When it comes to mma conditioning, mma fighters have to develop elite levels of physical cardiovascular endurance that few other athletes require.

With so many different types of exercises and pieces of equipment out there today, which one  is the best for mma fighters?

It seems like everyday there is a new product or piece of equipment endorsed by this celebrity or that company.

Granted, Chuck Norris will always be one of the biggest bad asses to walk the planet (I assume you sense the satire), but the Total Gym isn’t your solution to getting into fighters shape.

You can go on YouTube and see all sorts of crazy circus – er, I mean circuit – mma training workouts where there’s some dude doing everything from flipping tires to climbing ropes to doing upside down jumping jacks on some crazy machinery that looks like something Tim Burton and the producers of Saw put together.

Are all these different types of mma conditioning routines, exercises and tools necessary to get into elite levels of fitness? Well, yes and no.

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“It’s my birthday and I turned 31 today. I started fighting for this company about ten years ago at the age of 22.” States BJ Penn at the press conference following the annihilation of Diego Sanchez last Saturday at UFC 107.

Dana White, ever so tactful, chimes in with “And he just started training at 31.”

I am an avid believer in strength and conditioning as a integral part of any serious mma fighters workout.

This is, after all, the whole essence of this blog.

In part 1 of “The Case for BJ Penn’s Conditioning” I posed the question as to whether The Prodigy’s conditioning will ever be a factor again since he started his training with strength and conditioning coach, Marv Marinovich.

I think last Saturday answered that question.

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Every fighter has their strengths, and every fighter has their weaknesses. And some fighters naturally pick up skills with more ease and at a faster rate than others.

This is certainly the case with current UFC lightweight champion, BJ Penn. Unlike nicknames like “The Axe Murderer”, or “The Pit-bull,” Penn isn’t called “The Prodigy” for the intimidation factor.

Prodigy: A highly talented child or youth.

And this is exactly what the Hawaiian native is. He achieved his black belt in Brazilian Jujitsu in THREE YEARS, (most fighters are still blue belts at this level), then weeks later went on to be the first non-Brazilian to win the World Jiu-jitsu Championship in Brazil.

Then he became a professional mma fighter and started knocking people out.

He is the only fighter other then Randy Couture in the UFC to hold a title from two different weight classes, hasn’t lost in the lightweight division in 8 years, and hell, in my opinion he is the only other fighter other then Shogun Rua to really give light-HEAVY weight champ Lyoto Machida a run for his money (which, by the way, Shogun DID win) way back before Machida was the champ.

Outside of being somewhat of a sore loser (sorry Penn fans), where is the weakness in BJ’s game?

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Kimbo Doin' Work

Outside of the unexpected lack of killer instinct by both heavy handed heavyweights, one very obvious disappointment that Kimbo Slice and Houston Alexander displayed was their lack of cardio and conditioning.

Now, I’m not one to sit back and just analyze and criticize fighters all day from the comfort of my couch.

Although I’m far from a professional fighter, I train in MMA on the regular and can truly understand the type of hard work most fans simply cannot even begin to appreciate that fighters put themselves through.

With that being said, there was no denying that the internet born celebrity and “The Assassin” had a lot of room for improvement in the cardio and conditioning category.

Whether it was due to Kimbo’s first time cutting weight or the fact that both fighters simply didn’t put in the hard work and consistent effort to reach a satisfactory level of conditioning, nobody really knows for sure.

The fact is that there must be a change in any fighters conditioning program if they are too tired to throw clean punches by the second round.

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MMA Conditioning: Sparring

It has been said that the best way to condition for an event is repetition of the actual performance of the event. In other words, if you are wondering what the best way to train your mma conditioning for fight is, the answer is to spar as much as possible!

The human body is highly adaptive, and as soon as it becomes comfortable with a certain repetitive movement, such as jogging, the exercise becomes easier and easier.

However, if you were to jog 5 days a week for several months, this conditioning doesn’t necessarily transfer over to all other forms of exercise. Will your overall conditioning and endurance be improved? Yes.

But whenever a new form of exercise is introduced, your body takes extra energy to cope with the new levels of stress from this unfamiliar exercise.

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