Hi guys I want to get your opinions on this programme I have knocked up. I don't plan on competing again this year so want to use the last 8 weeks or so we have to focus on building some strength and adding some size. Strength wise I don't feel Iv got back to the level I was at before taking a sabbatical from martial arts and training and size I feel for my height I could get a little more armor packed on me. Since coming back to training I have been using never gymless by Ross Enamait as my conditioning bible and for things like explosive strength and insane cardio I think you'd struggle to find a better text, but for pure maximal strength and gaining mass I am starting to doubt its methods are the most efficient, basically I'm ready to start shifting some iron again. This is what Iv come up with. Day 1 Squat Bench Press Dips Higher reps lower weights Front Squat Resistance Band Qusai Isometrics Neck Exercise Day 2 (Explosive Strength) A1 Muscle-ups (from bar or rings) 4 sets x 8 A2 Knee Tucks 4 sets x 12 B1 Depth Plyometric Pushups (A or B) 4 sets x 8 B2 Lunge Jumps 4 sets x 12 C1 Clap Pull-ups 4 sets x 8 C2 Ankle Hops 4 sets x 20 D Power Overs Day 3 Deadlift Overhead Press Towel Pull ups Snatch Grip Deadlift, Low weight High reps Resistance Band Qusai Isometrics Neck Exercise Its essentially Wendlers 5/3/1 modified for MMA routine with the assistance exercises chosen from the ones William Wayland recommends in this article for stimulating hypertrophy. http://www.scramblestuff.com/so-you-want-to-go-up-a-weight-class/ and an explosive strength focused session taken from never gymless. Three Stregnth and conditioning sessions are about all I can manage on top of 10 - 12 hours of MMA a week, I plan to run with this till at least the end of the year possibly till the end of January, I am expecting to make my MMA debut in February or March so may have to change things up then. Any feedback would be appreciated also a (possibly stupid) question about using 5/3/1 I cant figure out, are you supposed to increase weight as the reps decrease ? also this is what is meant by Resistance band neck exercise. [ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjfutdMhL8E"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjfutdMhL8E[/ame]
There are some good calculators online for 5/3/1. Google calculator for 5/3/1 and pick the one you like best. I would say pick one that calculates all the sets, including your warm up sets. There are some out there that will allow you to programme several cycles of 5/3/1.
i would say focus on one thing, two at most. maximal strength improves almost everything, so strength and size OR strength and power (doesn't help that hypertrophy and power development methods are essentially opposites). what's your height, weight and current maxes?
I was actually coming round to this myself after a little more reading, maybe I should drop the explosive strength session for an additional accessory work session as Wendler recommends in his 5/3/1 for MMA article. If I was going to focus all three of my non MMA specific sessions on maximal strength for the time being I had also considered just doing starting strength again as some say its better for beginners (not a beginner to weight lifting but I have beginner stats right now) and very simple to follow however I think the volume of squatting involved would take a toll on my MMA training. 5.9, 67.7 kg, no idea what my current strength levels are in terms of lifts, I feel strong on the mats but have felt stronger in the past.
coordinating with the mma is the tricky part, but for both strength and size you can make progress with as little as 2x a week per exercise (although it'll be suboptimal compared to a specialized weights program and nothing else, of course). also, starting strength is low volume. eat, and you'll be fine, but you probably won't get big on it. 5/3/1 i hear is also low-ish volume (never ran it myself), but there are options for additions to it that are pretty interesting if you want more (such as 5/3/1 boring but big, which adds a 5x10 back-off after the main lifts). you need both volume and weight to grow and get stronger, more so weight for getting stronger and volume for getting bigger, and as long as you're not going extremely heavy (90+%), volume will likely be the main culprit regarding leaving you beat up and interfering with your MA training, but you can spread out your volume by increasing frequency (always bear in mind to downregulate intensity accordingly as total and/or per-session volume go up). icedield i'd say is the go-to guy here for combined weights and MA training, as he has a ton of lifting experience, but for my part, i'd say you don't need anything fancy, just squat, push something, and pull something 2-3x a week each for, say, 3-5 sets of 4-6 reps, increasing weight each week (no need to make every workout use the same sets and reps or to use the same sets and reps for every lift), deadlift 1-2x a week for a few sets of, say, 2-4 reps increasing weight weekly, and you should consistently get stronger as long as you eat and sleep enough. the heavy weight will make you a bit bigger, but more importantly, will let you handle bigger weihts faster for hypertrophy work, so when you want to switch to gaining mass, deload a little bit, and you can pretty much do the same thing but lighter and with more sets and/or reps; more sets will let you go heavier but will take more time and be more fatiguing, more reps involves getting a pump, which is a bit of an acquired taste, but takes less time to do and doesn't beat you up as much (although if you overdo it you might get epically sore the next day or two). if you want to use accessory work to try and get size early on, the options in the article are decent, although i'd change the snatch grip deadlift for a romanian deadlift variant (snatch grip rdl is always a fun one, in fact), as they tend to be better for posterior chain hypertrophy, and i'd add some ab stuff, for obvious reasons. just go light and do a few sets of moderate or high reps (anything from 5x5 to 3x10 and everything in between, 25-35 total reps is a decent rule of thumb, i'd say). squatting, pressing and pulling 2x/w, deadlifting 1x/w, and using one accesory for each 1x/w plus ab work 3x/w leaves you with effectively 14 "time slots" to distribute throughout the week, so if you train weights 3x a week, you could have something like two sessions with 5 exercises and one with four. an arbitrary example (with set and rep numbers pulled outta my butt): day 1: squat, 3x5 bench, 3x3 dips, 5x5 pull-ups, tons of pull-ups abs, all the abs day 2: squat, 3x3 front squat, 3x8 ohp, 8x3 chin-ups, all the chin-ups abs, by the truckload day 3: dl, 3x2 rdl, 3x10 towel pull-ups, till you drop abs, you know the drill could just as easily add another pushing movement there on day 3 and have 5 exercises per session, too, for example. plenty of options, really.
