Mixed martial arts is a sport of power and endurance. Maximizing endurance for power is always a tradeoff between optimizing two athletic qualities that are often at odds with each other: rate of force production, and producing that force over a long period of time. In other words, you need to hit hard and hit hard for a long time.
The focus of my training for the last month and the next month has been working on my stamina. It is a quality that has been left behind as I have sought to improve my maximum strength, my explosiveness and the size of my muscle mass.
For a fighter, aerobic capacity is one of the most important traits to possess, often overlooked in an age where HIIT, Tabata intervals, and raising your lactate threshold are considered key to performance.
Increasing your ability to use your oxidative energy system (ie your aerobic capacity) efficiently is critical to producing a high work rate throughout a three to five round fight. To that end, most of my endurance training has been focused on long, slow runs, training at a moderate pace for 60-90 minutes. At these intensities, for that period of time, my body trains aerobically, which leads to a more efficient cardiovascular system.
Another method of increasing your oxidative capacity is to increase your muscles’ ability to use oxygen for fuel. Tempo training or continuous training is designed to specifically target those muscle fibers that are best suited to oxygen use: Type I slow twitch muscle fibers. These muscle fibers are much more efficient at using oxygen for energy compared to with Type II fast twitch fibers, which are better at using ATP/creatine phosphate and glycogen.
tempo training method
In a six-day-a-week training program that includes three sessions to increase cardiac output, I have one session dedicated to strength. That strength session is based on tempo training.
Tempo training focuses on time under tension (TUT) to get the desired result. The protocol I’m working on calls for lifting weights around 60% of my 1 repetition max (RM) at a slow cadence: 2-0-2-0. This means lowering the weight at a controlled pace for two seconds, without pausing at the bottom, then lifting the weight at a controlled pace for two seconds, then repeating without pausing at the top. The muscles are in constant tension throughout the set, no matter how many repetitions you do.
My focus is on using large multi-joint movements, such as squats, bench presses, and shoulder presses, to target the maximum number of muscles.
In his book, Ultimate MMA Conditioning, Joel Jamieson recommends picking 3-4 strength exercises and performing 8-10 reps over 3-5 sets. He also recommends 6 to 8 minutes of active rest between each exercise to allow your muscles to fully recover and keep your heart rate up.
In practice, it turns out that doing three basic movements (squats, bench press, shoulder press) for my rhythm strength session takes around 90 minutes due to the long rest periods. For this reason, I have limited my tempo strength sessions to those three exercises. All of the following reps/drills are performed at a 2-0-2-0 pace:
1. 60% 1RM Squat – 8-10 reps, 5 sets, 6-8 minute rest between sets.
2. Bench press at 60% 1RM – 8-10 reps, 5 sets, 6-8 minute rest between sets.
3. 60% 1RM Shoulder Press – 8-10 reps, 5 sets, 6-8 minute rest between sets.
My active break between sets is usually shadow boxing.
Tempo Training Effects
After just four weeks of pace training, it’s hard to say what effect this mode of strength training has had on my muscular endurance.
According to the scientific literature, slow twitch fibers that are crucial for endurance are not fully recruited during fast, explosive movements. Only slow movements, which cause type I fibers to be under tension long enough, can cause adaptation of these fibers to occur.
An article looking at this is written by Thomas V Pipes, titled Strength Training and Fiber Types. In it, Pipes takes muscle biopsies from an athlete before and after predetermined training microcycles.
Pipes found that after a routine using 8 repetitions (at 8 RM), the fast-twitch muscle fibers of the trained muscle (in this case, the quadriceps via the leg press) hypertrophied.
However, he also found that slow-twitch muscle fibers atrophy (ie, get smaller); and he also found that the number of repetitions the athlete could perform at 80% of his 1RM decreased, but his 1RM increased. He then put the athlete through a routine using 12 repetitions (at his 12RM). This time, the muscle biopsy showed that hypertrophy did, in fact, occur, but this time it was in the slow-twitch muscle fibers. Not only that, but his fast twitch fibers atrophied and the number of repetitions possible at 80% of the 1RM increased, while his 1RM decreased.
What this shows is that with increasing reps, i.e., an increase in TUT, using a lighter weight, the slow twitch fibers preferentially target the fast twitch fibers. In other words, muscular endurance increases in preference to maximal strength.
This correlates to the real world example of bodybuilders. Bodybuilders have long used the TUT principle to increase overall muscle hypertrophy. The result is muscles that are capable of a remarkable degree of endurance but little maximal strength compared to other weight-trained athletes.
Another study I found related to this was done by Dr. Patrick O’Shea, Professor Emeritus of Sport and Exercise Science at Oregon State University (http://cbass.com/SLOWFAST.HTM).
He used electromyography (EMG) to study the order of muscle recruitment of muscle fiber types in the quadriceps of a trained athlete during the execution of a one-repetition squat with progressively increasing loads.
Starting with 60% of the 1RM, O’Shea found that the slow twitch fibers contributed 60% of the effort and the fast twitch fibers 40%. However, at 100% maximal effort, the percentage of slow twitch fibers involved was found to be only 5%, while fast twitch fibers contributed 95%. Therefore, lighter loads have been shown to target slow twitch fibers better than heavier loads.
conclusion
That is the limit of my understanding at the moment. Using tempo training, you can effectively target slow twitch fibers, increase their cross-sectional area, and make your muscles better able to use oxygen for fuel.
To what extent this contributes to the body becoming a better aerobic “machine”, however, I think is still open to debate. There may be another mechanism by which TUT leads to increased muscular endurance.
However, generally with more muscle hypertrophy (more muscle fiber protoplasm) lactic acid from the same workload can be distributed over a larger volume and not affect PH locally as much. Therefore, the decrease in performance should be more gradual, increasing the resistance. Since muscles generally have a mixed fiber composition, and faster twitches are known to hypertrophy more easily than slower twitches, there’s a good chance this has something to do with it as well.”
There are articles I’ve seen that say that hypoxia (oxygen deprivation to the muscles) can lead to hypertrophy, so continuous training, i.e. sets performed with no pauses between reps, can deprive the muscles of oxygen the long enough to cause hypertrophy.
The cause of local hypoxia has to do with the overall tempo, not stopping at the top or bottom of the rep and the overall load. This is how slow twitch muscles are targeted, not just because you’re exactly ‘going slow’.