strength training

A Guide To Strength & Conditioning For Combat Sports

August 2, 2023

When people think about strength and conditioning for combat sports they think of, well… they think of Rocky.

But if you get them to focus on real world boxing, people typically think of the lean, lithe bodies of lightweight champions like Manny Pacquiao and Vasyl Lomachenko or the stocky muscular physiques of heavyweights like Mike Tyson and Jack Dempsey. However, when talking about great boxing physiques few people think of Tyson Fury. At the time of writing Fury is the WBC heavyweight champion and undisputedly one of the greatest boxers of all time but the Gypsy King’s physical appearance is more what people associate with a divorced dad trying to pull himself together than an elite athlete at the top of his game. This is brought up not to take a crack at Fury’s appearance but, rather, to highlight the important point that strength and conditioning is about developing fitness and fitness is the efficient ability to perform a specific task. If we are talking about fitness it’s important not to get distracted by aesthetics. We are interested in how well we do the task not how good we look doing it.

So, if your current focus is on developing your sport specific fitness, it’s fortunate that combat sports have lots of options for improving your fitness while also developing your skills. Pad work, Partner work, Shadow work, Speed drills and Sparring can all easily be tweaked to focus on developing your conditioning.

Notice that things like running, push ups, squats and burpees are entirely absent from this list. Remember that you are a martial artist first and foremost so the majority of your time should be spent practicing your martial art. It isn’t that these exercises are without value, it’s just that they are not directly related to the activity to which are trying to specifically condition ourselves. Specific strength and conditioning is built on the mats and general strength and conditioning is built in the weights room.

While the best kind of strength and conditioning for a specific task is always the task itself, if you want to maximise your training and performance, some time in the weight room is invaluable for developing high end strength and power. Unfortunately, in the martial arts community, strength and conditioning has a strong tendency to morph into conditioning and conditioning. Don’t misunderstand me – conditioning is very important in any competitive combat sport but it is often emphasised to the point where other vital qualities are diminished. As a general rule 80 to 90% of your time training for a martial art should be spent actively doing the martial art. So, if we are only going to spend 10% to 20% of our training time developing our general physical qualities, we need to prioritise:

Strength & Power.
Aerobic baseline conditioning.
Additional Anaerobic conditioning if recovery allows.

When programming strength & conditioning the question should not be “how much can I do?” but rather “what can I recover from and still make progress?” If your S & C training interferes with your sport specific training you should re-examine your priorities. It is your capacity to recover, rather than your capacity to work, that determines the volume, intensity and density of your strength & conditioning training.

As for how to determine the actual nuts and bolts of a program designed to complement martial arts practice the very best way would be to hire a strength coach who understands the demands, listen carefully to what they recommend and then – this is the important part – actually go do it.

Failing that, here are some general guidelines.

First a combat athlete needs to be strong… for a combat athlete . A combat athlete doesn’t need to be strong when compared to a powerlifter or a gymnast; they need to be strong according to the needs of their art. This means strength training with a particular emphasis on developing your power to weight ratio, power endurance and mid section stability. Exercise selection should centre on large, multi joint movements that allow a focus on tension and speed over pump and burn.

Depending on your schedule and personal recovery capabilities you should be looking to program strength training somewhere between two and five sessions per week. Ideally your weekly volume should be around the same regardless of how many sessions you perform. More frequent training means shorter sessions with reduced volume and less frequent training should result in longer sessions with greater volume.

Next, we should address our aerobic baseline conditioning. Aerobic baseline conditioning is essentially your non specific cardio vascular fitness and it plays an important roll in your ability to recover both between rounds and after more intense bursts of energy. Aerobic training needs to follow the Goldilocks rule – not too easy and not too hard, it’s got to be “just right.” Go too hard and you end up working your anaerobic energy systems but go too easy and you won’t get a training effect at all.

To determine your ideal heart rate zone for aerobic training use the following formula:

Max Heart Rate

180 minus your age – if you’re hitting this you need to ease up.

Minimum Heart Rate

160 minus your age – if you’re hitting this you need to get back to work.

Because aerobic baseline conditioning is non-specific we are not limited in how we achieve our goal heart rate. So while you can simply go running I would encourage you to explore alternatives with fewer downsides and more secondary benefits; kettlebell swings, prowler work, rucking, belt squat marches and hot yoga are all excellent options. You’ll need to do 1 to 3 sessions per week and each session should be between 20 and 90 minutes long.

