What Does an MMA Athlete Actually Need to Be Good At Physically?

Oct 5

10 min read

Walk into almost any MMA gym and ask what an athlete needs to get better physically and you're going to get a lot of different answers.

Get stronger
Get faster
Build your cardio
Do sprints
Lift weights
Jump rope
Get more explosive
Improve your mobility
Build your conditioning

The funny thing is that almost all of those answers can be correct while still missing the bigger question.

What does an MMA athlete actually need to be good at physically?

I think this is an important question because MMA conditioning gets reduced to exercises very quickly. Somebody says fighters need better conditioning, so they run sprints. Somebody else says fighters need to be explosive, so they add box jumps and medicine-ball throws. Somebody says they need strength, so they start lifting heavy. None of those things are necessarily wrong. The problem is that we can become so focused on the method that we forget to identify the actual physical qualities we are trying to develop.

MMA isn't a sport that rewards one physical quality.

You can be incredibly strong and still gas out after two minutes. You can have excellent aerobic fitness but lack the power to finish a takedown. You can be explosive when you're fresh but lose that explosiveness after repeated exchanges. You can be fast but poorly coordinated. You can be mobile but unable to control your movement. You can have tremendous physical abilities and still be unable to express them effectively against another athlete.

That last part is particularly important. An MMA athlete doesn't perform physical qualities in isolation. They have to use them while striking, wrestling, grappling, scrambling and defending against another person who is actively trying to interfere with everything they're doing. That's a much more interesting physical problem.

Strength Is the Foundation, Not the Destination

Let's start with strength because it is probably the easiest quality to understand.

MMA athletes need to be strong. You need strength to control an opponent in the clinch, maintain position, create frames, defend takedowns, finish takedowns, hand fight, control wrists, resist movement and impose your own movement on another person. Strength also gives you a foundation for developing other physical qualities. If you can't produce enough force, there are going to be things you simply can't do very effectively.

But MMA doesn't reward strength in isolation.

The strongest person in the gym isn't automatically the best fighter. At some point, strength has to become movement. You have to be able to express that force in the right direction, at the right time and from the right position. You have to do it while moving and while somebody is actively trying to prevent you from doing it.

That's why I think of strength as a foundation. It's important, but it isn't the entire building.

Power Is Strength You Can Actually Use Quickly

Power is essentially the ability to produce force quickly, and that matters enormously in MMA.

A punch isn't useful because you can eventually produce a tremendous amount of force. You have to produce it in a fraction of a second. The same thing is true when you change levels, shoot a takedown, explode out of a position, scramble, bridge, sprawl or create separation. There are countless moments in MMA where the ability to produce a large amount of force very quickly can make the difference between succeeding and failing.

But there's a catch. You don't get to use your power once. An athlete might be incredibly explosive during the first minute of a fight and then become a completely different athlete once fatigue starts accumulating. That means peak power matters, but so does the ability to continue accessing useful levels of power after you've already done a lot of work.

And now we're starting to see why these qualities can't really be separated.

Speed Isn't Just Running Fast

Speed gets oversimplified in MMA too.

When I say an MMA athlete needs speed, I'm not particularly concerned about how fast they can run a 40-yard dash. That's a useful athletic quality, but it's not the whole problem.

I care about how quickly they can perform useful actions.

How quickly can they close distance?
How quickly can they change levels?
How quickly can they get their hands back?
How quickly can they move their feet into position?
How quickly can they scramble?
How quickly can they transition from one position to another?

And, perhaps most importantly, can they do those things at the appropriate time?

A fighter who moves extremely fast but constantly moves themselves into bad positions isn't particularly fast in a useful sporting sense.

This is where speed starts running into coordination.

MMA Is a Coordination Problem

MMA is an enormous coordination problem.

You're not simply producing force. You're producing force in the correct direction, at the correct time, with the correct body position, while responding to another human being whose actions are constantly changing the problem. That's very different from moving a barbell.

Strength without coordination isn't particularly useful.
Power without timing isn't particularly useful.
Speed without control isn't particularly useful.
Mobility without the ability to control the available range isn't particularly useful.

