Sport Specific
To maximize efficiency in your training, consider how you can condition while practicing MMA techniques and movements. Create similar conditions that you will experience in a fight and focus on the physical adaptations that you need to perform at your best. Set up workouts that involve 5 rounds that are 5 minutes long or longer for cardio endurance. Sport specific training includes heavy bag, double end bag, pads, sparring, shadow boxing, and all sorts of technique specific drills. Sport specific training also involves strength and conditioning, which doesn’t have to be exactly MMA related, so long as it helps your body adapt to the demands of an MMA fight.
Specific Cardio Training
Cardio training can be almost any exercise performed at a steady state. The best for mixed martial arts is going to be any form of shadow boxing, footwork drills, light sparring, light heavy bag work, grappling drills that involve rolling, or a combination of all of these activities. The key is to keep a steady heart rate that is between 130 and 150 beats per minute and a duration of 30-90 minutes. This pace and duration will increase your cardio vascular performance abilities. The actual activity is not as important. However, doing sport specific training will help improve muscle memory, fluidity, and many other aspects. Road work does not have to be purely running or cycling.
Strength Training
Strength training has been proven to improve the performance of any athlete. It will help improve overall strength, reduce injuries to joints and ligaments, and increase your nervous system’s ability to recruit and activate many muscle fibers at once. Strength training is about getting stronger, but it is also about avoiding major injuries and improving neuromuscular efficiency.
High Intensity Interval Training
HIIT is a good way to compliment MMA cardio training, but not replace it. HIIT can be useful if you are on a weight loss journey, or if you want to develop explosiveness. However, alone it will not bring you the overall performance results that you seek. It can very well improve your aerobic capacity, which is important, but it does not address aerobic power or increase the size of the left ventricle of the heart like steady state cardio will.
Quality & Quantity
MMA fitness requires a high level of precision because MMA is a sport that demands the proper development of all three energy systems in the body: aerobic, anaerobic lactic, and anaerobic alactic. MMA requires endurance, strength, and power. This means that the program that you follow must address each of these systems independently and at the same time, add to your fight experience.
I will be writing a lot more on all of these topics and provide my resources for all of my specific information. Thanks for reading. Feel free to comment.
MMA Guidance 