Incidentally, using these numbers keeps workouts repeatable and repeatable is probably the most important key to longevity in training and competition.

Finally we look at additional anaerobic conditioning. This is usually where most fighters’ strength and conditioning training starts and ends; hammering the Glycolytic energy pathway, bathing their muscles in lactic acid, puking on the floor and then wondering why their skill training isn’t going very well. Anaerobic conditioning training is an important part of any program which aims to maximise your combat sport performance – just not in the volume typically seen. Most people who train regularly only really need one anaerobic conditioning focused workout per fortnight; maybe one per week if they have excellent recovery or are in a period of lessened activity. Anaerobic conditioning is also far more specific in effect when compared to training for general strength, power and aerobic conditioning and so more care needs to be taken in exercise selection in order to get the most benefit. When in doubt go for simple, multi joint exercises that emphasise either hip drive or upper body push/pull along the X/Y axis. Also, remember that this additional anaerobic conditioning should be the first thing to go if you’re having trouble recovering or if it’s negatively impacting your sport performance.

So put together what does this all look like? An amateur athlete aiming to get the most out of their training would have a schedule along the lines of the following:

Martial Arts practice four to six days a week.

Strength practice two to five days a week.

Aerobic baseline conditioning one to three days a week.

Anaerobic conditioning once a fortnight.

It might not be as cool as the training montage you’ll see in a Rocky film but a montage only lasts 30 seconds. Training like this will last you a life time.

The Six Practices of Being an Athlete

March 12, 2018

See to it that you temper yourself with one thousand days of practice, and refine yourself with ten thousand days of training.
– Miyamoto Musashi

Athletic Practice

Your sport or art should obviously be the primary component of these six practices. The key here is to understand that your athletic practice is the most important aspect of all your training. If you are interested in being a legitimate athlete then focus is genuinely required.

To quote coach extraordinaire, Dan John, “The goal is to keep the goal, the goal.”

If you have an element of your training or lifestyle that is interfering with your ability to train or perform your sport or art you have to decide what your focus is going to be.

You should be training or performing in your athletic practice 4 to 6 days a week.

Strength and Power Practice

The poor implementation of a strength and power practice is by far the largest and most common impediment in an athletes development.

Too many people consider the barbell a test of mettle rather than as a tool of training.

The goal of this practice is to become strong and powerful for the kind of athlete that you are and not in some kind of general or absolute sense. This means that roller derby skaters need to be strong compared to other skaters but not necessarily when compared to powerlifters or gymnasts.

The bottom line is that what you do in this practice should support – not hamper – what you do on the mat, field, track or ring.

Ideally your strength and power practice should be overseen by a knowledgeable and experienced strength coach. If a personal coach is not an option for you I recommend researching Jim Wendler’s 5/3/1 program or Pavel Tsatsouline’s Power to the People program.

You should be implementing your strength and power practice 2 to 5 days a week.

Nutrition Practice

People often act like proper nutrition is some kind of complicated black magic or quantum level science but unless you have a severe or rare metabolic disease nutrition can be boiled down to two simple rules.

1. Eat like a fucking adult.
2. Don’t kid yourself.

If you can do this you are already out performing 90% of the population.

Eat like a fucking adult.
Eat food.
Eat real food.

Real food doesn’t come out of a can, or a box or a bag. Real food goes off.

No one over the age of 12 really thinks that nutri grain is ironman food or that diet coke is a healthy choice.

Eat vegetables for health.
Eat meat for strength.
Eat carbs for recovery.

Don’t kid yourself.
You know that pizza and beer aren’t getting you closer to your goals.

And the problem is not that you should *never* consume pizza and beer. The problem is that you pretend that because you ordered a gluten free base and low carb beer that you are somehow still eating well when what you actually did was fuck up a perfectly good meal.

Movement Practice

Repeated movement patterns take a toll and the more specific and intense your athletic practice the more specific and intense stress is placed upon your body.

If longevity in your sport and maintaining a pain free day to day life are among your goals (and they should be) then these issues should be addressed by maintaining a movement practice as a part of your schedule.

