10 COMMANDMENTS OF FIGHT FITNESS

One of the world’s most renowned strength and conditioning coaches for fighters offers his 10 Commandments for Fighting Fitness’.



BY PAVEL TSATSOULINE

Boston, USA, is a hard town and Steve Baccari is as hard as they come. His old boxing coach used to tell him, “When brute force doesn’t work, you just think you aren’t using enough.” Steve knows a thing or two about force. He is one of the smartest and most successful boxing, BJJ and MMA strength and conditioning coaches you will ever meet. I have been to Steve’s basement and he showed me a thick stack of notebooks going back a couple of decades.

Over the course of his career he has tried everything and ruthlessly eliminated what did not work. Steve Baccari, RKC has kindly agreed to contribute to this column. Following are his ‘10 Commandments of Fighting Fitness’. Do not be misled by the brevity of this article. It took the man over 20 years, blood, sweat, and brain cells to figure these things out, so pay attention. 

1. You can’t out-condition the dinner table. If you don’t believe this, try the following experiment. Eat your favourite junk food snack. Time yourself to see how long it took to eat it — most likely, two minutes. Then check how many calories it is — say, 250. Now get on a treadmill and see how long it takes to burn those calories. I think you will agree this is not a viable method to get rid of excess calories, so start your exercise by pushing yourself away from the dinner table and save your energy for more productive training.
2. Joint mobility comes before flexibility or agility. Before you can be truly flexible you have to be able to get your joints through a full range of motion. Start your days with [Pavel’s] Super Joints. [Joint mobility training is making progressively larger joint movements at a medium speed. Arm circles or back bends are examples – Pavel] 
3. Work pure strength or what Pavel calls ‘slow strength’. The ability to generate maximum tension over a given period of time. I think this is the missing link in 95 percent of the strength and conditioning programs being used by fighters. The programs that they do use should be called conditioning and more conditioning routines because they never work on pure strength. Whether you use your bodyweight, a barbell or kettlebells, the protocol is the same: slow, grinding movements with maximum resistance in a low-repetition range with long rest intervals. 
4. Practice spinal decompression. If you are performing these heavy grinding lifts, you should finish your training session with a spinal decompression exercise. You can hang off a pull-up bar or hang by your feet with inversion boots. I can’t give you the scientific reasons behind the effectiveness of this drill, but I can honestly say it has helped every single athlete I have shown it to. 
5. Grease the groove (GTG). This is the most effective method of strength training for a fighter and, in my opinion, the only productive way a fighter can effectively increase his overall strength without over-training. [GTG refers to doing easy sets of an exercise throughout the day. For instance, if you can do 10 one-legged squats or pistols, do sets of 3–5 every hour or so. – Pavel] 
6. Don’t overdo flexibility. You only need slightly more flexibility than your sport requires so forget doing the hot yoga class. 
7. Power starts with strength. Power is strength multiplied by speed, so unless you’re already super strong, don’t talk to me about plyometrics. 
8. Never work out, but practice. Webster’s dictionary defines the practice as “repeated exercise to improve a skill”. Sweat is a by-product of practices, not the purpose. Try to remember this the next time you are training. 
9.  Climb the ladder. The best way to increase exercise volume without it turning into a mindless workout is the ladder. [A ‘ladder’ means going up in reps every set, then starting over. For instance, you would do one, two, three, four, or five pull-ups, then start over at one again. I have explained this, and several other concepts Steve mentions, in-depth in my previous columns. The ones I have not covered I will address in the future. – Pavel]
10. More is not better — it’s just more. Focus on what you need to improve on, not what you like to do — they are rarely the same things. I will let UFC fighter Joe Lauzon wrap it up: “While I was training with Steve Maze for the fight with Jens Pulver, it seemed like he pulled some different strength and conditioning routines out of the air. I was amazed at how good some of the things we were doing were. I assumed he was coming up with things on his own or just looking for ways to make me tired.

Then one day he introduces me to another Steve, Steve Baccari. Steve Baccari is a maniac when it comes to learning about strength and conditioning and has a ton of experience in training fighters and seeing what works best for combat athletes. Immediately, everything made sense. Baccari and Maze had worked with fighters together in the past and I was doing some of the same routines they had done. As time went on, Maze got Baccari more involved and it got to the point where I was working with Baccari pretty exclusively on the strength and conditioning side of things. In only a few short months I noticed a drastic increase in both strength and conditioning. ‘When brute force doesn’t work, you just think you aren’t using enough’.” □

Pavel is a former Soviet Special Forces physical training instructor, a subject matter expert to the US Secret Service and the US Navy SEALS and the author of cutting edge books such as The Naked Warrior and Super Joints, which address the joint mobility, ‘grease the groove’ and ladder concepts. They are available from www. PowerbyPavel.com as hard copies and e-books. 

Blitz Martial Arts Magazine, JANUARY 2010 VOL. 24 ISSUE 01