Developing conditioning is a must for any combat sport athlete. What that usually involves is going all out for a certain amount of time and resting (something fighters seem to be allergic to) for a certain amount of time. Both of those are dependent on what quality you’re trying to develop (aerobic or anaerobic, capacity or power.) For striking, this is pretty straightforward. You grab some pads or a heavy bag and have at. You kick as hard or fast as you need to and all is right in the world. Grappling, however, has a special challenge. Yes, you could just grab your training partner and go as hard or fast as you need to (insert juvenile but amusing joke here.) You and your training partners simply can’t go all out on each other multiple times a week, week in week out. Like Thanos, injury is inevitable. So what do you do, then? You need to use lots of muscle with fairly heavy loads because humans are kind of heavy. You need to go full blast. The best approximation I’ve found are strongman movements. So, here’s how you condition for grappling with strongman.

Yoke Walk. For a laugh, some friends and I decided it would be a fun idea to load up the yoke with 400lbs and see how far we could get in one minute. After each of us got up off the floor in a puddle of our own sweat and the ringing in our ears stopped, we decided that was one of the best conditioning exercises there is. Nothing makes your lungs burn, your heart pound, and your abs cry like taking a heavy weight on your back and running with it for an extended period of time. How I got the number 400 was simple, take your best yoke walk for five meters and use 60% of that weight. For me at that time, that was 660. Yes, I’m aware that 60% of that is actually 396. But we didn’t have the fractional plates to get to 396. Besides, 400 is cooler. What can I say, I’m human.

Sandbags. While atlas stones are the iconic strongman implement, they’re hard to find and can only be used on either well matter floors or special pads so that when you drop them they don’t form a crater in the floor. Enter sandbag. It offers all the same benefits of stones (picking an awkward object up off the floor; use of legs, hips, back, and arms in one movement; and having the wind crushed out of you) except for the pure, unadulterated badass of moving big rocks around. Sorry, nothing can match that. There are two ways you can use sandbags very effectively when you have minimal space. One is by simply picking it up off the floor and lifting it to chest height, then dropping it back down. The other is to pick it up, then dump it over your shoulder. Both are great. Both are dead simple to do. And both will feel like absolute torture. Sandbag weights often go up in big increments, about 40 to 50 pounds. So when you pick one, err on the side of too light. You’ll find that “too light” isn’t after about thirty seconds.

Sleds. It doesn’t look like much, but the sled is easily one of the most sinister pieces of equipment you can use. It’s basically injury proof because if you’re not doing the movement right or it’s too heavy, it just doesn’t move. It’s also very easy on the joints because there’s no eccentric (lowering) phase. There are a lot of ways to use it, but my favorites are pushing it forward and pulling arm over arm. The former lights up your legs like nothing else and the latter gives your arms, back, and forearms an insane workout. How heavy you load them will depend on the sled itself, the surface you’re pulling it on (grass, concrete, turf, etc.,) and how strong/conditioned you are.

Log Press. Another one that tries to crush the wind out of you. Log presses tax the entire body. You have to pick it up off the floor, get it to rest on your upper chest, then put it overhead. The log is big, awkward, and heavy. For conditioning, it’s best to go from ground to overhead on each rep. Whether you put it on your lap before getting it to shoulder level or just go straight from ground to shoulder (called a viper press,) is up to you. You can strict press it, push press, or jerk it (insert Beavis and Butt-head laugh.)

When using these exercises for conditioning, you first need to know which part of conditioning you’re trying to develop. This is going to dictate how long each round is and how much rest you get in between. When you’re trying to develop power (think of it as the horsepower of your engine,) you want to keep the work periods shorter and allow full recovery in between. When you’re trying to develop capacity (think of it as the size of the gas tank,) you want to keep the work periods longer and the recovery periods shorter. For the specifics, look at the picture above. You don’t have to just stick to one exercise for the work period either. If your work period is 60 seconds, you can do 20 seconds of sandbag, 20 of sled pushing, and 20 of log pressing. Feel free to get creative. If you really want it to suck, which I assume you do if you’re reading my articles, then put the sandbag work last. Just make sure you keep a bucket or some bushes nearby.

To program it all is actually pretty simple. The closer to it gets to fight night, the more anaerobic you want to get. This is because aerobic adaptations last longer than anaerobic ones. You can drop most of the aerobic stuff a month out and still be OK because it’ll hang on for a few weeks before dropping. The anaerobic ones will start to drop after only a couple of weeks. This is why we keep them in until a week out from the fight. They won’t drop in only one week. A sample would be that you do aerobic work for three weeks, do half aerobic and half anaerobic for one week, three weeks of anaerobic, deload and fight the final week. That’s your conditioning for the eight weeks leading up to your fight.

Conditioning for jiu-jitsu, wrestling, and MMA is often a tricky beast to tame. There are so many things to manage and there hasn’t been as much development of strength and conditioning as there has for sports like American football, hockey, or football. Hopefully you’ve now got a better understanding of how to manage your conditioning. If you don’t have access to all that lovely gear, don’t worry. There are still plenty of ways to get the job done. If you’re like me and you live in northern New Jersey, then you’re lucky and places like Whippany Athletic Club have all of these. If you’re a bit further south in central Jersey (please don’t fill the comments section with debates on its existence,) Savage City Strength does as well. Oh, and don’t forget the bucket.