Stretch what is too tight, open what is too closed and stabilise what is too loose. This can be as simple as going through a mobility routine – like DeFranco’s Agile 8 – three or four times a week or beginning a full blown yoga practice.

Meditation Practice

A meditation practice is an incredibly powerful tool for improving all areas of your life especially your athletic performance.

We’ve all had those experiences of getting into the “zone” or hitting our “flow”. Matches or performances where time seems to slow down and our ability to think, move and react seems limitless. We recognise the advantage of this state but hardly anyone actually trains to deliberately enter into it.

As athletes we are obsessed with training our bodies but so few of us put the effort in to train our minds.

The “zone” is really nothing more than consistent mindfulness. The ability to remain in and focus on the present moment without distraction.

Regular meditative practices cause actual structural changes in the brain. Just ten minutes a day can improve your will power and decision making capabilities; increase your focus and decrease your stress.

Ten minutes a day, everyday.

Developing a meditation practice doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll end up sitting in the lotus position, wearing flowers and talking in the breathy, hushed tones of someone who just finished a three day yoga instructor course.

To get started try the Headspace app, google ‘daily journaling’ or click here.

Lifestyle Practice

Your lifestyle practice is primarily about making sure you stay physically, mentally and emotionally healthy. By necessity training environments tend to be fairly insular and it’s easy to fall into the pattern of eat, sleep, train, repeat. While this makes for some neat tee shirts the reality is that it’s an expressway to injury and burnout.

The specifics of a happy and healthy lifestyle are unique to each person but there are few general principles that will always apply.

Get enough good quality sleep.
Have interests outside your athletic practice.
Spend time with people.
Spend time by yourself.
Spend time simply playing.

The Best Supplements for Training

October 9, 2017

A while back I republished a new and updated version of the popular article “The Best Supplements for General Health” where I focussed on discussing which supplements were useful in building a foundation of good overall health. They were simple vitamins, minerals and fats that help with immunity, energy levels and general well being.

This time around I want to look at some supplements that will help you get the most out of your training without breaking any laws or taking any undue health risks – nothing here will land you in jail or the hospital if you use them as described.

As always – It is important to note that I am not a doctor, and I don’t pretend to be one on the internet. If you are pregnant, have a chronic condition or are taking medication, you should consult a physician before commencing any supplementation regime.

Branch Chain Amino Acids (BCAAs)

Branch Chain Amino Acids are made up Valine, Leucine and Iso-Leucine and can help promote muscle protein synthesis, increase muscle growth, regulate blood sugar levels and prevent muscle catabolism.

BCAAs are also an excellent way of managing appetite during weight cuts as your liver can convert 8g – 12g of BCAAs into just enough blood glucose to alleviate cravings without slowing fat loss.

Some people also experience a reduction in fatigue while supplementing with BCAAs but the jury is still out on whether this is a placebo or a genuine physiological effect. At the time of writing most journals and text books refer to this as a reduction in “perceived fatigue”.

While research does seem to indicate that Leucine is the most beneficial of the three, clinical trials have found no advantage to either isolating or increasing the ratio of the acid in the supplement so you are probably best off consuming a balanced ratio.

A dose of 10g to 30g depending on your size and activity levels is pretty standard. Branch Chain Amino Acids are best consumed before or during training and quantities larger than 10g should be split into two or three doses for maximum effect.

Creatine

Creatine helps regenerate a molecule called Adenosine Tri-Phosphate (ATP) which is what your body uses for energy in practically every physical process from muscle contraction to cellular regeneration. Basically, whenever an ATP molecule is ‘used’ it loses a phosphate becoming Adenosine Di-Phosphate (ADP) which cannot be used as a fuel source unless it is converted back into ATP. This is where Creatine comes to the rescue – by donating its phosphate group to the ADP, Creatine reforms it back into ATP refilling your body’s energy stores. Supplementing your body’s own Creatine allows this process to go on for longer that it would otherwise enabling you to train longer and harder.

Also, as Creatine itself is also a fuel source for short duration, high intensity anaerobic activities (like weightlifting and sprinting) supplementation can result in performance increases.

If potential weight gain is not a concern for you I would recommend taking 5g in the morning before any training and 5g in the evening before you go to sleep. If you participate in a sport where weight has to be factored into the equation just take the 5g in the morning.

