How Do You Measure Up?
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At some point in the evolution of your skills as a mixed martial artist, it inevitably becomes necessary to stop and take a minute to evaluate which areas of your game are solid and which need more work. Is your striking a weakness or is it one of your strengths? Are your takedowns good enough to get the job done, or are you great on the ground but lack the wrestling skill to take the fight there? Being able to accurately answer such questions and focus your MMA training accordingly is the difference between continuing to develop your skills and become a well rounded mixed martial artist and having glaring holes in your game that cost you fights. When it comes to developing an effective strength and conditioning program, the same types of questions must be answered. Only through a comprehensive evaluation of your aerobic fitness, explosive power, muscular endurance, strength levels, etc., can you accurately assess where your strength and conditioning program needs to be focused. In other words, if you don’t even know where you are, it will be pretty hard to figure out where you should be going or how to get there. In this article, I will give you a simple yet very powerful assessment tool I’ve developed to help guide your MMA strength and conditioning program and make sure you are headed in the right direction. The Problem Unfortunately, it has often been much easier for fighters to evaluate where their MMA skills are at (provided they have a good coach) and where the holes in their MMA game are, than where their levels of power, endurance, strength, etc. are compared to where they should be. The reason this can be difficult is simply because unlike in many other sports, fighters have had no real set guidelines or standards to compare themselves against. The result of this problem is that you likely aren’t sure how to compare your endurance levels to your explosive power, or see how your strength levels measure up to other fighters in your weight class. Because there are no set of universally agreed upon tests to take or numbers to compare yourself against, you are forced to rely mostly on guesswork and/or trial and error. Your strength and conditioning program is probably not as effective as it could be, because it’s not as individually targeted towards your specific abilities and weaknesses as it should be. The Solution I started working on the solution to this problem a little more than 6 years ago when I trained my first MMA athlete for his upcoming fight in the UFC. In the process of evaluating him so I could design the most effective program possible, one based on his specific needs as a fighter, I put him through a series of simple physical tests to measure his endurance, power, strength, speed, etc. Back then, the results from a single fighter didn’t have much significance beyond his specific program, but I knew that with more information from enough fighters, that could change. Over the last 6 years, I’ve worked with more than 30 of the highest level fighters (from just about every major organization out there including the UFC, Pride FC, K-1, Dream, King of the Cage, etc.) as well as countless amateurs and put them through this same type of evaluation and recorded their results. From all this information, I’ve been able to develop the first real standards of performance for MMA and discovered which tests correlate the best to actual performance in the ring or cage. This can help eliminate the guesswork from your program design by finally giving you real and meaningful fitness standards to compare yourself against before developing your program. The simple yet informative tests and standards outlined below are a sample of those used in my new free online “BioForce Performance MMA Assessment” (register at www.8weeksout.comto find out more on how the system works. You can use these tests to fine tune your MMA strength and conditioning program by comparing yourself against the standards to discover where the strengths and weaknesses in your MMA fitness lie. I’ve also included some test results from a few of the top pros I’ve tested and trained so you can see out just how you measure up. The Tests
* measured in supine position
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