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sport-specific

Nexercise

February 18th, 2009 | Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments
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Spinal health is a big deal. Really big. Most people are familiar with the lumbar spine, since the majority of injuries happen to hit the lower back. However, there’s definitely more to it; especially for grapplers. We’re going to go upstairs today to get right up to the cervical spine, which starts by connecting to your skull and ends at the base of your neck (feel along the back of your neck for the vertebra that juts out more than the others; that’s your lucky seventh cervical vertebra).

The bad news is that working on neck strength won’t give you 24 inch pythons. The good news is that it will help you prevent injury and chronic pain. Not being embarrassed by accidental decapitation on the mats is a bonus.

So how do we actually strengthen our necks?

If you ask most people how to exercise a given body part, they’ll think about how it moves and tell you to do that.

Abs? Crunches.
Knees? Knee extensions
Neck? Bridges and rolls and on and on.

Sometimes, yes. But defaulting to this stuff without thinking about it drives me nuts.

It may be counter-intuitive to strengthen a body part by not moving anything, but it’s often the correct approach. The major reason for this is protection of the structure. While some joints work best by providing mobility, others work by providing stability. The cervical spine is a prime example of the latter. If you want to keep your C-spine happy, strengthen yourself in a way that will keep you resistant to misalignment and wear. You can start by not intentionally putting it in harm’s way. This is where isometric contractions come into play.

Just so you know, “isometric contraction” refers to contraction of the muscle fibers without any discernible movement. Make a fist, put your other hand over it and stop it from moving as you try to flex your elbow. Congratulations, you’re now familiar with isometrics. Let’s move on.

Here are two solid exercises for your neck that take advantage of isometric contraction:

1. Forehead to stability ball
Place a stability ball against the wall at head height and press your forehead into the ball, bearing weight on it. You’ll start this one standing pretty much vertical. As your strength improves, you can start moving your feet further and further away from the wall. Remember that your job is to maintain neutral spinal alignment, not tilt your head back.

2. Theraband holds
You can either have someone hold a Theraband, or tie one to a stationary object. In this exercise, you’ll put it on like a headband and move away from its fixed point. You can to this for the front, back and sides of your head.

For both of these exercises, I recommend starting with a light warm-up and then progressing to reps that are extremely challenging to hold for seven or eight seconds. Rest for two to three minutes (do some ab work in between if you like) and repeat for five or six sets. You can then lower the intensity of the exercise (by decreasing distance) and maintaining longer holds (40 to 60 seconds for two to three reps should be fine).and shorten the rest periods. For the shorter duration contractions, less is more. It’s not productive to go longer than 10 seconds.

The progressions here are start with beginning to move a little off course and then coming back. It’s key to not move beyond a point that you can return to with good technique.

Is there room for flexion/extension, such as traditional wrester’s bridges and the like? Absolutely, but not for everyone and certainly not until you’ve built up a decent base level of strength with isometric movement. If there’s interest, I can definitely post some further progressions at a later date.

Hope this helps keep you pain-free and bad-ass.

Geoff

A Big, Tough Baby: why MMA conditioning is in its infancy

February 17th, 2009 | Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments
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When it comes to most sport-specific training, knowing the position of a player is generally enough for a basic plan. In football, an elite-level offensive lineman, for example, will be expected to weigh in between 280 and 330 lbs, demonstrate decent relative strength, explosive starts, excellent footwork and great agility. Done and done. Training them for performance may not be easy, but it is relatively straightforward. You’re working with a specific body type and set of attributes. Not so for MMA athletes.

While the first UFC introduced MMA to North America in 1993, it’s only been over the past few years that it’s began to gain widespread attention as a sport. It’s still young enough that we see a wide range of natural physical ability (with world-class genetics still being the exception, not the rule). Likewise, the sport-specific training necessary to maximize MMA performance is still a veritable baby. Training methodologies from Olympic lifting, wrestling, powerlifting, boxing and many more have infiltrated the scene. However, the best way to string things together is a challenge that no one seems to completely agree on. There’s a good reason for that: strength and conditioning for MMA is more challenging – and more complex — than for any other sport.

What makes training MMA athletes so different? The sheer number of variables for starters. Let’s break it down a bit.

Physical Base

Before we even get started, we’re going to have to look at an athlete’s physical status. A lot of people assume that you should jump right ahead to maximizing existing physical attributes. What’s missing from that equation, however, is a hard look at injury prevention. The truth is that sports generally emphasize certain attributes out of proportion to others. Are you a boxer? You’re doing a lot more pushing (that is to say moving your hands away from your body) than pulling. Are you a boxer that works behind desk (slumped shoulders and all)? Well, guess what? Before we get to even more of the same, we’re going to have to counterbalance both your training and lifestyle factors. That means increasing range of motion and balancing strength in all planes. That’s assuming that there aren’t existing injuries to rehab on top of everything else.