At this dose Creatine must be taken daily for two to four weeks before it is likely that you will see the full benefit. You can speed up this process by starting with a loading phase where you ingest 20g daily for five days before dialling back to the recommended daily dose of 10g but this can cause gastro intestinal distress in some people.

Finally, I would recommend cycling off Creatine for one week every six weeks or so and for one full month every year. Supplementing Creatine will increase your body’s natural stores for a short period but after a while your body will get used to receiving this extra Creatine and down regulate its own production as a result. Regularly cycling off Creatine for short periods of time will help mitigate this effect.

Protein Powder

These days more and more people are over fed but under nourished and the thing missing from the majority of athletes’ diets is sufficient protein. While bodybuilding magazines tend to recommend a daily protein intake somewhere in the vicinity of 2.5g per kilo of bodyweight, studies and experience indicate somewhere between 1.2g and 1.7g is probably sufficient unless your goal is to put on substantial amounts of mass.

While it’s nearly always better to get your protein from whole foods like meat and eggs the sheer convenience of a protein shake makes it an easy way to ensure you are consuming sufficient protein.

There are a couple of important things to look out for when purchasing protein powder. First, when you are drinking a protein shake you want to be taking in protein and not a bunch of sugar so try to find a brand that has at least 22g of protein and less than 5g of carbohydrate per 30g serving.

Secondly there is the type of protein to consider. While there are a bunch of different types, blends and brands they generally fall into one of three categories.

Whey Protein Isolate or Whey Protein Concentrate: Whey protein is a fast acting protein whose rapid absorption causes the blood’s amino acid levels to rise extremely quickly making it an ideal post training supplement. While there are differences between Isolate and Concentrate if you follow the above recommendation regarding purity they are basically minimised to the point of non-existence.

Casein: Casein protein is slow acting and its effects long lasting making it better suited to being a meal replacement than for post training recovery. During periods of training where significant mass gain is the goal a Casein protein shake before bed can aid in muscle growth and recovery.

Plant Based: These are best used if you have a dairy intolerance and cannot make use of either of the above options. While there are many, many, many types of plant based protein powders I would recommend finding a blend of rice and pea; it has a fairly neutral taste and two combined covers the shortfall found in just taking either one individually.

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There you have it. No magic or secret pills with guarantees of “XtremE” gains in a shockingly short amount of time just three simple supplements which, if used correctly, should help you train a little harder, recover a little faster and perform a little better.

Forget About Willpower: Fitness as a Function of Knowledge Part 2

July 13, 2015

This is part 2 to Nick’s debut series of articles outlining how sheer obsessive nerdiness is the most powerful super power of them all. You can check out part 1 here.

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There are a lot of enjoyable, pleasurable things in life that aren’t working on your health and fitness. These are often quantified as ‘bad habits’ — stuff like eating fast food or surrendering a whole weekend to your Netflix account (just to name two personal favourites). My conviction is that you can’t quit a bad habit. What you can do is build a good habit that becomes a priority to the point that it crowds out the bad habit. The great news is that most ‘bad habits’ become perfectly fine things to do once you do them a lot less — in fact they can become healthy recovery practices for your downtime between training sessions.

How do you build a good habit? It’s gonna mean getting over The Hump. The initial soreness, the fear, the distrust, the anxiousness of the new environment and the lure of familiar comforts.

I’ve gotten pretty good at getting new clients over the hump (I’m not perfect of course). My approach is very simple — I talk. Non-stop. I tell them exactly what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, what results they can reasonably expect and when they can expect it. I invite their questions and when they stump me (rare but it happens) I don’t front, I go look it up.

Do my clients think I talk too much? Probably. I’m okay with that, since my clients tend to know more programming science than the average freshly minted personal trainer. They’re no more likely to perform a squat without proper form than a firefighter is to point the hose the wrong way. They just know better. The best part for me is that results are relatively normalised across my client base, whether they are ‘naturally’ hard-working or not.

Of course I’m not ignorant of the prevailing trends in modern gym training. I appreciate that there are modern exercise systems that present themselves as sport-and-training-system-in-one, and they take place largely in gyms. I’ll likely weigh in on this phenomenon more in a future column, but in the meantime let me clarify what I’m saying. I’m saying that Mental Toughness has become a runaway idea within gym culture and is frequently overstated in terms of its importance to athletic success. The focus on attitude as the be-all and end-all can be used as a smokescreen by mediocre coaches and just plain isn’t as effective as a knowledge-based approach.

