upper body in the clinch.

In a MMA fight, fighters often use more of their upper body pulling muscles rather then pushing muscles. Pulling your opponent in the clinch, pulling your opponents head down, pulling your opponent while in your guard, pulling and defending from an armbar, applying the several choke holds, are all scenarios mma fighters frequently find themselves in.

One of the best ways to increase your upper body strength that I rarely see people do in the gym is weighted pull-ups. I have seen this exercise in every mma strength training program I have ever recommended, and there is a reason.

“But I do lat pull-downs, isn’t that the same thing?”

Not exactly. If you have ever read any of my previous stuff you know I am a strong advocate of free-weights over most (99.9% of the time) machines; at least when it comes to raw strength.

The reason being is that with free-weights you are developing more functional strength, such as your stabilizer muscles and balance. With machines, the plane of motion is guided and assisted, limiting development in your stabilizer and supporting muscles.

Am I against machines? No, not by any means, but if you are looking to build real world, functional, and raw strength free-weights are your best bet. There’s a time and place for machines, but I’m getting off topic and we can discuss that later.

Back to weighted pull-ups. By progressively increasing the weight tied around your waist in your pull-ups, you will build some real back and arm strength that most other back exercises don’t quite match.

You get the FULL range of motion, you are pulling your body weight (which is always a good idea for mma fighters and combat athletes) along with an addtional load, and their are a million different variations you can do.

In terms of your mma strength training workouts though, I would suggest you focus more on progressively adding more and more weight with just good old fashioned pull-ups with your palms facing away or chin ups where your palms are facing towards you.

As you start to develop a good base of pull-up strength, such as reps of 5 with 50+ lbs tied around your waist, then you can start adding variables to your pull-ups, such as different grips, pull-ups with a gi or towel to target your grip strength, widening or narrowing your grip, etc.

One last benefit with weighted pull-ups is that in my personal experience  there is no pulling exercise better that carries over to all the other exercises that involve your pulling muscles.

When you continuously add weight and and can do regular pull-ups with heavier and heavier resistance, you’ll also notice a huge improvement in strength with exercises like lat-pulldowns, t-bar rows, bent-over barbell rows, dumbbell rows, seated rows, curls, etc.

Start including weighted pull-ups in your mma strength training workouts. If all you can do is 1-3 regular pull-ups without additional weight, then keep at it until you can do 8 or more.

Then slowly increase the weight just like any other resistance exercise and before you know it you’ll be the only guy in your gym doing pull-ups with a 80 lb dumbbell around your waist.

But more importantly, your next opponent in the ring or cage will have a lot of the fight taken out of him as soon as he feels the strength and power in your clinch.

Train hard fellow fighters and fans,

Derek Manuel
MMA Workouts