UFC Live on Versus is this Sunday and with a pretty good card to boot. Since I have not written for the site recently, this week I will feature some of the fighters MMA strength and conditioning training. The first person I will feature is Matt Mitrione. Mitrione takes on Christian Morecraft in a heavyweight battle. This TUF alum has really made a name for himself and is proving he belongs in the UFC. With each fight he has you see great improvement in his game.
In the video below produced by none other that Mitrione you will see how explosive this combat athlete really is. His strength coach combines plyometric hurdle hops with the twenty yard shuttle. Using track hurdles you see lower body explosiveness out Mitrione as he jumps over six hurdles. These hurdle hops help Mitrione generate force off the ground. Being able to generate alot of force of the ground will help combat athletes become more powerful strikers and help them have explosive takedowns. As soon as he finishes the hops he sprints to a set of three cones for the 20 yard shuttle. the 20 yard shuttle helps all kinds of athletes with their agility.
Separately these two exercise are great, when combined it adds a little conditioning element to it. My recommendation is to not go out and try this short combo of movements but to train them separately. work on your power using the hurdles but remember in order to do the hurdles you need to develop some kind of strength. As for the agility make sure when performing agility drills to get ample rest in between sets. They are agility drills intended to work on your agility not your conditioning.
Jun 21 2011
Matt Mitrione MMA Strength Training
Sep 07 2010
Hurdles and MMA
We all know that combat athletes need to be explosive. Developing a MMA or Jiu-Jitsu fighters lower body explosiveness is essential in developing an excellent fighter. Lower body explosiveness transfers over to punching, kicking, takedowns, sprawling and using your hips to escape from compromising positions. You get the point a fighter needs to be explosive and it explosiveness starts from the ground up.
Hurdle hops are a great way to develop this type of explosiveness. Before you run off to the local track and start doing these type of hurdle hops you must first develop some strength. Many athletes and especially martial artist sometimes ignore this fact and just jump into these plyometric type exercises without gaining strength. This usually leads to not doing the plyometric effectively and causing injury. A solid strength program with plyometrics incorporated into the program can lead to vast improvement in power production.
To start an athlete can use shorter hurdles to jump and progress to taller hurdles as they become more powerful. The objective during the hurdle hop is to reduce the ground contact time after each hop. Essentially a combat athlete wants to limit the amount of time that they are actually on the ground. As soon as your feet hit the ground you are jumping right over the next hurdle. Here are a few tips when performing the hurdle hop, one always stay on your toes, two use your arms to help you jump, just like a broad jump of vertical jump and three avoid staying on the ground to long in between jumps.
Remember this is a little more of an advanced plyometric make sure you progress as an athlete to this point to avoid injury. Train Hard! Train Smart!
Aug 11 2010
Power and Agility for MMA
Speed, agility and quickness are key essentials in any fighters program. These types of drills to improve speed and agility can turn the average fighter into a better athlete. So adding these drills into any program is a must.
Here is the thing and coaches out there should be careful especially with fighters. Fighters in my experience feel that every drill has to be conditioning. This is not the case especially when training speed, agility and quickness. You must make it clear to the athlete that these drills are designed to improve these different aspects of training. They are not meant as conditioning drills. Of course if you want to make them into conditioning protocols by all means reduce the rest time in between drills and go for it, no one is stopping you. Usually when I tell a fighter to perform the next set when they are ready they go to fast, so to combat this I now wait about two minutes before I tell them to perform the set.
Another thing that a coach or if you are training yourself that you want to be aware of is to perform these drills if possible before you strength and power work. So before you hit the weights perform your speed and agility drills. You want to make sure that you are a fresh as possible when performing the drills, this way you are fresh. You will move a lot faster than say if you lifted first and then performed the drills. These are just a few pointers to help fighters understand and learn how to train effectively.
In the drill below you will see one of my fighters Mike Savarese perform a drill using a hurdle. Mike jumps over the hurdle forward and backwards as quickly as possible, which helps with his quickness and agility and power. As an added bonus, Mike performs a sprawl after landing on the backend of the hops. This makes Mike have to react quickly as he lands off the hop and go right into a sprawl. Just a small way for the fighters out there to add a little combat sport component to this drill. In this video you will see normal hurdle hop followed by the MMA style hurdle hop.
Train Hard! Train Smart!