Let’s take an example that’s close to my heart — say you want to get stronger. Let’s say much stronger, exceptionally strong relative to the population. If you’ve ever been on the internet or in a gym you might have seen this process related in quite dramatic terms — No Pain No Gain, Embracing The Grind, Paying The Iron Price or whatever else. At the very least, it has likely been presented to you as a matter of hard work and sacrifice above all else.

Well hard work is an essential component, though not in the sense of mindless grinding. Sacrifice too, technically, though that’s a bit overwrought; it just means you have to commit some time and also choose it over other athletic goals. Anyway, more determinant than both of those is the refinement of your goal to a specific definition of strength. Do you want to be functionally strong in your everyday life or in a specific sport, do you want to be competitive in a strength sport or is there a very specific physical action you want to complete?

Once you know what your goal is you can structure for optimisation — the exact amount of work per week to achieve your results. No more, no less. This should be expressed as a range with upper and lower limits to allow for the non-linear system that is the human body. Luckily we’re in 2015 and have access to decades of Eastern block training and research as well as the work of elite western strength coaches such as Louie Simmons and Glenn Pendlay.

Ultimately you can break your months, days and weeks down into optimal rep and set ranges across a minimum of effective separate exercises. Spoiler warning, it’ll involve some skill-intensive movements, often (but not always) performed at a weight heavy enough to demand technical excellence. Once this is all planned out you can go into every session knowing exactly which stimulus you’re targeting and whether your focus in the moment is on speed, hypertrophy or any of the other attributes of strength. You’ll also have the parameters to make the inevitable changes and adjustments that come which the unpredictable nature of the rest of your life.

Got pretty nerdy there, didn’t it? (Again, I just offered some heavy spoilers for future columns).

It always gets nerdy with me, because I can’t escape the fact that a lot of people have been doing this to a very high standard for a very long time. I’m not the guy who’s produced dozens of Olympic athletes, but the brutal truth is that I don’t have to be; that guy’s lifetime of knowledge is available for study and absorption by a spoiled Westerner such as myself. What excuse do I have not to know this stuff? Even though I’m decades of experience away from matching these guys as a coach and my clients aren’t training for a world championship they all still deserve the best possible programming.

I’ve taught proper lifting technique and programming to a lot of different people by now. Their dedication in terms of consistency and attendance has varied widely, but there’s two things I’ve seen born out 100% of the time:

once someone knows how to train an exercise properly, why the technique is important, and what they’re getting out of it, they can’t bring themselves to do it the wrong way any more
those clients that DO put in a longish period of consistent, structured training — achieving dramatic results without mishap or injury — will then keep going, farther and farther into advanced levels of physical transformation.

Of course this effect is cumulative. It can take a fair few sessions to build trust in a system and lots of questions to accept an information source. That’s the other big part of my job, building context and subject knowledge for clients as quickly as possible. It’s also the easiest part of my job, because I love to share this completely free information. ‘Cause I’m a huge nerd.

What’s my practical point? It depends who you are:

Gym-Goers — are you getting the results that you want? If you strip away your trainer’s charismatic persona, the friendliness and emotional support of your training partners and the rush you get from your sessions, is there still a sense of real progress? I ask because all those other elements are actually pretty easy to find, but real (and by real I mean sustained and lasting) physical transformation is a much rarer thing.

Trainers — look, I have no doubt your clients love you. You’ve nurtured and supported them through their ups and downs, you get invited to their birthday parties and they trust you with their deepest secrets. My (unfair) question is this — have you repaid their trust with real, lasting results? Do you regularly interrogate your own knowledge base to make sure you’re working with the best possible information? Have you given your clients the knowledge that will make them independently fit for life, long after you’ve moved away or been hit by a bus? Or have you hoarded the knowledge in a misguided attempt to increase its market value, or worse, to prevent it being subject to scrutiny or second guessing?

Gym Skeptics — It’s true, most gyms are cringe-worthy ego-mines full of Bros, Posers and Brosers. But the great thing about those people is that they’re so easy to beat at their own game. If you have average intelligence, a modicum of critical thinking skill and even a touch of nerdiness you can easily exceed the results of the gym junkies around you.