This is one of the reasons I don't like treating strength and conditioning as something completely separate from MMA training. The physical qualities have a job. They're supposed to make the athlete better at expressing their technical skills. If we make an athlete stronger but their technical training suffers because they're constantly fatigued, we haven't necessarily made them a better MMA athlete. If we make them more explosive but don't give them the technical ability to use that explosiveness effectively, we've developed a physical quality without necessarily improving the fighter.

The physical preparation has to serve the sport.

Mobility Means Having Range You Can Actually Use

Mobility gets abused in a similar way.

You don't necessarily need to be able to perform an impressive yoga pose. You need enough usable range of motion to perform the positions and techniques your sport requires. That might mean adequate hip mobility for kicking, wrestling and grappling. It might mean enough thoracic mobility to rotate effectively when striking. It might mean sufficient shoulder mobility for posting, framing and grappling. It might mean enough ankle mobility to maintain your stance, change levels and move efficiently.

But there's an important distinction here. Having range of motion isn't the same thing as being able to control range of motion. For an MMA athlete, usable mobility is what matters.

I don't care very much whether you can demonstrate a spectacular stretch if you can't control that position while somebody is trying to move you out of it. The goal isn't to accumulate impressive measurements. The goal is to have the movement options necessary to perform your sport effectively.

Then There Is the Energy Problem

This is where the conversation about MMA conditioning usually becomes confusing.

People talk about "cardio" as though it's one thing. It isn't.

MMA requires the athlete to produce energy in different ways and at different intensities. There are periods of relatively lower-intensity movement, periods of sustained work, and periods where the intensity suddenly goes through the roof.

You might spend part of a round moving, feinting and hand fighting. Then suddenly you're in a thirty-second wrestling exchange. You explode into a takedown, scramble, recover your position, throw a combination and then find yourself defending another takedown.

The physical demands are constantly changing.

Your aerobic system matters because it supports sustained activity and helps you recover between high-intensity efforts. Your anaerobic systems matter because sometimes the demand for energy is extremely high and immediate. A hard wrestling exchange, a prolonged clinch battle, a striking flurry or a desperate scramble can create demands that simply aren't the same as jogging around the block.

So when somebody tells me they need better "cardio," my next question is usually:

What exactly are you struggling to do?

Are you unable to recover between exchanges?
Do you lose your ability to produce power?
Do you become exhausted during prolonged grappling?
Do you struggle to maintain your pace?
Does your technique fall apart when you're tired?
Do you simply lack the physical strength to continue controlling positions?

Those are different problems and require different solutions.

The Ability to Do It Again

This is one of the physical qualities I think is particularly important in MMA: repeat-effort ability.

MMA isn't about producing one great effort. It's about producing a great effort, recovering, producing another great effort, recovering again and then doing it over and over while somebody is actively trying to stop you.

Think about two athletes.

The first athlete has tremendous peak power. Their first takedown attempt is explosive. Their first striking combination is devastating. Their first scramble is incredibly fast. But after several hard exchanges, their output drops dramatically.

The second athlete has slightly less peak output but can continue producing a very high percentage of their best effort throughout the fight.

By the third round, the second athlete may be considerably more dangerous.

Peak physical performance matters. But the ability to repeatedly access that performance matters just as much.

And this is where strength, power and energy-system development start interacting. Your physical qualities aren't separate boxes that you check off. They influence one another.

The athlete needs enough strength to produce force, enough power to produce it quickly, enough energy to keep doing it, and enough recovery capacity to do it again.

Durability Is Part of Performance

Then there's durability.

I think this word gets misunderstood in combat sports. Durability shouldn't mean, "How much punishment can I take?" That's not a particularly intelligent training objective. I'd rather think about durability as the athlete's ability to tolerate the physical demands of training and competition without constantly breaking down. That requires strength. It requires appropriate loading. It requires movement competency. It requires recovery. It requires gradually developing the physical capacity necessary for the work you're asking the athlete to perform.

And it requires intelligent programming.

Because the greatest strength and conditioning program in the world doesn't help much if the athlete can't stay healthy long enough to use it. A fighter who can train productively for most of the year is going to have a tremendous advantage over the fighter who trains like a maniac for six weeks, gets hurt, misses two months and then starts the entire process over again.

