When training for mma, it is not enough just to have strength. It is not enough to just have endurance. One of the most important attributes to develop in your mma workout routine is strength endurance.

Strength endurance is not the same thing as muscular endurance, though both should be developed in your mma workout routine. Muscular endurance is the ability to execute muscular contractions over and over again for a length of time, where strength endurance is the ability to execute MAXIMUM muscular contractions over and over again.

Think 100 push-ups as muscular endurance and bench pressing your 1-3 rep max for as many reps as you can in a 3 minute period as strength endurance.

Why Strength Endurance is Important in MMA

Put quite simply, if you don’t have strength endurance then being stronger then your opponent isn’t going to be an advantage for more then a few minutes into the fight or even after a few seconds.

If your muscular conditioning isn’t developed properly then after just a few maximum muscular contractions (such as picking your opponent up for a take-down, defending a take-down, or failing an attempt for a guillotine choke) you’ll no longer have that level of strength available for the rest of the fight.

There are many different mma workout routines to help develop your strength endurance. You can develop it partially by just increasing your maximum strength, or working on your muscular conditioning.

If you want a mma workout routine to build both simultaneously, then one of the best ways to accomplish this is strength and power complexes or circuits.

Here is an example of a set of power complexes from a typical mma workout routine:

5 reps of heavy squats followed immediately by 10 reps of burpees. This would be 1 set, and the goal is to do as many sets of these as you can in a given time-frame, such as 5 minutes.

1 Round = 5 min

1 Set = 5 reps of squats followed by 10 reps of burpees

Goal: As many sets as possible in 1 round

In a full mma workout routine you’ll want to execute several of these “rounds”, with each round a different combination of exercises (in other words, round 2 would be 5 minutes of two different exercises other then the squats and burpees, such as deadlifts followed by mountain climbers).

Variations of Progress for Strength Endurance

Depending on what you want to focus on determines how you want to progress with a workout like this.

So if you wanted to increase your muscular endurance and conditioning, you can use the same weight each workout but work on doing more sets per round and/or decreasing your rest period between sets.

On the other hand, if you wanted to increase your strength endurance, you could progress by doing the same amount of sets per round and/or keeping the rest periods the same but increase the weight in each workout.

In summary, always keep in mind that anytime you build new levels of strength, it’s is equally important as a mma fighter to take that new strength and convert it into strength endurance, otherwise 80% of your strength potential could become obsolete very quickly in the ring or cage.

Hope this helps,

Derek Manuel
MMA Workout Routine