There is an option on the latest 5/3/1 to run the programme 2 days a week, if you have a lot of other training happening. You alternate workouts every week. So you'd have workouts A, B, C and D, and Week 1 you'd do A and B, and Week 2 you'd do C and D. It takes a little bit of thought to plan how you fit everything in, but you can set up a reasonable routine if you want to.
You should take a look at Starting Strength. I have been doing it for around a month now and feel stronger than I did when I started.
The conscensus seems to be from what I am reading that starting strength is a better programme for beginner levels of strength and 5/3/1 is more intermediate, however if implemented correctly 5/3/1 gels better for people with other training to do. I have previous experience with SS and am inclined to think it wouldn't fit very well with the level MMA training I'm putting in.
I recently restarted Starting Strength after a log period off. I'm running a slightly modified version of it 2 days a week along with 2 days of running and will be adding in BJJ in a few weeks time. I've run SS 2 days a week in the past and made good progress on it. The lift that did seem to suffer though was the squat. I find I make better progress with squats doing them 3 days a week (at least when I get my numbers up). WheN my numbers are still low, 2 days seem to work OK. I currently squat once a week and clean once a week, but may add some pistols in soon.
Fish has some good ideas, basically the issues you will have is recovery and growth, you get bigger when resting not training so the first thing id put in is your recovery days. Have at least 2 days off where you can just eat, recovery and grow. Then plan your lifting around your training, how many days a week are you training MMA, what days and whats the level of stress in those classes like, for example is one day hard sparring, and another technical work? Be clever when planning your sessions, for example Martin rooney has his guys only doing lower body once a week, the last session of the week because its pointless squatting hard on a Monday and then turning up to MMA classes on a Tuesday and Wednesday with your lower body destroyed, and its also hard to grow and recovery squatting multiple times a week when you are also wrecking your legs with conditioning work, and wrestling
I already take two days a week off from any training regardless, I do between 10 - 12 hours of MMA a week, some times this is in 4 3 hour sessions some times its more spread out among a couple of 3 hour sessions and hour morning classes, just depends on my shifts. I can manage 3 strength or conditioning sessions around this a week. Iv simplified things considerably, Im just going to follow Wendlers 5/3/1 for MMA to the T to get some strength back. Day 1 Squat Bench Dips Hanging leg Raises Band Good morning Day 2 Deadlift Press Pull ups Hanging leg Raises Not sure whats going here, maybe more band good mornings, maybe more neck work After 4 or 5 weeks or so I may think about adding some more hypertrophy stuff, Ill leave explosive strength development for when fight time comes closer next year. Things I need to decide now are should I use the 5/3/1 rep range right now or would I get more out of just doing your average 3x5 every week. Also not sure whether to use my third S+C session for more accessory work or a cardio session, probably going to trial and error using it for cardio for now.
Personally I have a problem with guys writing strength articles for a sport they have never trained anyone for, not having a go at wendler because at least in his article he mentions speaking to your coach about training and that he wont write a book about training for MMA as he has no experience, but for me suggesting two whole body days for an athlete doing a load of leg intensive work already is strange. As is suggesting OH press work, the research on the dangers of overhead pressing to people doing impact sports is well documented and ironically the coach who did the most work on it is an old friend of his. This kind of thinking is in line with the likes of defranco who are training athletes with much less physical demands than those placed on MMA fighters. Most coaches who work with MMA athletes seem to suggest a shed load of direct core work, a shed load of neck work, grip work, upper back endurance work, and hip, abductor and groin work, which from a sports specific point of view makes real sense, most injuries are neck, groin, abductor and shoulder issues. As for core and hip work well everything in MMA from lifts, to sitting up in guard, to posturing out of submissions is core related, endurance and strength in all those muscles are essential. Even dreaded flexation work (situp variations) , a no no for most is recommended because lets face it, in MMA and grappling we are curling the body up allot especially if you are a guard player. So high rep sets 10-20 and multiple sets are an idea, and probably way more important than the actual main lifts. Or put another way personally I would rather do just 1 or 2 main lifts and a load of assistance work, than 3 or even 4 main lifts and not much Assistance stuff Anyway sorry for rambling just a pet pev of mine
You can point to many people who do train combat athletes who's perodization for MMA theories generally boil down to, not fighting get stronger doing the major lifts, fight coming up get more gas in the tank i.e. Joel Jamieson, William Wayland etc and Wendlers is as good and simple a program as any Iv seen for getting stronger in a General preparation phase. Not saying your wrong about the OHP btw.