Thursday, July 18, 2013

How To Prepare For Your Initial MMA Bout

By Rod Bourgoine


If you want to become an MMA fighter, be prepared to spend many months or years getting ready for your first bout. After you join an MMA gym and train for a while, ask your instructors if they think you are ready to take part in small show MMA. The instructors or coaches at your MMA gym can be particularly helpful in guiding you toward that first bout.

Strength training and conditioning are big components of training for every athlete, regardless of the sport. While you might want to spend the majority of your time working on takedowns and chokeholds, don't forget about doing some hard-core cardio exercises. Running builds endurance, but be sure to include a few hill sprints and even use the jump rope. Your body goes through a lot during a fight, so it needs to be in top condition to handle the battle.

While you might be an expert in Muay Thai or a black belt in Judo or Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, it is still wise to consider adding at least a little bit of boxing to your repertoire. The skills learning during boxing classes will provide you with the ability to throw punches, block punches and improve your coordination, especially when it comes to footwork. Hopefully you belong to an MMA gym that offers a wide variety of classes, including boxing instruction.

Obviously, it is wise to have a wide skill set, but we all have specific strengths, and you need to create a fight plan that maximizes these strengths. So if your specialty is Jiu-Jitsu, work on your best takedowns, holds and chokes and perfect those moves. You typically have no control over who your opponent will be and you certainly have no control over how hard they will be training. However, you can control what you are able to do, so focus on elements within your power.

When it comes to training, the worst thing you can do is to lose your focus. We are all busy with many other tasks, but when you are focusing on getting ready for a fight, you need to eliminate other activities. Training should take up a great deal of your time, so keep the rest of your life as simple as you possibly can.

Something else that fighters sometimes forget about is nutrition. There are several reasons to focus on your food when you are training. First of all, food is fuel, and bad fuel damages your body just as it would a vehicle. Be sure to avoid junk food and alcohol and stick with food that provides energy and strength. Also, because your weight matters, you need to monitor gains and losses and have enough calories to accommodate training and still stay within your weight class.




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