Physical Requirements For Combat Sports

Most Athletic Requirements Are Comparable

For ages, combat sports have functioned as a means for health and self-defense.

They accomplish these roles from the youth to the elite rank by establishing a strong footing of basics, order, and regularity and by supplying a lasting organized approach.

When martial arts are considered through the lens of athletic merits, each specialization is characterized by its requirements.

Nevertheless, most of their athletic requirements are comparable, such as:

• Athletic growth and motor proficiency
• Athletic functioning
• Quickness
• Power
• Strength
• Dexterity
• Flexibility
• Coordination
• Conditioning

Biomotor Proficiency

The building blocks of athletics are motor proficiencies:

• Speed
• Agility
• Power
• Strength
• Flexibility (mobility and stability)
• Balance
• Coordination
• Conditioning

Many fighters can build different bio-motor abilities at the same time, and this is typically the most suitable course for both novice and intermediate fighters, who have less conditioning ability and must produce numerous abilities simultaneously. Elite athletes, however, may profit better from committing focus areas of conditioning to producing distinct capabilities. For instance, a fighter encountering a tough competition calendar may use about a month of training on speed and strength without placing much focus on conditioning, which can confine the full manifestation of the other two abilities. Because conditioning and speed live at opposing ends of a whole, an elite athlete can isolate them in training.

Speed

Of all the athletic characteristics, speed is the most desired. From a 100-meter sprint to the transfer speed of a kick or punch, speed is an attribute that all sports emcees chitchat about and all athletes consume their training to acquire. Speed can also be witnessed, for instance, in a snappy judo toss, an explosive double-leg takedown, and the mounting of excellent defense against a takedown effort. Regardless of how you visualize it, speed is an attribute worth conditioning for.

The muscles that permit an athlete to move quickly and create timely power are controlled by the nervous system. As an offshoot, if conditioning is accomplished correctly, all of the biomotor abilities grow in a complementary manner. It is essential, nevertheless, to drill for speed in an unfatigued shape, which can be achieved through short-range sprints, resisted (using a parachute, band, belt, etc) sprints, uphill sprints, and partner-chase games that produce competition. Be conscious also of the point that speed counts on the process, and never forfeit technical proficiency in favor of short-term performance in training.

Agility

Agility splits adequate athletes from extraordinary ones, for instance, in the capacity to respond and explode or to hit the brakes and shift into a punch, a kick, a takedown, or redirecting of a challenger. This capability can be both a natural talent and a trainable one. The purpose of agility workouts is to discover how to do the correct things from the wrong positions. In combat sports, in particular, fighters must continuously respond and switch positions depending on the opponent’s movements. To magnify this capability, fighters can use explicit agility exercises to generate body recognition that supports them in one-on-one fights and decreases their chance of damage.

Power

Power is a critical element of martial arts achievement. It creates more bang in kicks and punches and enhances the fighter’s capability to toss or hurl an opponent. As a consequence, martial artists devote considerable time to building specific power through hard work with kicks and punches. The power produced in class can be boosted by committing different training times to build general power. There are numerous methods to do so, for instance:

• Sprints
• Skips
• Jumps
• Medicine ball tosses
• Olympic-style workouts
• Other weight room techniques that can assist practitioners to manifest better power in their combat sport of choice

Strength

As commented earlier, the biomotor abilities build upon one another. In light of this strength might be the most significant attribute for a fighter to grow because it supplies the support for both power and speed. Based on these grounds, the most powerful, most robust athletes are commonly also the quickest.

Maximal strength is the capability to show maximum spontaneous contraction in opposition to resistance. When examining strength in numerical importance, the three major lifts are the squat, the bench press, and the deadlift. In grappling-based combat sports, like wrestling, jujitsu, judo, and Muay Thai (clinch positions), fighters require both dynamic and isometric strength to complete and protect against takedowns. In mixed martial arts (MMA), fighters require a combination of excellent leverage and old-fashioned savage strength to exercise positional command in the octagon or ring and wrist control on the floor.

Flexibility (Mobility & Stability)

In most martial arts, flexibility is essential. It concerns not only how elastic an individual is but also the strength that he or she boasts in the current range of motion. Signifying that an individual’s flexibility is just as good as his or her athletic strength through the full range of motion. Accordingly, mobility and stability are not independent but interdependent qualities. Exploiting mobility and stability is also the rationale for utilizing an energetic active warm-up rather than fixed stretching.

Studies have indicated that active stretching is quite superior to fixed stretching because it decreases the chance of injury and allows more significant power creation. If performance is about power and explosion, why use a method that hinders power creation in the pre-competition stage? Instead, the warm-up must ready the fighter for the needs of the preferred combat sport. For this logic, given that competition demands the muscles to compress and extend rapidly under pressure, the warm-up must do the same.

