Developing your muscular endurance will let you keep throwing right until the last bell. But it’s better to work smarter than harder.

After two rounds of vicious fighting in the main event of UFC 127, Jon Fitch was losing a decision to BJ Penn. Some unexpected takedowns and fluid jiu-jitsu from ‘The Prodigy' saw Fitch disoriented and on the defensive, fighting off rear-naked chokes in both rounds.

Then, after 10 minutes, Fitch started to take over, following takedowns of his own with a barrage of punches and elbows. In the final three minutes of the fight, he threw an uninterrupted stream of ground 'n' pound – none of the blows were hard enough to finish the fight, but together they made it impossible for Penn to mount any kind of offense from his back.

Fitch took the last round 10-8 on two judges’ scorecards, and held the former welterweight champion to a draw.

Bout statisticians FightMetric later reported he’d landed 149 shots in the final round.

“That’s the sort of endurance you need for MMA,” says strength and conditioning coach JC Santana, who works with the likes of Thiago Alves and Cole Miller at American Top Team.

“In boxing, that’s useless – throwing arm punches like that isn’t going to knock a guy out. But in MMA, on the ground, we now know that if you can throw a hundred assaults in three minutes, you can win that round. If Fitch had done that three times in 15 minutes, he would have won that fight.”

Muscular endurance is one of the most important assets a fighter can have, but it’s often misunderstood. It comes in three basic types: alactic endurance, which you use for explosive efforts but can only use for 10–20 seconds; lactic muscular endurance, which leads to that burning feeling in your muscles after 60–90 seconds of intense activity; and aerobic muscular endurance, which keeps your muscles working for longer bouts of lower intensity effort – basically, anything below the anaerobic threshold where you’re getting enough oxygen.

The first one is what you’ll use to throw knockout punches or hit a big double-leg, and to grapple or throw Fitch-style ground 'n' pound. The third is what keeps your hands up at the end of three five-minute rounds. You need all three, but it’s the second one that people most associate with the term.

“Improving what most people think of as muscular endurance is about lactic threshold training,” explains Sean O’Keefe, co-founder of the Strength & Performance gym and Michael Bisping’s conditioning coach. “That basically means extending the point where your blood isn’t getting rid of lactate as fast as it’s being produced.”

According to O’Keefe, though, many fighters make the mistake of including this too early in their training camp. “It’s easy to think you’re training hard because you’re doing circuits that are leaving you fried,” he says, “But you’d be better off spending the early part of your training camp building your strength and aerobic endurance.

Too many people are doing circuits eight, nine weeks out.” Training your aerobic endurance is fairly simple: low-intensity sparring and drilling will do the trick. “The easiest way to do it is to use a heart rate monitor,” says Keefe, “Stay about five beats per minute below the heartbeat where you hit your anaerobic threshold.”

It’s also crucial for a fighter’s entire team to work together. “The conditioning coaches, striking coaches and grappling coaches need to get together and talk about the intensity of each session so their athlete isn’t overtraining,” adds O’Keefe.

When it’s time to train the anaerobic systems – O’Keefe recommends ramping up this sort of training with three or four weeks to go – you need to up the intensity, building on the base of strength, power and aerobic endurance you’ve created over the previous weeks.

“We don’t try to get too specific with training movements,” says O’Keefe. “If you want to get better at jiu-jitsu, you still have to do a lot of jiu-jitsu. We’ll focus more on moves that work your energy systems efficiently, like medicine ball slams.”

Santana uses similar methods, but throws in challenges for his athletes. “Maybe once a week we’ll get our guys to throw two minutes of constant ground 'n' pound on a bag,” he explains.

“You don’t need to do that kind of training all the time for it to be effective. A lot of it is getting our fighters to know that they can put out that effort in a fight – I want them to know that it might hurt, but they’re not going to die.”

Another of Santana’s innovations is to work on specifically isometric muscular endurance training – basically, the ability to stay strong in static positions, like holding onto a single-leg or squeezing on a choke. He’ll get his athletes to work on this by hanging from a custom-made sling for up to a couple of minutes, using the same arm muscles as the choke they’re working on. “Imagine knowing that you can hold a guillotine or a rear-naked choke for two minutes without worrying about your arms gassing out,” he says.

“If you’ve got a potential submission locked on someone and you can keep it on until the end of a round so that the other guy’s saved by the bell, you might win that round.”

Santana isn’t alone. Eddie Bravo is an outspoken advocate of building a good ‘squeeze’ and talks about spending hours rear naked choking his own knee to build a strong grip.

It’s one of the reasons he’s against MMA fighters training in the gi, arguing that they should focus on building their strength in clinches or using underhooks, not gripping fabric.

