Fighters Only

Issue 082

December 2011

Strength only matters if you can carry it into the fifth round – here’s some tips on how to add cardio to your muscle

Barry Gibson

Strength & conditioning trainer

Barry Gibson BSc and MMA-CSCC is the owner/founder of GrappleFit Training, and an S&C coach focusing on combat sports

This issue we’re talking about heavyweights so I thought I’d hit on some heavy training; heavyweight cardio to be precise. I’ve banged on about strength a lot over the years and how important it is to combat athletes. Strength can be defined as the ability to exert or resist force, this is a very simple view and we’ll keep it at that for now.

What we all know is that mixed martial artists need to lift ‘heavy’ – a relative term, but necessary to highlight all the same. They also need to express that strength over a protracted period – 15 minutes to be precise.

Strength is useless if you can only exert an all-out effort then need to recover for five minutes afterwards. A 700lb deadlift would be awesome, but if you can’t function for the half an hour that follows then your strength is completely useless.

The term ‘long strength’ has seen some light again recently, in Marty Gallagher’s book The Purposeful Primitive, he quotes Dr Len Schwartz’s system of ‘Heavy Hands’ as a method of developing what is commonly know as strength endurance or heavy cardio.

Normally the term ‘cardio’ is associated with running, cycling, rowing or stepping away mindlessly on a machine. I can’t think of anything worse… Or useless for fighters for that matter.

What Dr Schwartz discovered was that athletes with the highest VO2 Max were the ones like Nordic skiers, who utilized what Schwartz called “quad-limbed” cardio. Essentially the greatest aerobic demand came when arms were used in conjunction with the legs. However, the key point remained resistance.

The ‘Heavy Hands’ system used a series of movements involving dumbbells (weighing approximately 5–8kg) and footwork patterns. For example, athletes may jog while performing the above movements.

Heavy Hands was a great system and the real shame is that it quickly became a fad of the fitness industry, as it got commercialized and people began to walk with the dumbbells at their sides – that was just a waste of time.

The basis of it lies on real science. What Heavy Hands and other resistance cardio systems do is add to the number of mitochondria in the cells. The mitochondria are the ‘power houses’ of the cells. These units take in nutrients and create energy in the process. They produce the bulk of ATP which is the body’s energy currency – the more mitochondria we have in our cells, the more energy we can produce. It’s really that simple. And yes we can increase this number through systematic training.

We do this by combining strength and resistance with cardio or aerobic elements. Essentially a hybrid type of training will allow the body to adapt favorably to the demands you place on it, by increasing the number of power houses in the cells and allow athletes to display that long strength I mentioned earlier.

One routine used extensively at Grapplefit Towers can be seen above.

The beauty about it is you’re hitting heavy movements with an element of cardiovascular activity. Starting with the farmers walks, then moving onto a squat-push-pull combo movement followed by another cardio element.

This will provide real world strength and allow the athlete to demonstrate that strength over an extended period. Essential for fighters. Make sure you add this to your routine and watch your functional strength in the cage or on the mat go through the roof.

HEAVY HANDS EXAMPLE

Press - 10 reps

Upright row - 10 reps

Punching - 30 reps

Pummeling - 30 reps

Flies - 10 reps

Combo Sprawls* - 10 reps

*(Throw a 1-2-left hook then drop immediately into a sprawl and pop back up at a fast pace)

Perform the above for a five-minute round and try to hit three to five sets

GRAPPLEFIT ROUTINE

Farmers Walk - 100m

Kettlebell squat - 6 reps