It all starts with well-tested knowledge and in my humble assessment, finding great teachers. The latter can take a bit of work, but the former has never been easier and my hope is that this site can be a portal to the high-quality information that lies just beyond the Valley Of Fitness Fads.

I’ll be beginning with articles that zero in on some of the concepts I’ve touched on above, both the nitty gritty structure of how to train and the broader issues of teaching and learning within the wide world of gyms.

I invite you to come back and check them out, but I won’t try and convince you with a big speech. Experience tells me that if you get something out of them, you’ll come back on your own.

Again and again and again.

NEXT TIME — A CASE STUDY IN SPORTS-SPECIFIC STRENGTH

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Nick is that indescribable scent you smell right after it rains . He is available for Personal Training and instructs the Strength & Power and Freestyle Wrestling programs. Check out his personal site Form=Function.

Forget About Willpower: Fitness as a Function of Knowledge

June 29, 2015

Nick is truly obsessed with developing technical excellence in everything he does whether he’s writing songs for experimental indi pop groups or lifting ridiculously heavy weights without mussing his hair. Here he reveals the secret to his superpowers: Nerdiness.

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Gym

Noun

A crucible of pain and ordeal in which the worthy temper themselves into elite paragons of achievement and beauty.
A testing environment in which superior character is revealed and your primal worthiness as a human being can be objectively defined .

Is this conception familiar to you?

How about this one:

Personal Trainer

Noun

A combination of army drill sergeant, life mentor, spiritual guide and infallible fitness expert.
An exemplar of physical achievement with a hyper-natural connection to the intangible heart of physical excellence.

If these definitions seem commonplace rather than laughable then there’s a good chance you’ve spent some time in the modern first-world fitness environment.

Now, I’m as much a fan of heroic narrative as the next person, but the deeper I get into my practice as a PT and strength coach, the more the current discourse and language around gym training concerns me.

‘Pain is weakness leaving the body’. ‘Failure is not an option’. ‘Something something Beast Mode etc’. All very pithy and galvanizing. On the other side there’s these, ‘I know what to do, I just don’t do it’. ‘I’m just lazy, I hate exercise’. ‘I don’t have the willpower’.

Willpower.

Noun

An intrinsic ability to work hard and be disciplined under harrowing conditions.
An innate potential to do the things that others won’t or can’t
A trait that can reach full flower via the perfect combination of having a great coach and being a mentally tough athlete.

This is a definition that we’re all very comfortable with, right? Everyone knows that some people are just better than others, right? Some people have ‘the right stuff’, ‘what it takes’, etc.

We also know that drawing out someone’s best performance involves working them under the toughest conditions, right?

Before I take this line any further, I should level with you. I’m not a very tough person. I like living pain-free, in comfortable surrounds and at a pleasant temperature. As a general rule I like to get along with people and make them feel good. I’m not keen on yelling, and I’m naturally suspicious of inspirational quotes or memes. The only time I’m an alpha male is in a karaoke bar. To reiterate, I’m not tough.

On the other hand, the sport that I compete in, freestyle wrestling, is very tough. Just training for it requires high levels of strength, power and endurance, as well as the durability to be smacked against the ground a few hundred times a week.

So how has a non-tough guy like me, low on natural talent and late to the game, managed to compete in such an uncompromising environment?

The answer is nerdiness.

What do I mean? Well just for instance, ask me about the energy systems involved in my sport, the specific breakdown of aerobic, anaerobic and phosphate. Ask me about the bio-mechanics of sound combat sport footwork.

Ask me about optimal recovery envelopes for super-compensation. Ask me about sports-specific strength training. Ask me about macro-cycles and neural adaptation and Prilepin’s Table. Just don’t ask me unless you have at least an hour to kill (probably better just to wait for future columns).

The brain I use for fitness is the same one I’ve always used for cataloging comic books and vintage punk records. When I’m not in the gym (which is often), I’m frequently geeking out on the history, science and modern cultural movements in sports and exercise.

Partly it’s just the way I was made, partly it’s the mentors that I’ve trained under, but most of all it’s that I don’t want to be hurt. I want to spend as much of my life feeling good and having as great a time as possible, and I want my sport to be a part of that for many many years to come. I will use every fact and figure available and ignore any popular ‘wisdom’ I need to to achieve that.