Durability isn't about making somebody indestructible. It's about making the athlete capable of consistently training. That may be one of the most important physical qualities of all because every other quality depends on the athlete being able to accumulate enough training to develop it.

So What Is "Conditioning"?

This is why I don't particularly like talking about conditioning as though it were one isolated physical attribute. Conditioning is a broad term.

When somebody says, "That guy is in great condition," what exactly do they mean?

Maybe they mean he can run for a long time. Maybe they mean he can maintain a high pace. Maybe they mean he recovers quickly between rounds. Maybe they mean he doesn't lose much power when he's tired. Maybe they mean he can wrestle hard for five minutes without falling apart.

An MMA athlete needs a collection of physical qualities that allow them to meet the demands of the sport.

They need to be strong enough to produce and resist force.
They need enough power to produce force quickly.
They need speed and coordination to organize movement.
They need sufficient mobility to access the positions their sport requires.
They need aerobic capacity to support sustained work and recovery.
They need anaerobic capacity to handle high-intensity efforts.
They need the ability to repeat those efforts.
They need enough durability to tolerate the training required to develop all of it.

That's what people are usually trying to describe when they say an MMA athlete needs "conditioning."

The Fight Is the Test

But there's one more piece that matters more than all of this.

Can you actually use those physical qualities while fighting?

That's the real test.

An MMA athlete doesn't get to perform a strength test while they're fresh and comfortable in a weight room. They have to use their strength while somebody is trying to take them down.

They don't get to demonstrate their power on a medicine-ball throw while perfectly rested. They have to produce that power after wrestling for three minutes and then find an opportunity to use it.

They don't demonstrate their aerobic capacity on a treadmill. They use it to recover from a hard wrestling exchange so they can immediately defend another attack.

They don't demonstrate coordination in a controlled movement screen. They have to coordinate their body while another human being is actively trying to disrupt what they're doing.

That's what makes MMA such a complicated physical problem.

The physical qualities matter, but their value ultimately comes from their ability to support the athlete's performance in the fight.

You Don't Need to Be Elite at Everything

There's another point that I think gets lost when we start listing all of these qualities.

An MMA athlete does not need to be elite at everything. That's impossible.

Training time is limited. Recovery is limited. The athlete still has to develop their actual fighting skills. They have work, family and other responsibilities. And, most importantly, different athletes have different needs.

A heavyweight and a lightweight aren't the same physical problem. A beginner isn't the same physical problem as a professional fighter. An athlete with tremendous strength and poor aerobic development doesn't need the same intervention as an athlete with excellent aerobic fitness and inadequate strength.

Good physical preparation starts by identifying the actual problem. Then you train that problem. That sounds obvious, but it is surprisingly easy to lose sight of.

We see a fighter doing sled pushes and decide sled pushes must be important. We see another fighter running sprints and decide sprints must be the answer. We see a successful fighter lifting a particular way and assume that copying his program will make us better.

But exercises aren't the goal. Adaptations are the goal. And the right adaptation depends on the athlete.

Build the Athlete, Not the Workout

Ultimately, I think that's the best way to think about MMA strength and conditioning.

The goal isn't to collect exercises. It isn't to see how many different conditioning methods we can cram into a week. It isn't to make every workout exhausting. And it certainly isn't to make an athlete so tired that the workout feels like it must have been productive.

The goal is to develop the physical qualities that allow the athlete to perform MMA better.

Strength gives you a physical foundation.
Power allows you to express force quickly.
Speed and coordination allow you to organize movement.
Mobility gives you access to the positions you need.
Aerobic and anaerobic systems provide the energy to perform.
Repeat-effort ability allows you to keep producing useful work.
Durability allows you to keep training.

And technical skill gives all of those physical qualities somewhere useful to go.

That's the part I think is easiest to forget.

We're not building a collection of fitness qualities. We're building an MMA athlete.

The question isn't whether an MMA fighter needs strength, power, speed, mobility, aerobic capacity or anaerobic capacity. Of course they do. The better question is how much of each they need, where their current limitations are, and how those qualities interact with the demands of their sport.

Because MMA conditioning isn't one thing. It's the physical preparation that allows an athlete to fight hard, fight fast, recover between efforts, repeat those efforts, maintain their skills under fatigue and continue doing it long enough to win.