Unfortunately, most mixed martial artists follow a strength training program designed for bodybuilders. If your schedule consists of days for the chest, legs and arms, or any other division of body parts, it is also included in this category. So if you’re following a bodybuilding routine, let me ask you this: is your goal to walk around the ring, flex your biceps, or is your goal to knock out your opponent? If you want to have sexy biceps, stop here. But if you want to knock out your opponent, read on.
If you are a mixed martial artist, there are 3 pitfalls to sticking to a bodybuilding routine at the gym:
1) The routine will require a large volume and therefore take time away from martial arts training.
2) The routine will leave your muscles tired and sore, which will take you away from martial arts training.
3) The routine promotes muscle hypertrophy, which means that if you follow it correctly, you will have to move to a higher weight class.
Now, for most athletes, if you have to learn wrestling, boxing, muay thai, grappling, and dealing with life on top of all that, a 4-5 day strength training routine will not improve your performance. Add resistance training on top of that and you’re probably setting yourself up for overtraining and possible injury.
Even if you can put it in and it doesn’t leave you too sore, you don’t want to add too much muscle. Instead, your goal is to achieve relative strength and power, which means you want to maintain the same weight, but become more and more powerful.
Since your goals are different, your strength training routine must be different to address those goals.
That’s where you should start thinking about training movement patterns first and muscles second.
There are six basic movement patterns:
1) squats
2) lunge
3) Bend over (aka deadlift)
4) Twist
5) Push
6) sweater
By integrating these movements into your program, you will work all the muscles in your body to some degree.
Also, when you perform these movement patterns, you may notice strength deficiencies or imbalances. An example is during a lunge: if your forward knee sags, this means that your glutes (mid and max) are not firing when they should or are relatively weak. Either way, you know you have to do some isolation work to get the lagging muscle out.
Isolation exercises do not fall under the movement patterns listed above, but there are some that mixed martial arts artists must perform, such as isometrics (planks, hanging, etc.) and single-joint exercises (external shoulder rotations, bicep curls, etc.), in addition to corrective exercises.
So instead, focus on training movement patterns first and then isolate them later.
Now since you are in the movement pattern paradigm, the biggest benefit to the mixed martial artist is that you want to train 2-3 times a week to get the most benefit. Since you will be hitting all the major muscle groups each time you train, training more than 3 times per week will interfere with your recovery and will leave you too sore and tired to be effective in your MMA training. A 2-day sample split would be:
Day 1: Forward lunges, bench press, chin-ups, skull crushers, and prone bridges.
Day 2: Deadlift, Arnold Press, 1 Arm Rows, Bicep Curls, and Lumberjacks.
Here you will be hitting all movement patterns and all major muscle groups. You will continue to gain strength by following effective rep, set and rest schemes, you will not feel too sore, and you will be refreshed and ready to absorb effective MMA techniques.
Remember, you are a mixed martial artist, not a bodybuilder posing on a speedometer, so train with one goal in mind: improve your performance in the cage.