Other coaches take the idea further, aiming to get the muscles used to making the transition from an isometric contraction to an explosive effort – for instance, going from the clinch to throwing a flurry of punches. John Hathaway, for instance, might go from a medicine ball squeeze – isometric contraction – to rapid-fire combinations on the heavy bag during a single circuit; training to get used to the shift.

Training all these energy systems properly isn’t easy, but if you do it smartly you don’t need to kill yourself for months on end to get results. And, when you’re pushing yourself through those final weeks of camp, just remember: throwing a hundred punches in two minutes might just be what keeps you out of the 'L' column.

It was for Jon Fitch.

> Pushing The Pace

Five fights where muscular endurance decided the victor.

1: Frank Shamrock vs Tito Ortiz

Despite a track record of running through opponents, Shamrock was the underdog to the bigger, heavier Ortiz in their title fight. But Shamrock had a plan: by employing an active guard and constantly moving, he forced Ortiz to gas out, winning by strikes in the fourth round.

2: BJ Penn vs Georges St Pierre

“He has boxer’s shoulders,” explained GSP in the aftermath of battering Penn to a stoppage in their second meeting. “I made him wrestle to tire him out.” It worked to perfection – after two rounds of pummeling against the cage, enough of the snap left BJ’s jab to allow St Pierre to work his masterful striking.

A classic.

3: Michael Bisping vs Denis Kang

For an example of how relentless pressure can break an opponent, look no further than Bisping’s back-and-forth battle with Kang. Though he was put on his back in the first round, constant movement kept Bisping relatively unharmed, letting him take the initiative in the second with a string of takedowns and finish with ground 'n' pound.

4: Randy Couture vs Chuck Liddell

'The Natural' showed hugely improved striking in his first fight with the Liddell, but crucially he mixed it with clinch work against the cage, exhausting 'The Iceman' and opening him up to strikes. By the third round, Liddell had nothing left in the tank and a final takedown saw him finished from the mount.

5: Jeff Monson vs Kazuyuki Fujita

JC Santana cites this as a classic example of a great ‘squeeze.’ Though Fujita has essentially no neck, once 'The Snowman' took his back, he was able to ratchet an RNC on hard enough to tap out the giant wrestler through sheer horrible face-squeezing.

The workout

Sean O’Keefe of UK Strength & Performance talks us through a typical conditioning routine from Michael Bisping’s training camp.

“Mike will do this sort of workout four or five weeks out from a fight, maybe twice a week,” explains O’Keefe, “It’s basically made up of different tri-sets, designed to mimic the pace of a fight.

In the first week he’ll do each move for 30 seconds, and run through each tri-set twice, so that he’s spending about seven minutes on the whole circuit.

Then he’ll rest for 90 seconds and repeat the whole lot for two more rounds. As he gets closer to the fight, he’ll bring the round time down to five minutes and the rest time down to 60 seconds, working much more intensely so he can mimic the demands of a fight.” There’s a caveat though: “This is based on Mike’s foundation of strength, power and aerobic capacity that we’ve developed over the rest of the camp,” says O’Keefe. “If you just jump into it without laying the groundwork it won’t be as effective.”

› How to do The workout

Do each of the moves in the first tri-set (A1, A2, A3) for 30 seconds, and then repeat the circuit. Do the same with the second and third trisets without stopping, then rest for 90 seconds.

Repeat the whole thing twice. As you improve, work on making your rest intervals shorter and working harder.

A1 TIre Battle

Using a large tire and a partner, push the tire towards each other, focusing on short, explosive pushes.

A2 Band Sprints

Get a partner to hold you back as you perform a resisted sprint against a band – or tie it to something solid if you’re working out alone.

A3 Box Jumps

Jump onto a plyometric box or tire from a standing start, starting and finishing on both feet. Standard box height at S&P is 24 inches.

B1 Medicine ball chest pass & sprawl

Throw a medicine ball to a partner (or against a wall) and sprawl immediately. Pop back up, retrieve the ball and repeat.

B2 Low Prowler Push

Push a prowler or weighted sled, focusing on staying low and driving with your legs. This is the only move where you don’t go for 30 seconds – instead, complete one 25m push with a challenging weight.

B3 Medicine ball slams

From full extension, slam a medicine ball into the ground as hard as possible. Note: you might want to check that this is okay with your gym.

C1 Squat To Press

Holding two barbells attached to a ‘grappler’, perform a squat, then press the bars upwards as you stand up. If you haven’t got access to a grappler, do a barbell thruster instead (as used above).

C2 Landmines

With one barbell slotted into a grappler, twist your torso while holding the bar, mimicking the movement of throwing a punch.

C3 Battling Ropes

Holding a battling rope in each hand, aim to keep them moving for the entire 30 seconds for a killer grip workout.