Mobility and injury prevention/recovery don’t make a lot of highlight reels, but they’re an essential foundation. Once established, they’ll contribute to the lifetime of an athlete by minimizing breaks in training due to injury. Only with this base can an athlete really begin to make dramatic improvements in their sport-specific performance.

Technical Base

Is our fighter starting out with a set of technical skills specific to a particular sport? What physical attributes are worth emphasizing and maintaining? What types of motor patterning have to be revamped? How can we assist this process? For example, if we were working with someone with a wrestling background, we may wish to emphasize maximal power through a range of motion that synchs up with their go-to takedowns and throws. However, we may find them working from a deficit in the area of striking. Perhaps they have persistent difficulty in not leaving their punches hanging in mid-air. An over-emphasis on pulling (from maximal to power-oriented) in the same plane may help them overcome unfamiliar or unnatural movements. However, it’s a fairly delicate matter when it comes to deciding whether a temporary diversion from a fighter’s primary gameplan will be worth the time and effort in the long-term.

Physical development

A fighter’s technical development typically sets the pace for strength and conditioning. Sometimes, though – just like in judo – things (and people) get flipped on their heads. We occasionally find that the physical attributes of an athlete are substantial enough to supersede previous technical gameplans; instead, it becomes worthwhile to maximize development of a specific attribute and adapt their game to that. A good example is Georges St. Pierre’s transition into wrestling. Although his background was in Kyokoshin karate and Brazilian jiu jitsu, he demonstrated a natural explosiveness that arguably lent itself best to wrestling. Continuing to emphasize this aspect of his conditioning, his coaches also made wrestling an increasingly important part of his game. In this case, St. Pierre’s technical skill set changed substantially to emphasize his physical abilities.

Technical development

What new skills are we going to need to develop? What kind of base do we need to ensure that the upcoming stages of technical training can be carried out safely and efficiently? Energy system training will set an initial base for injury prevention by staving off fatigue, as will adequate pre-habilitiation work. However, it’s strength training that can truly help bridge the gap when it comes to developing and perfecting new technical skills.

Weight Classes

Listening to commentary on an MMA event, a friend once asked, “What does it mean when they say a fighter is a big 170? It’s like saying he’s a tall 5 foot 10.” The difference is that while a fighter’s height won’t change between weigh-in and the beginning of a fight, their weight can change substantially. And while standard practices are a debate all their own, it’s known that there’s an art to making weight. Many fighters have fallen to technically inferior opponents who surpassed them in maintaining their strength and conditioning through the weight cutting (and re-gaining) process. It’s absolutely essential to manage a fighter’s weight and minimize any diminishment in strength or conditioning between the time they stand on the scales and set foot into the ring.

Short-term competition strategy

For an MMA athlete, the ever-present question is, “Who am I fighting next?” The answer can mean dramatic changes in training approach. I’ll use a fighter we’re currently training as an example. We’ll call him “Roman McGnomey” (look: I’m making up the names and that’s the name I made up!) Roman has a brawler’s approach to stand-up striking with a good ground and pound strategy. He has a lesser emphasis on takedowns and grappling. His next opponent’s primary strength is as a wrestler. In many respects this is a bad match-up for him. His opponent’s technical strengths neutralize many of his own. Without getting into too much detail, our job is to minimize the likelihood of Roman a) getting taken down and b) being kept down.

When we look at what we’re capable of in the short-term, we have to be pragmatic. Outworking a conditioned athlete within their comfort zone is unlikely. Instead, we want to maximize our figher’s performance in the areas that his opponent is weakest in. From a technical perspective, we can make some educated guesses about where and how opportunities will appear. From a strength and conditioning perspective, we want to facilitate getting to these situations and then emphasize the energy system appropriate to them.

Clearly, strength and conditioning can’t be performed in a vaccum. Strength coaches need to be in regular contact with instructors to determine what approaches will work best. Refinement of these approaches is an ongoing process that requires a lot of evaluation and communication.

Long-term competition strategy

In theory, a long-term approach should be straightforward. In practice, there are a lot of issues that interfere with this. Where is a fighter ultimately going? Their next fight doesn’t always have a lot to do with that goal. We’re frequently faced with the question of how far we’re willing to veer off track from our long-term gameplan. From a fight-to-fight perspective, this can be substantial. As such, we sometimes have to make some hard choices – from turning down a fight to showing up at less-than-peak condition. Technical development, physical development and all the hard-to-predict factors (from workload and lifestyle to injuries and changing coaches or teams) all have a substantial impact.

Summary

Truth be told, when I started this article, I was planning on giving a way more generic overview of sport-specific training for MMA (and why it’s so god-damned complicated). However, what I quickly realized that I — along with our other trainers — make it that complicated. Certainly, it’s possible to hand someone some weights (or a tire, for that matter) and tell them to go as hard as they can for as long as they can. Lord knows plenty of people do. And while going balls-out may feel right (that is to say adequately hard), it’s an approach that misses out on a whole lot of stuff. The details above, despite barely scratching the surface, should give you a sense of what some of that stuff is.

Geoff