Building a Fighter

Aligning your goals. How does your style in MMA or training match your exercise protocol? Through training we look at three factors to lead to high level performance Sport Demands, Individual needs, and Overall Health and Wellness. We address the Individual needs part heavily in this podcast. Your physical demands will change drastically based on your game plan for a fight. This means that we need...

Fitness Technology that is actually worth the $$$. What tracking do I need and what actually matters from biotech? We argue that something that tracks your heart rate is the most important and most affordable avenue to objective measurement. Heart rate straps do great to measure cardiovascular exercise, but are not great to measure strength qualities. To measure strength qualities (speed, power, s...

Top 5 grappling mistakes made by mixed martial artists. As wrestling coaches we go over our top 5 ways to improve your grappling efficacy in mixed martial arts. We dive into the technical pieces of cage wrestling, timing and spacing for shots, grappling feints and movements, and how to align these for ultimate MMA grappling. The other pieces we really dig into are wrestling frequency and practice....

Apologies for the intro y’all. We are talking about trunk training misconceptions. *Having a six pack does not mean you have a strong core!* The ability to expand and create pressure through your trunk is more important than the outward appearance. A Power Barrel to us means that you can expand your trunk and that you are getting 360 degree activation. This total expansion is hugely important for...

DNS Strength Training 1. What did Building a Fighter learn through this course? We took away many key principles of movement, such as uprighting of the spine, joint centration, and breathing and bracing. This in depth look at movement can help us be more efficient in our use of energy. This was another principle called functional capacity vs absolute capacity. Through this lens of movement we can...

Do the Work. How you feel, is a lie. It is what it is. Cliché central in this podcast! Sometimes it truly is about how hard you work. We need a standard of movement and to avoid unnecessary risk, but we can’t do this at the complete expense of training effects. Often we err on the side of caution in the weight room, but this can have a detrimental effect on our athletes. Sometimes we need to just...

Post Competition Plan. How should we carry on with training after a fight, or season. We talk about good mental and physical training strategies when you’re fresh off a fight in this podcast. So many times there are high emotions and a lot of adrenaline dumping after a competition, and while you have earned the right to relax a bit and enjoy the fruits of labor, we shouldn’t take too much time. Tr...

Building a Fighter Ep.147  March Freestyle! We talk a lot about coaching in this one, Alex has started coaching a high school wrestling team in the last two years and makes many reflections on that experience. We talk about building a program, then warming up, and creating a good culture on a team. Not just a hardo culture, but one of valuing winning the right way. Then we talk about stress cycles...

Rotation is a pivotal piece of movement! (See what I did there??) Especially sports that involve max power output, a rotational movement is typically the main movement. We can correlate MMA and baseball in this sense. Both are rotational sports with different energetic demands. In this podcast we give rotation its due. Rotation is one of the 7 primal movement patterns we have identified countless...

Let’s talk about how to be in peak condition when competition is at its highest. This is a common topic for track and field and other more controlled sports, but as with all good training principles we can apply it to wrestling and MMA. A taper is a limit in volume of training, measured in sets/reps, or time at practice. While a peak is a change in the intent and intensity behind the work. Peaking...

Having hard conversations. We talk a lot about the leadership aspect of being a coach, business partner, husband, athlete, and quite frankly a person. What makes anyone reliable and accountable to their job? For a lot of athletes accountability comes down to a coach. As a coach there is a good way to hold athletes accountable and a more toxic way. It's the classic argument of leading with fear or...

Yoga, pilates, and organizing your supplemental training methods. As an MMA athlete should I be doing yoga? Or cycling? Or add pilates? Or add anything? In a sport where more training always seems better, we talk about navigating these extra workouts and truly finding what is best for you. OVerall adding these workouts may not make or break you, however to get the most benefit from them we should...

