This series of posts will follow the progress of Marlon as he trains for an upcoming Semi-pro cage fight at the beginning of May. Marlon will be training with me twice per week alongside his current MMA sessions.  The first few weeks we will be focusing on basic strength work using large compound lifts such as squats, deadlifts, clean and presses etc. After this we will move into a power phase where we will add more explosive type movements and plyometric exercises such as jump squats, plyometric press-ups, medicine ball slams, box jumps etc. Over the last few weeks we will focus our sessions more on increasing power endurance and anaerobic fitness. This will be done by using more fight specific exercises such as sprawling, ground and pound, pad drills etc and working in 5-6 minute rounds to help simulate MMA rounds.

Our first session is outlined below.

Warm up:

We started off by warming up with a mixture of dynamic movements, functional flexibility and sport specific movements such as medicine ball swings and rotations, lunges, active hip flexor and hamstring stretches and hip escapes.

Main workout:

For the first session we focused mainly on exercise technique rather on how much weight we could lift, working around 10 reps. We started with a lightweight to help warm up the targeted muscle groups and then increased the weight slightly each set completing 3-4 sets per exercise.

 Deadlift 

Clean and press

Squat

2-handed kettlebell swings

Recline row and walk over press-up on a low step (These 2 exercises were completed in a superset with no rest between the 2).

Core superset:

After the main resistance workout we finished with a superset of 2 exercises that targeted the core. Each exercise was done for 30 seconds.

 Medicine ball Russian twists

Press-ups with handclaps (Marlon got into a press-up position and I knelt in front of him. He performed one press-up and then lifted his right hand of the floor and clapped my right hand aiming to keep his body still by engaging his core muscles. He then repeated with another press-up followed by left hand clap).

At the end of the workout we cooled down and stretched focusing on lower back, hamstrings and hip flexors.

I will be posting more of the workouts over the next few weeks complete with video clips showing a sample of some of our sessions.