Saturday night Dana White is giving us all a free UFC event on Versus. The card is pretty stacked, and if you are a big fan of the UFC you have been itching for the last month for some octagon action. The main event of the card is Jon Jones taking on Vladimir Matyushenko in the light heavyweight division. This can be a big stepping-stone for Jon Jones young career as many see him as the future champion of the division. With all that raw talent and youth on his side I tend to believe this as well. Jones is a pure athlete and the future of the sport.
Also on the card Mark Munoz will be taking on veteran Yushin Okami. Last April Munoz had a great come from behind victory over Kendall Grove defeating him with some vicious ground and pound. Munoz like Jones is a rising star in the UFC. Munoz is still going through some of the growing pains as all fighters do but he is well on his way up the ladder and becoming a serious contender in the near future.
As a treat for the site I was able to find some of Munoz’s strength and conditioning training. In this video he is doing a ten-minute non-stop conditioning circuit. In the circuit Mark is wearing a weighted vest. In this circuit you will see all different types of training going on. Each exercise is done for thirty-seconds. The circuit includes: speed and agility training, you will see him testing his core with medicine ball tosses, he performs plyometrics in the circuit to develop explosive power sledgehammers swings and some fight specific movements that you will see throughout the protocol such as ground and pound. So sit back and enjoy the next ten minutes and wish you were doing the circuit.

We are a little less than a week away from the UFC on Versus. The card is pretty good and since the last PPV I have been waiting patiently for some MMA. The main event on this card is Jon Jones going up again Vladamir Matyushenko. I am looking forward to this match up. I want to see Jones and his awesome athletic ability in the octagon. He never disappoints in a fight.
So since I love MMA and I love strength and conditioning, I am trying my best, even though they are hard to come by, to find video of the fighters training for these upcoming fights. I want to show the different styles that strength and conditioning coaches have when training combat athletes for fights.
In my search for some kick ass strength and conditioning video of these fighters I came across an interview with Vladimir Matyushenko. The interview is not really what I am concerned with, it’s the video that goes along with the interview. They show some of the exercises that “The Janitor” has in his strength and conditioning program.
Matyushenko trains at a Velocity Sports Performance, which is one of my former places of employment. The first two minutes he discusses his training and the video shows him doing some one-arm medicine ball tosses as well some muscle snatches and my personal favorite overhead squats. So enjoy the video it’s the best I could do for strength and conditioning video of Matyushenko. The UFC on Versus will air on Saturday, August 1.

In sports a second can be the difference between a winning and losing. As the competition gets better reaction time is critical. For example stuffing a take down in the final seconds of a fight can get your hand lifted at the end or send you back home a loser. I have been doing my research and reading a lot on reaction time. Strength and conditioning coaches all know it is an important component to training. All athletes should be working on improving their reaction time.

So what is reaction time? Reaction time is the interval time between the presentation of a stimulus and the initiation of the muscular response to that stimulus. Some examples in combat sports such as MMA or boxing are avoiding a punch with say a slip or bob and being able to sprawl in time when you see a takedown coming.

Some athletes and people are born with great reaction time. But that does not mean that you cannot increase the ability of your reaction time with practice. In a fight there are many different stimulus’s a fighter must react to. Within those stimuli there can be many different reactions. The more choices a fighter has in ways to react the slower the reaction time will be. So when starting off training reaction time you want to keep it simple with your fighters. You may want to start off with giving them only one choice to make. So say they are working on their boxing, Give them only the choice to parry a punch, as they get better add the slip.

These are some of the more sport specific ways to train reaction time. As a strength and conditioning coach you don’t have to be as sport specific in your training to start off. Using different exercises that we have done before you can add the element of reaction time within them.

In this training clip I incorporate medicine ball tosses with reaction time. So as you will see this thirty second set incorporates, power, acceleration, reaction time and conditioning. Focusing on the reaction time, after tossing the ball you must turn around track the medicine ball and react to where it is going and get to it before two bounces. As for reaction time it’s on an easier level because you kind of know where the ball may land. To make this harder have someone throw the ball for you then turn around and chase after it. So check out this video and more to come on training reaction time. Train Hard! Train Smart!

P.S. This was done the morning of my second anniversary. Happy Anniversary Baby!