We hit the ground running on this edition of our Building a Fighter Freestyle. Talking about holistic wellness vs going all in for a goal. Are they one in the same, or is one approach better than the other? How can we function best as humans, and how can we balance all of our priorities? We explore so many facets of living your best life in martial arts and training. We talk about setting a plan,...

What's your goal? Define your goal then train for it. We talk about two different common training goals in this podcast. First is training for a championship, and second is training for a healthy long life. We debate whether you can chase both of these goals at once, or if you must isolate one goal or not. Different times in your career you will train for each of these goals but the problem persis...

What is a training age? Quite simply we explain the difference in chronological age, and your experience level in any athletic endeavor. In the weight room, we like to quantify everything so we are quantifying your “age” based on your experience level and ability to execute. Every sport does this, whether it's with belts, specific equipment (think metal baseball bats vs wooden only in the MLB), or...

Top 5 benefits of Strength and Conditioning that translate to MMA. Today we review what are the specific factors that will be enhanced because of the addition of strength and conditioning. We start with the obvious: you will get stronger. There is a subtle differentiation we need to make for this podcast. The benefits we are looking for are all “sport-specific” . The weight room is a good place to...

How to avoid the pitfalls of New Year's Resolutions. We talk in depth about  how to set good goals, hold yourself accountable, and balance holistic health. What is holistic health? We view it as a good maintenance of mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual health and habits. The habits part is big, replacing bad habits with good, and making small consistent changes is the right way forward. We...

Training Trunk Stability Part. 1 One of Austin’s favorite topics within human movement. Trunk Stability provides a foundation for good movement, and an ability to hold good position. We dive into how the trunk works best, and how we can train to make that our default movement pattern. Trunk Stability is a huge part in training, and also in competition, so why wouldn’t we really emphasize it as the...

The ideal week of training is not a freestyle week. Ironically we are freestyling on this episode but we hit some major points on workload management. Working efficiently has its merits and we typically opt for a 6 day training week, with less work each day. We need to make it clear that we do not advocate for working less hard, we still need to put time in and work hard but we can do so in a stra...

Everyone is looking for a quick fix, a shortcut, a cheat to get the same results with less work. We’re here to tell you that you cannot in fact cheat physiology. Adaptation, recovery, and healing all have aspects of physical health surrounding them. You cannot modify or change those processes to fit your convenience. There are ways to supplement them or optimize them, but we simply cannot make thi...

The Ego. Is the ego a benefit or a detriment? We explore the intercourse of the ego and practice in this episode. Spoiler, the ego is not all a bad attribute. You must have some pride and ego in your work which can enhance your overall product. We find that the negotiation and awareness of the ego is the main thing. How are you being affected by your ego and how can you turn that to benefit yourse...

How should we modify the weight room for MMA athletes?  The weight room is certainly one of the most stigmatized locations in our society. Whether you think of bodybuilding, football Strength and Conditioning, vain fitness, or even as an intimidating setting. For a lot of athletes the weight room equals a place where 1. I’m just not good at that, 2. That place is boring, or 3. That's not going to...

Huge guest appearance. Richard Ulm, DC is a phenomenal coach, and coach educator. He is a former NCAA track and field athlete and strength coach. He now practices in Columbus, OH, and teaches DNS courses through his website https://www.athlete-enhancement.com/  Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization is a system of movement that facilitates training appropriately and factors in so many topics includin...

Fiery debate time! Austin and I go at it talking about correct biomechanics vs. learned successful movement. This debate is rife with performance vs. health type arguments and we articulate the landscape on this type of topic. As we always qualify our talk the context matters and it depends on the athlete’s lived experiences. Ultimately we do want to clean up athletes’ biomechanics and make them m...

How do you get better at what you do? Practice right? That's too vague, what are some actionable strategies, goals, and methods to genuinely develop professionally. We break down professional growth in our own experiences, as a field and how to get the most out of it. There are pros and cons of the acute conference, or weekend seminars to learn and grow, similar to the pros and cons of chronic and...