The goal of almost every fighter is to have great conditioning; to never feel the sensation of fatigue in a fight. But is this what we are really training for?
We define conditioning as:
‘ The ability to maintain a given power output with or without fatigue ‘
The last part of the definition is probably the most important. Everybody thinks that a well-conditioned fighter doesn’t get tired. Not the case. A well-conditioned fighter is able to perform for whatever the prescribed time period is. If you finish a fight and still have a ton of energy left over, that isn’t necessarily great conditioning, it may just be poor management of available energy. If a sprinter runs 100m, isn’t tired, but finishes in 15seconds, that doesn’t sound like good conditioning…
We have fighters who begin training with us, and are exhausted when they hit 75% of their Max Heart Rate (MHR). We ask our fighters to give us a Rating of Percieved Exertion (RPE) after each round. It isn’t uncommon after a few months of training for a fighter to report a lower RPE, with a higher heart rate; maybe 85% MHR this time. The athlete has become conditioned to the feeling of their arms and legs feeling like lead, their heart beating more times than they can count, and their brain feeling like it’s going to pop out their ears. Sure they have had some physical adaptations take place (increased lactate threshold, increase in anaerobic enzymes, increased substrate storage, etc), but the athlete has now become conditioned to performing with fatigue present.
In our last article, ‘Why you need to hit the gym...’, we suggested that improvements in movement economy and the law of diminishing returns means that it becomes harder and harder to improve your fitness. This is where supplementary conditioning comes into play.
Check out the video below, and in our next post we will give you a basic conditioning template, discuss some basic guidelines, and explain why integrating skill work is so important.
