Issue 055

October 2009

Paul McVeigh is a sports scientist, professional fighter, Cage Warriors champion and is ranked the number one bantamweight fighter in Europe. He fights out of the Dinky Ninjas Fight Team in Glasgow, Scotland.  

If you are currently training in mixed martial arts your week might look a bit like this: Skills training 3–5 days a week, some running or circuit training for your conditioning and, if you’re one of the cool kids, some weight training once or twice a week. For many of you I bet this sort of pattern does not change much throughout the year, except when you are injured or taking time off.  

What if I was to suggest eliminating anything that was metabolically taxing? That would refer to all your heavy sparring, intense pad work, running, circuit training and pretty much everything that you enjoy about the sport. This leaves you with weight training, light sparring and technical drilling. Sounds fun, right? What if I was to suggest that these changes would enhance your sporting performance much more than sticking with your old routine?  

For me, the off-season represents a period of time when there are no competitions in the immediate future. In other words, this is a period of time when you do not need to be at the peak of physical fitness or technical proficiency. This is a time when you can work on developing the general physical quantities, like maximal strength, power and power endurance that will make you a better athlete and competitor. The big problem with trying to do everything at once from an athletic standpoint is that the sheer volume of training stimulus has a negative effect on the physical qualities mentioned above.  

We are involved in a sport where the most desirable physical quality is power endurance. This is the ability to be repeatedly explosive for the duration of a bout. Maximal strength, maximal power and power endurance are all interrelated. The stronger a person is the more power they have and, as a result, the greater their potential to display power endurance. Most of the time the best way to improve your athletic performance is to improve your maximal strength.  

If transforming yourself into a jacked-up ball of fast-twitch muscle fibers is not selling the idea of an off-season to you, then how about the chance to clear up all those niggling injuries? By reducing the time spent sparring you have increased the time you can spend on stuff like stretching, EQIs (check issue 4 for more info), foam rolling, dynamic mobility, corrective exercise and other stuff that should give you an odds-on chance of being able to walk normally five years from now.  

You can also use the time away from the rigors of the sport to become a better technician, analyzing your weak points and diligently working to correct them with technique work, visualization and limited goal-orientated sparring. This can be really difficult to do when you are constantly tired and treat every sparring session like your opponent touched you inappropriately.  

The value of off-season training became apparent to me when guys picked up injuries that prevented them from sparring and forced them to take time off from the sport. These guys often turn towards weight training as it is something they always knew they should be doing but never had the time. When these guys come back to the sport they can be monsters. Their timing and cardio might be off for a couple of weeks, but when it all slides back into place they are much stronger and harder to deal with.  

People often worry about taking time off in case they lose their timing, sensitivity, mojo, or whatever you wish to call it. In my opinion, if these guys have a few years of experience then two weeks of solid training can bring them back to, or above, the level that they were at before the off-season.  

Going into the specifics of off-season programming goes beyond the scope of this article. An important point to remember is that any strength and conditioning program must be tailored to the individual. There are factors like training experience, injury history and mobility issues to take into account. With so many factors involved in developing strength and conditioning programs the best advice I could give is to search out a professional with experience in training athletes before going it alone. Learning exercise technique in movements such as cleans, deadlifts and squats will be invaluable for the duration of your athletic career.  

As a final word on off-season training, if tackled intelligently it can be a great way to revitalize a stale and monotonous routine that is producing limited gains in performance. Sometimes the best way to improve in any sport is to avoid it for a while, as hard as that can be.