Five More Mistakes Fighters Make in the Gym

A while back, I wrote an article about mistakes I often see fighters make when they hit the weight room. Since then, things have gotten a bit better. The barbell isn’t maligned the way it used to be and, thanks to people like Joel Jamieson, cardio is now a thing again. But just like when you become more skilled, you find new things that you need to improve, I’ve seen fighters make new and better mistakes. Here are the top five.

Not having a program. This is a big one. You finally started lifting to build basic strength for your combat sport. The only trouble is that you’re doing what most people do, which is not have a program and do what they feel is right for that day. The trouble is that, just like your training for fighting, there needs to be organization. You don’t just go into the MMA gym and randomly decide what to do that day. Your coach has a plan. Today we’re hitting pads. Today we’re doing light sparring. Today we’re flowing in jiu-jitsu. Your coach organizes these days so that they build on each other and turn you into the monster you want to be in the cage. Your lifting needs to have a similar logic.

But I also understand that you’re a fighter. This is because you love fighting. You don’t love lifting. If you did, you’d be a powerlifter or a strongman. Leaving aside the probable lack of interest, you simply don’t have the time to learn all about writing training programs. Luckily, there are dozens of great strength programs and smart people out there who can write them for you. From 5/3/1 (Jim Wendler) to Juggernaut (Chad Wesley Smith) to Westside (Louie Simmons,) you can certainly find a program that fits you and just follow it without having to get a degree in exercise science. Oh, and shameless plug, you could hire me to do it.

Pretty sure the IBJJF doesn’t approve of this under your gi.

Copying powerlifters. But let’s say you did pick up a program and follow it. This is a beautiful thing. However, don’t make the mistake of doing exactly what powerlifters do. The trouble with this approach is that a powerlifting program is designed for one purpose: to increase your squat, bench press, and deadlift, all with a straight barbell. I love powerlifting, but the fact remains that you’re not a powerlifter. You won’t walk into the cage and see a squat rack with a loaded bar waiting for you.

This isn’t a bad thing at all. As a fighter, you’re not trying to increase your squat bench and deadlift, you’re just trying to be able to produce more force. This gives you more freedom so that if you’re shoulder hurts, you can swap out the straight bar for a football bar or change the depth you bench. If your back is hurting, you can use a trap bar instead of a straight bar for deadlifts. You’re not obligated to use a certain bar or lift to match the rules of a sport you’re not even competing in.

Not deloading. You train good and hard for weeks and weeks and then the inevitable happens: things start to hurt or your progress stalls or both. But you’re a badass fighter, not some sissy who backs out when things get hard. So you keep training hard. That little nagging hurt is now a full-blown injury. Now you can’t hit pads because your elbow is killing you or you can’t roll because your low back screams every time you bend it. What was a little tweak has become a handicap. What could have gone a long way to preventing that is a deload.

Think of it like this. Training is digging a hole in the ground. Recovery is filling the hole back in. Without proper recovery, you dig a hole that will become a grave. Deloading doesn’t mean stopping training. It means you have a planned series of lighter days. Say you roll hard three times a week. To deload, you would roll hard once this week or you roll hard three times a week, but for half as many rounds each time. So what do you do with that extra time you now have? Well, you don’t sit on your butt, eat cheetos, and watch The Raid 2 (though it’s one of the greatest action movies ever made.) Instead, you replace the rolls you’re not doing with technique work or flow jiu-jitsu. If you’re working striking, you’d replace hard sparring with touch sparring, hitting pads for technique, or doing footwork drills. This lets you keep your skills sharp, but lets your tendons and joints heal from the battering you normally give them. By the end of the deload week, you’ll probably notice that the little aches you had at the beginning are gone and you don’t feel as run down. Once the deload is over, simply go back to regular training.

Doing too much. Fighters are hard-working people. This is one of my favorite things about them. However, you can be too hard-working for your own good. You want to win, so what do you do? You hit the gym five times a week on top of your MMA training. You do lots of work on everything, wanting to make sure it’s all being improved. There are a couple of problems, though. One is that you’ve only got so much capacity to recover. Recovery spent on lifting is recovery that can’t be spent on pad work, sparring, rolling, etc. What this means practically is that you have to be picky about what you do in the weight room. Everything has a cost, but not everything has a benefit. Squatting heavy once a week has a big benefit. Doing ten sets of curls has a very small one. The idea is to find out what’s going to bring you the most benefit and spend your time on that. If your gas tank is tiny, it’s time to invest in cardio. If you keep getting muscled around the cage, it’s time to invest in strength. This is one of the biggest benefits to having a strength coach in addition to your striking and grappling coaches. He or she will talk to your MMA coaches and find out what raw qualities are lacking. Together they can find ways to bring them up and translate them to your fighting.

Ignoring rehab/prehab. It’s easily the least fun and least badass thing to do in the gym. Nobody enjoys it. But if you don’t do it, you will pay for it. The only difference between rehab and prehab is whether you’ve had the injury yet or not. The purpose of these exercises and protocols is to make sure that the right things are strong and the right things are flexible enough. If you ignore rotator cuff work long enough, your shoulder’s not going to be happy for very long. This doesn’t mean you have to be lifting a hundred pounds for fifty reps on rotator cuff exercises. But if two pounds for a set of ten makes your arm look like it’s made of jelly, there’s a problem. Keeping five to ten minutes of these kinds of exercises and protocols per workout is usually enough to keep the worst things at bay. All of that is assuming you recover enough and get a deload in once in a while.

Here you’ve had a chance to see if you’re making any of these mistakes and how you’d fix them. You’re putting in the work in the gym to get better at fighting. And getting better is always a journey that involves making mistakes. There’s nothing wrong with it. What matters is that you learn from them and use those lessons to grow. There’s a saying in jiu-jitsu: either you win or you learn. So it goes with most things in life.