. The Kettle Bell cleans need a little fixing but as with anything with more reps comes perfection.  You do not need all this equipment to do this type of circuit training.  Be creative, use what you have and make the circuit challenging.  Remember it’s not what you have to train with its how you train.

Train Hard! Train Smart

Another gorgeous day this past Thursday and the boys from Staten Island, New York made it out for another training session. If you remember Mike Savarese is an aspiring MMA star and is currently training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu under Ricardo Almeida at RABJJ.
Last time I met with Mike we hit the weight room and then headed to the field for some speed and agility work.
After our first session I knew that Mike would be a future star in MMA. He is dedicated and trains hard with no complaints. And we all know in this day and age athletes like to complain. For this session we headed out to the field to train. Our focus was speed, agility and conditioning.
The first thing we started with was some speed drills. These drills are designed to place the athlete in accerleration position and to generate force off the ground. How does this transfer to MMA you may be asking, well after you are done with this post check out my post titled Usain Bolt v.s. GSP Part 1 and 2 http://bit.ly/cVCQTO http://bit.ly/au0RP After we hit the speed work we moved onto some agility drills, the first time I trained Mike in these drills he was not as fluid as I wanted him to be. He was very tense up top almost robotic. In this session he looked looser, his arm action when moving was vastly improved. Like I have been saying, I train my fighters to become better athletically and that will transfer into into being a better all round fighter. We also hit some work with mini-hurdles and there is more to come on that in a later post this week.
Finally we came down to the conditioning portion of the session. To start we worked some kettlebell swings into 100 yard sprints for three sets. And as his brother Patrick said while Mike was running, :Who knew he was that fast?” After the three sets we moved onto a circuit using, Battle Ropes, sledgehammers, and Medicine Balls. This time I increased the time on the circuit by thirty second, the last training session we had we did a three minute circuit. Increasing it slowly will increase Mike’s work capacity and increase his level of conditioning. So check out the video below, let us know what you think! Oh yeah sorry about the shaky movement of the camera I was trying to get down the field. Train Hard! Train Smart!

Having access to different implements for training purposes is really fun. Lucky for me I am able to train with some of these fun tools. Being a coach and also training in martial arts I find that these implements of strength and power are great for training fighters. We have seen and influx of trainers using these toys with their fighters to enhance their strength, power and conditioning.
The day that this conditioning circuit was filmed I actually did not have strength and conditioning session planned in my day. I was sitting around waiting for my evening Muay Thai session when a text message came in from my training partner. It read, “Want to flip tires?” Now how could I resist? Of course I wanted to go flip some tires. Then I thought to myself, “Wait a minute, I have a rope and sledgehammer in the car from training a fighter, I will use those as well to create a conditioning circuit.” So the 15-minute trip to the field I was devising a plan, lucky when I had arrived another person was training with us and he brought a medicine ball. This just added to the plan and the fun.
So when I arrived I warmed –up with some tire flips then laid out my plan. The plan was four stations. A tire station, a rope station, a med ball station and a sledgehammer station. Each person would pick a station to start at and work for forty-five seconds at each station. Now sometimes when you train you will always have to make adjustments. During conditioning this is no different. When I was doing the tire flips, I was just jumping on the tire with really no thought. Midway through I thought to myself that I could broad jump onto the tire and this way add a little plyometric work into the training session as well. In the video you will see a little annotation of when this thought pops into my head. After the tire flip I move on to the Battle Ropes. For this round I just did one exercise with the ropes in the following sets I switched up different exercises using the ropes, so you always have that option. After the ropes I hit the med-balls for some slams and followed it up with explosive pushups onto the medicine ball. Finally to finish off the circuit it was forty-five seconds of pounding the sledgehammer. You know it’s a good conditioning protocol when your training partner turns to you and tells you she hates you. My response, “Thank you!” Best of all I still made my Muay Thai class. Remember Train Hard! Train Smart!