I’ve said many times that physicality is a tool, a weapon, a skill, something you can leverage to win and therefore should train. There are smart and less-smart ways to do that. To get anywhere useful we need to look beyond both “what’s trending” and “what we’ve always done.”
You often hear championed, the idea of “just doing more of the thing.” For a lot of people this is relevant as it upholds the fundamental law of specificity. However, it misses the counterpart law of adaptation.
There are memes about yolked-blue-belts vs. beer-bellied-brown-belts. Why? Mechanical and technical efficiency are rewarding and focusing on that erodes and untrains our physicality.
“Just do more (of the sport)” isn’t very helpful once our movement patterns and efficiency have adapted to the specific demands of the training room. If we want to further improve that efficiency, we’ll need a novel stimulus (and subsequent recovery) in order to provoke further adaptation.
Let’s first clear the air about what I would not do. Largely this has to do with developing skills in their most conducive environment rather than forcing a square peg into a round hole.
I would not try to load grappling movements in the weight room / track — e.g. sled-pull-shrimps.
I would use my mat time for the things that are hard to replicate elsewhere — mats and partners.
Only for the “sharpening” required for competition would I combine conditioning and skill efforts on the mat. Overuse of this on a regular basis will cause one to get brittle. Absence of it will cause one to get dull.
I would use synthetic support environments for developing supportive skills and systems (e.g. mobility, strength, endurance, capacity).
I’m specifically talking about conditioning in this article, so let’s also establish some operational definitions:
Fitness: The conditional ability to perform a task.
Endurance: The ability to persists, particularly past the point of wanting to stop.
Capacity: Output produced during a designated interval limit.
Conditioning: The degree of specialized adaptations to a given task.
All of the energy systems I’m going to mention here are worthy of their own articles and training programs as they require their own dedicated development. However, the following should give a good bird’s eye view.
Endurance and LISS:
Humans are inherently aerobic creature; we breathe oxygen. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, I’ll remind you that you’re not very strong if you’re not breathing. You’re also not very strong if you cannot move yourself.
We now have some foundational principles to work with:
Breathe
Move
It’s important to note that not all combat sports have the same energetic demands, as some have different predominate movements. For example, striking-based sports tend to be significantly more aerobic than grappling-based sports; the latter sees a more direct translation from strength development.
This shouldn’t be hard to image since grappling is a sport based on control, grabbing, and holding. However, this brings us full circle back to breathing and moving as limiters to our ability to express strength.
Essentially all recovery is aerobic, whether that’s within a round, between rounds, or between training sessions.
As a grappler, you probably don’t need to run a marathon (5+ hours). But, if a local competition is 3 x 10-minute rounds and you’ve never seen a 30-minute jog, I would not count on your “cardio” to save you.
I think this scales for larger events too. The ADCC North American Trials at 66Kg and 77Kg are full 256-man brackets every time. That’s 8 x 10-minute rounds if they all hypothetically go the distance; then another 8 on day two.
As I mentioned above, movement efficiency matters. This is why it’s important to sometimes use “objective” or external metrics such as a heart rate monitor (i.e. target heart rate) rather than a specific outcome (i.e. 5K or 10K runs) for a specific movement pattern we may not be conditioned for.
For example, if you’re comparing “just rolling” to running it makes a huge difference in effort and heart rate if you’re bad at either one. If we’re developing the endurance system, cardio-respiratory function is the target we’re trying to improve regardless of the movement pattern used to elicit that response.
Aerobic Capacity:
The above puts some parameters on low intensity steady state (LISS) training. With a general foundation built, the next logical step would be to improve our “aerobic capacity” by “packing more work into a given interval.”
This is where we see structures like As-Many-Reps/Rounds-As-Possible (AMRAP) or “for time” — in opposition to “further or longer.” For example, we want to bike more calories in a 10-minute round (more work in the same amount of time), or run a 5K faster (the same work done in less time).
Once again we need to be cautioned of movement efficiency. If I’m not already “good” at running, then perhaps my work capacity is not improving, but rather I’m getting more efficient or “better” at the movement of running (or burpees, or whatever).
This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just a reminder that “noob gains” are as present in developing physical fitness as they are in sport skills. Therefore non-technical and bodyweight movements are usually good choices to work the aerobic capacity domain.
Anaerobic Capacity:
All sports require specific adaptations — there aren’t many people on Earth deadlifting 3x, let alone 4x their bodyweight. However, there’s a wide range of complexity in the skills required for different sports.
Combat sports in general are very complex, even “just grappling.” One reason for this is that, in contrast to the above section on aerobic capacity, a given round does not have the same consistent pace throughout the round in actual practice.
Anaerobic capacity can target this by combining elements of explosive power, aerobic capacity, and impaired recovery on repeating intervals. EMOM (every-minute-on-the-minute) structures are a good choice here. We might create a short circuit (alternating EMOM) for a 5-minute round, rest for 1 minute, then repeat another 5-minute interval, and so on.
These sessions can feel like a dumpster fire, especially if they’re structured appropriately; which is to say still emphasizing a heavy aerobic component and not letting yourself hide behind micro-rests during transitions.
Conclusion:
Energy systems aren’t as black and white as exercise scientists and self-proclaimed gurus would like you to believe. Nevertheless, language is how we express ourselves and ides, so here we are. In reality movement costs energy. What substrates are used to create that energy, and what byproducts accumulate as a result, are a nuanced spectrum dependent on amounts of oxygen and acidity.
At the lowest level we need to breathe. The primary fuel substrates here are fat and oxygen. Thereafter we can mobilize and explore the efficiency of different patterns (movement and mobility) and it would be prudent to note their incumbent biological and psychological effects.
When pushed hard, we often find that an in/ability to clear waste products from the system can be a limiting factor. Finding and knowing where this threshold is is a powerful lesson that doesn’t need trained often.
Some time should be spent on mirroring the energetic demands of your sport with exaggerated difficulty. For grappling and most combat sports this falls into the anaerobic capacity domain, though aerobic function (above) is more likely the limiting factor than force production (below).
Lastly, we get to cellular energy production and other “short fuel” processes. These are often described in terms of rate of force (power) and the ability to hold tension (strength) by either generating or resisting movement.