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If you look at some of my older posts there are references to doing isolated muscle group workouts. If you haven’t been following the blog for that long, I used to lift the only way I knew how to lift. Tri/Chest, Shoulders/Back, Legs/Biceps, some sort of 3 or 4 day split. I was taught this way of lifting from my roommate where we trained for hypertrophy. When I started training MMA I continued to hit the gym to supplement my training but I never changed my outlook on weight lifting.
The Problem
- Doing certain specific groups gave me nothing for MMA that night. For example, if I did shoulders, you can imagine I had a tough time keeping my hands up.
- I did a lot of dumb isolated exercises that had no functional carry over to MMA. For example, leg curls, isolated bicep curls, and so on and so forth.
- For some reason I spent too long in the gym doing a bunch of exercises for one muscle.
Strength Training
Recently I’ve totally thrown out and written off my old ways of lifting weights. It wasn’t about lifting weights, strength training comes in many other forms. I’ve incorporated a lot of body weight exercises, kettlebell training, and plyometrics. I still do lift weights, I try to do at least one barbell complex a week.
Some other things I’ve been doing differently is the trying to do full body exercises and more circuit training to really tax my muscle endurance. I’ve also been cutting my time at the gym, spending no more than 30-40 minutes at the gym. This helps me from being too burnt out for nightly training.
I’ll be venturing into sandbag training and sled pulling also, so I’ll be blogging about that in the near future.
Past MMA Training Mistakes Round-up:
MMA Training Mistake #1 – Balance
MMA Training Mistake #2 – Feedback
MMA Training Mistake #3 – Mouthpiece
August 28th, 2009 at 1:00 am
Great post , i also train mma, I find it nice to do circuit trainiing for cardio and full body training on days i dont train mma.
December 5th, 2009 at 5:28 am
Good post, I train in Sikaran Arnis and Filipino Kick Boxing, I used to hit the GYM before I started to commit more to my MA, doing 5×5’s and splits and heavy weight sessions thinking that it would help with strength which it did but not the “fast twitch”/endurance type.
I have now since changed my routine to still include a barbell complex once a week and more high intensity cardio, bodyweight and plyometrics, now seeing improvements in speed and I burn all day