Combat and Conditioning

The Mill Hill Combat and Conditioning Academy has been a blog topic twice before on the Trojans website, mainly because one of the Trojans is a part owner and the strength and conditioning coach at the academy.

Andy (mentioned above) has been trying to get me up to his Academy for the last couple of months, to be honest I’ve been trying to avoid for about as long! He’s been threatening that he’ll flog me when I turn up and s&m preferences aside there’s things that I’d rather be doing than getting ‘flogged’ for a couple of hours on a Saturday.

Anyway last Saturday despite my better judgement I made my to the Mill Hill Combat and Conditioning Academy. Now my combat training experience is quite limited, I’ve trained briefly as a boxer and had an amateur boxing fight and I also had a little grappling experience for 3months 7 years ago, but that’s about it. My limited experience left me under no llusion as to what I was getting myself in for- I knew I was going to be in trouble.

I arrived a little late( Iwas hoping to have missed it!) and found out that the guys were all waiting for me. I was quickly introduced to the group who’s conditioning session I was about to join. Among them was Daniel Strauss, a BJJ star and No-Gi Champion and Chris Hearn a purple belt under the famous Roger Gracie.

Andy got us all started with joint mobility and muslce activation warm up, we were then into the main conditioning component of the session. As one of the team “Panny” is 3 weeks out from an MMA fight the focus of the session was specific energy system conditioning for his fight. An MMA fight is scheduled for 3 x 5 minute rounds and as an overload- and because there were six of us- we trained for 4 rounds of 6 minutes each.

Each 6 minute round was broken into 6 – 1minute stations and you just moved direclty from one station to the next. The stations included:
- Bulgarian Bag ‘Rotations’
- Heavy Bag ‘Slams’
- Standing Barbell Wood Chops
- Elastic Band ‘Pulls’
- Medicine Ball Overhead Slams
- Swiss Ball Push Ups

By the end of the 1st round I was in trouble, by the end of the fourth I nearly lost my breakfast! It took me about 10minutes just to regain composure, which was just enough time to join the No Gi Brasilian Jiu Jitsu class led by Daniel Strauss. Now this class was a little advanced for me and I kept tying myself in knots but it was great fun none the less.

After the technique session it was time for sparring. We ended up doing four 5 minute rounds. These rounds seemed to consist of me wasting a lot of my energy not really getting very far whilst my opponents seemed to spend most of their time expending very little energy and forcing me to submit! It was horrible- but I had a great time. In fact it was the best 3 hours training I’ve had in a while.

MMA is the fastest growing sport on the planet and as trainers and strength and conditioning coaches MMA fighter preparation is definitely something we need to become aware of. The correlation between Kettlebell Sport Training and MMA is huge. The combination of patience and relaxation whilst exerting force is prevalent in both sports and I believe Kettlebell Sport training for MMA fighters is hugely beneficial.

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