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!

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!

Nothing beats youth and determination when it comes to wanting to be an athlete especially an MMA fighter. That youth and determination can be found with Mike Savarese. This future MMA fighter has just started on his journey but you can see in his eyes that he wants nothing more than to be a fighter. Mike trains jiu-jitsu under Ricardo Almeida at RABJJ.
After speaking with his brother Patrick about strength and conditioning and MMA, I had the pleasure to meet Mike and his brother for strength and conditioning session. Mike and I hit the gym, this training session was used to test where he was at with strength and where his conditioning level was currently. As with any of my fighters or athletes I tested his one-rep max deadlift. The deadlift is one of the best movements that can be placed in any fighter’s strength and conditioning program. The deadlift builds strength along the entire posterior chain. As you know with any sport a strong posterior chain is very important in a combat athletes performance. Working on some tips to clean up Mike’s deadlift technique, he was able to pull 345 for his one-rep max. Not to bad since he had not deadlifted in quite a while due to injury.
Next we moved on to test his one-rep max on the bench press. Although I don’t use the barbell bench press in my programs that often I use this test and transfer it over for pressing with dumbbells. Mike put up 265 lbs for his one-rep max. After the one-rep max tests were done, I introduced him to Olympic lifting and taught him some of the movements in the power clean. If you have read some of the other posts on the site you know how important it is to have some of the Olympic lifts in the strength and conditioning programs of athletes. These lifts test the power an athlete can produce. Using only the bar I taught him how to clean from the top down. Pretty much this is how it went. I had him front squat to learn where his body will be at the end of the clean, then had him do jump and shrugs to teach how when doing this movement he should shrug his shoulders. This was followed up by cleaning from the thigh, then above the knee and finally below the knee.
After our training session we headed for the park to for some speed and agility work. Usually I will begin a training session with speed and agility work but I knew I was testing one-rep maxes and want Mike as fresh as possible. During this session I used drills found in some of my previous posts. Here are some of the drills we did…

Finally we ended our training session with some conditioning. He did two, three-minute rounds of the following circuit:
Super Legs
24 Squats
24 Lunges
24 Split-Jumps
12 Jump Squats
This was followed by a minute of Battle Ropes, using four different rope exercises for 15 seconds each. To finish off the three minutes he smashed away at a tire with a sledgehammer for thirty seconds alternating the grip on the sledgehammer with every strike.
Here are some things that I picked up during the session. Mike is very open minded to learning new ways to train in and out of the weight room. He is willing to do what it takes to achieve his goal. Mike is and exceptional athlete and is the future of mixed martial arts. So I would like to welcome Mike to the Combat Trainer team. He has a bright future in the sport of MMA and will be a world champion one day.