Mixed martial arts is a sport of power and endurance. Maximizing power endurance is always a trade-off between optimizing two often-opposing athletic qualities: the rate of force production and the production of 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 endurance. It is a quality that has been left far 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 seen as 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 or five round fight. To that end, most of my endurance training has focused on long, slow runs, training at a moderate pace for 60-90 minutes. At these intensities, during 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 using oxygen: Type I slow-twitch muscle fibers. These muscle fibers are much more efficient at using oxygen for energy compared 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-rep max (RM) at a slow cadence: 2-0-2-0. This means lowering the weight at a controlled pace for two seconds, with no pause at the bottom, then lifting the weight at a controlled pace for two seconds, then repeating with no pause at the top. Your muscles are in constant tension throughout the set, no matter how many reps you do.
My focus is on using big multi-joint movements like squats, bench presses and shoulder presses to target the maximum number of muscles.
In his book, Ultimate MMA Conditioning, Joel Jamieson recommends choosing 3-4 strength exercises and performing 8-10 reps between 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 repetitions/exercises are performed in a 2-0-2-0 rhythm:
1. Squat 60% 1RM – 8-10 reps, 5 sets, 6-8 minutes rest between sets.
2. Bench press at 60% 1RM – 8-10 reps, 5 sets, 6-8 minutes rest between sets.
3. Shoulder press at 60% 1RM – 8-10 reps, 5 sets, 6-8 minutes rest between sets.
My active break between sets is usually shadow boxing.
Effects of tempo training
After just four weeks of rhythm training, it’s hard to say what effect this mode of strength training has had on my muscular endurance.
According to the scientific literature, the 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 discussing 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 leg press) hypertrophied.
However, he also found that slow-twitch muscle fibers atrophied (became 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 placed the athlete in a routine using 12 reps (to his 12RM). This time, the muscle biopsy showed that hypertrophy did indeed 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 reps possible at 80% of 1RM increased, while his 1RM decreased.
What this shows is that with increasing reps, i.e. an increase in TUT, using lighter weight, slow twitch fibers preferentially target fast twitch fibers. In other words, muscular endurance increases in preference to maximal force.
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 force compared to other weight-trained athletes.
Another study I found related to this was done by Dr. Patrick O’Shea, Emeritus Professor of Exercise and Sports Science at Oregon State University (http://cbass.com/SLOWFAST.HTM).
He used electromyography (EMG) to study the muscle recruitment order of muscle fiber types in the quadriceps of a trained athlete during the performance of a one-repetition squat with progressively increasing loads.
Starting with 60% of 1 RM, 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 in 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 contractions are known to hypertrophy more easily than slow contractions, there’s a good chance this has something to do with it as well.”
There are articles I’ve seen that say hypoxia (depriving muscles of oxygen) can lead to hypertrophy, so continuous training, i.e. sets done without pausing between reps, can deprive muscles of oxygen over time. 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. That’s how slow twitch muscles are targeted, not just because you’re ‘going slow’ exactly.