One obstacle even the most motivated fighter in world will often face is the inability to realistically sacrifice the time it takes to develop elite levels of mma strength and conditioning.

The average person has a job, a family, school, or some other major obligation that simply cannot be comprised for putting the time it takes to become a mma fighter.

If you aspire to become a fighter with a chance to compete with some of the best, you have to develop a certain level of mastery in three different categories:

Martial Arts Skill

Plain and simple, if you want to be a good fighter, you’re going to have to put in the man hours it takes to learn how to fight.

This includes striking, kicking, the clinch, throws and take-downs, grappling, and everything else in between; not to mention putting these altogether so that you can harmoniously transition from each of these distinctive techniques and their respective styles.

This alone takes YEARS to develop and requires a minimum three to five days a week of consistently improving your technique and skill.

There is no short-cut in regards to time when it comes to developing the skill it takes to become a mma fighter.

Strength and Power

Fortunately, because of the nature of the human body, developing strength and power doesn’t take several hours a day to develop.

On the contrary, it shouldn’t take more than  4 hours a week to constantly improve your strength and power, and in many cases much less.

This is something most people can fit into their schedule without making any major sacrifices of time in their daily life.

Cardiovascular Conditioning

Developing your cardiovascular conditioning, like strength and power, doesn’t have to take too much time out of your day, but still requires consistent effort.

No more then 20 – 60 minutes of cardio 4 to 5 days a week is needed to develop maximum levels of cardio conditioning.

Again, developing your cardio doesn’t take too much time in your day by itself, but once you begin putting all three of these together, it can add up to several hours A DAY that many people simply don’t have.

Saving Time with Circuit Training in your MMA Conditioning Workouts

Once you factor in your strength, power, cardio and overall conditioning in, the hours start to really pile up.

Like I stated above, the average busy person just doesn’t have an extra 2 or more hours a day to dedicate to mma strength and conditioning.

There is a way, however, to save time by combining your mma strength training with your cardio in your mma conditioning workouts. This is through circuit training, also known as complexes.

A circuit is moving from one exercise to another with little to no rest periods in between each exercise, not stopping to rest until one “circuit” is complete.

With each workout, you can either increase the weight you do for each exercise, or decrease the time it takes to complete a circuit.

The great thing about circuit training is that compresses the time it takes to develop strength, power, AND cardiovascular conditioning into one mma conditioning workout; and the best part is that circuit training normally doesn’t take longer than 25 minutes a day to complete.

Don’t assume that with circuit training you’ll work any less hard or get any less of a result.  In fact, this type of training is one of the most physically demanding things you can do if you really push yourself, and is a staple in every fighter’s mma training workouts.

To learn more about circuit training and complexes for mma fighters, or to get started on a proven mma conditioning workout developed specifically for aspiring fighters who have little time but still want the results, the program I would recommend is:

Eric Wong’s Ultimate MMA Strength and Conditioning Program

Eric does a great job in covering every aspect of strength and conditioning for mma fighters, and breaks it up into a customizable yet effective workout program for every individual and their unique schedules.

Learn more about his program here

Train hard fellow fighters and fans,

Derek Manuel
MMA Conditioning Workouts