Issue 088
May 2012
Mastering the optimal amount of training is the only way to surge to the top
Rosi Sexton
Pro fighter & sports therapist
Rosi Sexton is a leading professional fighter, sports therapist and registered osteopath.
In November last year, I was at a workshop given by strength and conditioning coach Vern Gambetta. One of the things that struck me from his talk was his insistence that adding more volume to a training plan is rarely the answer. He emphasized the importance of going through a training plan carefully, and having a clear rationale for every exercise, every drill, every minute of training that an athlete does. ‘If in doubt, leave it out,’ was the overriding message.
Simply put, more isn’t necessarily better. Sometimes it’s important to focus on doing the right thing, rather than just doing more. By contrast, in the MMA world, ‘if in doubt, do it’ seems to be the prevailing attitude. Fighters often boast about how many hours they spend training in a week. It’s common for people to talk about how great a sparring or conditioning session in terms of how tough it was, how many people were sick, or how sore they felt the next day.
It’s natural to feel that having worked hard means that you’ve accomplished something. But it’s also important to remember ‘any fool can make another fool tired.’ Actually improving someone is much harder.
Doing the right kind of training doesn’t always feel good. Sometimes it’s frustrating, boring, or it might just feel like you’re not getting anywhere. To many of us, it feels better to spend that time sparring or grappling hard, smashing a circuit or throwing some more weight on the bar. But hard work can often be a distraction and the feeling of having achieved something an illusion.
The problem is with the idea that if a little of something is good, then more must be better. Doing five sets of four dead lifts will make you stronger; but doing 200 dead lifts won’t make you 10 times as strong. It’s more likely to leave you with sore legs and a bad back.
This confusion exists because it’s not training that leads to improvement. It’s the rest and recovery after the training that allows the body to adapt and to become stronger in order to deal with the stress you’re putting on it. There’s an optimal amount of training that will give the biggest improvement – doing either more or less than this will lead to poorer results.
There’s an inverse relationship between the volume of training an athlete is doing and the intensity of that training. Just as it’s impossible to run marathons at 100m sprint pace, doing too much training is a sure way to get slower. Pacing yourself to make it to the end of the training session becomes a habit, and speed and explosiveness get sacrificed in favor of just doing enough to survive. Fatigue leads to bad habits that may prove harder to shake than you imagine and could land you in trouble when it matters most.
The same also applies to technical training where 10 minutes of focused effort doing the right things will beat several hours of energetic but aimless mat time.
Of course, a strong work ethic is important too. There is definitely a time for pushing the boundaries and doing that extra round even when you don’t feel like it. Knowing when to push yourself to work harder and when to take an extra day off can be difficult even for experienced fighters.
It depends on many factors, such as how far out you are from the fight, your current fitness, stress levels, age, weight and individual differences. A great coach will take these things into account and watch fighters carefully for signs of both under and over training
As fighters, our training time and intensity in any given week is a finite resource that we have to use wisely.
At the highest levels, you also have to assume that everyone else is training just as hard as you are. You can’t rely on simply being able to out-work the opposition – you might have to out-think and out-plan them instead.