Balance

Balance manages to be neglected in most conditioning workouts. Nevertheless, like coordination, it demands practice and hence must be handled frequently in exercise. Balance depends on a mix of the fighter’s senses and his or her reaction to exterior influences and other triggers (whether visual, hearing, or touch). In martial arts, a practitioner’s balance in an open fighting position relies on weight allocation and how competently he or she handles their weight on the balls of their feet while in action.

Balance also relies greatly on strength, particularly in clinch positions, the more powerful the fighter, the better he or she can keep balance to counteract an opponent’s tried throw or takedown and shift into a throw or takedown of his or her own.

Coordination

Coordination is the capacity to bring different body regions operating concurrently in a broad sense. Many individuals suppose that coordination should be conditioned only to a finite period, yet, just as strength props speed and power, coordination is critical to power,  speed, and agility. For instance, the coordination of moves from the ground up assists to create efficient power. More precisely, excellent footwork is a paramount component of the basic coordination needed to put oneself in place to strike or guard.

Footwork must not be mistaken for agility, but the two are correlated. Footwork comprises merely temporal and spatial forms that allow you to create a tempo, which in turn allows you to shift smoothly and yield more power. Agility, on the other hand, concerns motion established on the necessity to react. The connection between the two is that the more balanced you are and, more particularly, the superior your footwork is the more nimble you can be. For instance, if an opponent throws a kick or punch, excellent body cognition permits a fighter to counter and get into an offensive position.

Conditioning

In combat sports, your performance is controlled more by conditioning than by any of the other characteristics. Conditioning is divided into two basic kinds, general and specific. Both of these need to be produced by fighters at all ranks for top performance. Regular conditioning sets up more significant workability, whereas distinct conditioning is customized to the precise competition needs of a given system.

Martial art disciplines differ in their methods of competition, varying from point sparring to specific rounds and duration. Nevertheless, the purpose of conditioning is to form a superb basis of all-around fitness that qualifies the athlete to endure increased magnitudes of all-out training down the route. This precise work emulates the needs placed on the body’s direct power systems during competition in their selected specialization. The training program presented in TTF is constructed on the following three high-energy methods:

• Lactic (glycolytic)
• Alactic (phosphagen)
• Aerobic (oxidative)

The alactic system is also understood as the ATP-PC system and can be regarded as jet fuel, highly potent but burns up fast. It supplies the fastest obtainable ATP and is utilized for short, explosive blasts. This is a necessary ability and one that is teachable if a fighter sticks to proper rest breaks that allow him or her to apply maximum power in workouts. Generally, after 0 to 10 seconds of maximum exertion, an individual requires approximately two minutes to recharge 80% of the energy consumed and three minutes to refresh 92%.

The lactic system releases after around 20 to 90 seconds of energy-intensive work. In that portion of the power range of exercise, you feel restricted by local burning, heaviness, and the inability to persist in repetitions. Most individuals mistake the burning to be lactic acid accumulation, but in truth, it comes from the collection of lactate and hydrogen ions that hamper muscular contraction. Throughout the entire year, conditioning of this sort is typical in numerous martial arts, and it is immensely prevalent in MMA conditioning. Regardless, this exercise should not be carried out throughout the year.

Energy System Use (duration & intensity):

Aerobic

• 3 minutes to 2 hours
• Moderate to low degree of intensity

Anaerobic Lactic

• 20 to 90 seconds
• Moderate to a high degree of intensity

Anaerobic Alactic

• 1 to 20 seconds
• A high degree of intensity

It’s excessively taxing on your body and challenging to recuperate from. Be that as it may, it is critical to enforce lactate workouts not earlier than 4-6 weeks preceding the competition to better simulate the intensive essence of your combat sport. The objective of drilling this system is to increase the lactate threshold. In other words, to drive to it but not beyond it!

The aerobic system is the most paramount of the energy systems. An exemplary aerobic foundation sets a basis for the coming phases of additional intensive training. Likewise, the more expansive the base of your aerobic workload, the better you can endure higher intensive gaps with decreased harmful exhaustion, therefore assisting her or him recuperate sooner from the insufficiency of the more intensive alactic and lactic power systems.

Surprisingly, considerable martial arts styles use mainly this energy system because the lessons last 60 to 90 minutes and include functioning at intensity levels that are difficult to sustain for
that period. This mixture of time and power makes the aerobic system the greatest importance for combat sport conditioning. Many fighters struggle with misunderstandings about conditioning, particularly about energy systems.

In truth, all of the power systems function simultaneously. The dispute, then, is which one rules. The response counts on two factors, duration & intensity of training. For this reason, the objective of TTF Conditioning for Combat Sports is to assist you to determine the most suitable strategy for your preferred fighting style.