Don’t get me wrong, wrestling for me is a brutal, ego-crushing Everest that I climb a millimeter at a time, and my athletic career is nothing to hang a reputation from (I’m nationally ranked in Australia which means my skills are equivalent to the average Bulgarian 12-year old).

The thing is, I don’t value the sport for it’s toughness or it’s status among sports (good thing too, because it has zero status in this country). I value it for it’s reality.

It’s a sport that can only be won one way, that is, by doing it more correctly than the other guy. Attitude is a huge, essential part, but there’s no sudden underdog victories achieved through determination and believing in yourself. Just correct application of trained strategy and response. Sexy right?

So my sport has influenced my sensibility, but more important still has been my experience with clients. A giant nerd like myself tends to attract nerdy clients, often people who weren’t part of a sports or gym culture before they came to work with me.

That means that I’ve had to be conscious of presenting the gym as an accessible, culturally neutral space in which people can build a knowledge base about their own bodies. In the process I’ve developed some very specific definitions that guide my practice:

Gym

Noun

A classroom environment containing purpose built equipment, in which physical skills can be learned and refined.
A laboratory environment in which principles of physical development can be enacted and tested under safe conditions.

Safe conditions. Here’s where my personal bias becomes obvious.

As an athlete I know that the world of sport is one of risk and unpredictability and I relish that.

In the heat of competition, victory is often achieved by pushing yourself beyond your normal safe operational parameters, and the ability to do that doesn’t appear spontaneously. I encourage my athlete-clients to compete in their sport frequently to help build the capacity and judgment to take it to ‘the place’ when required.

When programming for said athletes, I build specific, deliberate moments into the workouts in which they push their parameters beyond the platonic ideal of technical perfection. But note that I say moments. I expect the vast majority of reps performed in the gym to be as close to perfect as possible.

As a client myself, I still train under my long-term strength coach. I look at the gym as a tool to ensure that the body I take into the ring is as resistant to the unexpected as possible.

I have hours of wrestling technique to learn and practice every week, I need to bring as much mental focus and physical freshness to that process as possible. To that end, my strength and conditioning sessions need to comprise the minimum amount of work necessary for me to get stronger and fitter, no more.

As a gym coach, I know that there is no reasonable scenario in which my client should ever be injured in the gym.

In my six years doing this type of work I’ve had one (minor) client injury occur and it was a direct result of my ignorance and incorrect application of knowledge. I don’t intend for it to ever happen again. People are putting their physical wellbeing in my hands, and that responsibility can’t be overstated.

Safety aside, people are coming to me for results. Not endorphins or a sense of community or improved self-image, although those are all likely side-benefits.

They come to me wanting to transform their bodies in specific ways, and my job is to make sure it happens. Sure, it’s ultimately up to them since it’s their choice to keep showing up, but I need to know that if they do, then they’ll get the results they want. It’s not easy, but it’s not really that difficult either.

My clients will tell you that I’m not a shout-y call-you-to-get-you-out-of-bed trainer. I don’t ‘push’ my clients in the traditional sense. So what’s my actual job, as I see it?

Personal Trainer

Noun

A teacher who specialises in the skills required for physical transformation, relative to athletic performance, injury rehabilitation or general functional movement.
A coach who facilitates the acquisition of specific goals for individuals or groups.

I have a skill set and a knowledge base. The things I know take time to learn, but they can all be learned by a human of average intelligence. You can pay me to teach them to you. That, to me, is the only service that I offer, the only thing I have worth charging for.

Good teaching is my sole product, because the knowledge is free. I have no special secret system, everything I know is already out there. My business lives and dies on my ability to communicate it to people who would otherwise find it cryptic and forbidding. In doing so, I’ve discovered something really cool.

Willpower isn’t a thing. Not the way it’s been sold anyway. While it is absolutely essential to be consistent, do the work, and move outside your comfort zone, the mechanism for doing so is simple and quantifiable.

People do things that they understand. When you can draw a line between an action and a positive outcome, you’ll do that action again. The more clearly you comprehend a process and how it works, the easier it is to invest in it. No faith required.

Stay tuned for Part 2 – Practical Examples!

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Nick is the band you discovered in highschool long before anyone else did. He is available for Personal Training and instructs the Strength & Power and Freestyle Wrestling programs. Check out his personal site Form=Function.