If you’re a combat athlete who is serious about competing, then you have a lot of areas you need to take care of in any given training cycle:
- Skills - whether that means grappling, boxing, kicking, or wrestling
- Conditioning - your ability to go the distance and not get gassed
- Strength - ability to execute techniques that require strength
- Mobility and Flexibility - to both get into difficult positions and express your strength fully
- Diet and Nutrition - are you fueling yourself correctly?
In my experience, a lot of combat athletes suffer from one of two things - not knowing what to focus on, or focusing on the wrong things at the wrong times. It’s important to identify the single factor that is the biggest obstacle to your improvement, and focus your energy on improving that. For example, too often fighters assume that the reason they are getting winded during sparring (or rolling) is because they are not fit enough, particularly at the novice level. This can sometimes be the case, but your strength and conditioning may not be your limiting factor.
Case in point: I train a grappler who holds junior Irish national and European records in Powerlifting. He has squatted 530lbs, benched 340lbs, and deadlifted 595lbs. Since turning to grappling as a sport, he has focused on his conditioning. And because of his strength-training foundation, he can match and exceed most guys in my gym (and probably your gym too) in any of the conditioning training we do.
However, when he moved up a level to a more advanced training group, he was gassing in every session, and was getting tapped regularly, often through sheer exhaustion. He was becoming frustrated and his answer, understandably, was to up his conditioning. However the fact that he was demonstrably stronger than everyone he was losing to, meant that he was off target. His problem was, in simple terms, that when he was rolling he was being beaten by superior skill. To use a gambling analogy, in his matches he didn’t know when to stick or to twist, and that meant he was burning excessive amounts of energy and becoming tired before his opponent.
We know that greater skill can often manifest as the appearance of superior strength, because the more skilled athlete has a better knowledge of leverages. But the same is true of conditioning, where the more skilled competitor simply expends less energy to accomplish more on the mat. I recommended that he spend the 15 minutes after practice that he was going to use swinging kettlebells for drilling more techniques, or asking his training partners where he went wrong in their roll. Pretty soon he was less exhausted after training, as he adapted faster to the increased skill level. In his case, his limiting factor was his skill-set, and the solution was more time “playing the game.”
In your case it may well be your conditioning, your strength or some other factor that is holding you back. For example, your diet may be poor, and this could be leading to a drop in energy levels late in a training session, or it could be slowing your recovery between sessions. You may be strong enough and fit enough, but your mobility may be impeding you from expressing your strength, or from getting into positions that require a mobile body. You may also be simply too weak or unfit to express your skills adequately.
In any of these cases, it’s important to have someone like a coach or training partner to assess this for you. Even if you have good analytical skills yourself, it’s best to get an outside opinion. Once you know your limiting factor, you can begin to improve it.
