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.

In laymen terms, you’re still going to be sucking wind if you haven’t done much of this exercise, no matter how much jogging you’ve done in the past.

Because of the nature of fighting, there are so many different scenarios that can happen in a fight. The majority of it can be a boxing match, or you and your opponent can be in a grappling battle the whole time.

Often times it can randomly go back and forth, and sometimes you could be spending a lot of time trying to lock a submission on your opponent or trying to escape from one. These are just a few scenarios that all require different levels of strength and conditioning.

So what is the best way to train for such an unpredictable scenario? Mimic these unpredictable scenarios in you mma training workouts! Spar! Spar! Spar! Wrestle with wrestlers, box with boxers, grapple with jujitsu fighters, and combine them all together.

And I don’t just mean wrestle for hundreds of hours (obviously this is necessary to develop the skill and general aerobic endurance), but to mimic the rounds and the rest of a fight or competition.

So if you are training for a fight that is set to go for 3 five minute rounds, set your mma conditioning routines to five minute rounds.

You don’t always have to spar, as you might not always have sparring partners readily available, not to mention the physical beating you will take and the higher chance of injury. In this case, you can still train your mma conditioning in rounds, with 1 minute rest periods.

You could do interval training, shadowboxing, sandbag training, jump roping, and all sorts of exercises that require different levels of strength and conditioning that could be needed in a fight.

MMA Conditioning: Shadow Boxing

Mix and match them into five minute rounds, create obstacle courses, get creative and have fun with it!

Just understand that you want to create your mma conditioning workouts so that they mimic the rounds, rest, and actual fight as closely as possible.

If your fights or competitions last for five minute rounds, it is much better to train by running as fast as you can for a five minute period then to go jogging for 45 minutes. Long distant runners train by constantly running for long distances.

Sprinters train by sprinting. Weight lifters train by lifting weights. It follows that mma fighters should train by fighting (sparring of course; you certainly don’t want to get yourself all banged up five days a week!)

So learn to format your mma conditioning routines to mimic the rounds in a fight. Sparring of course, should head the top of the list, because this will mimic how an actual fight goes as closely as possible.

Bruce Lee, when giving advice to Larry Hartsell, a kick boxer training for one of the first full contact fights held in the US, gave this advice:

“Larry, I want you to do this everyday [interval training that mimicked the time in each round]… increase your rounds, and spar all you can.”

Larry followed his advice, and ended up knocking out his opponent in the final fight. An interesting fact, however, is that he actually didn’t get first place because he was disqualified for unintentionally kicking him when he was on all fours.

Train hard fellow fighters,

Derek Manuel
MMA Training Workouts