It doesn’t really matter whether it be BJJ, Muay Thai or MMA, the nerves and pressure of competing are largely the same. At that very moment in time it is the most important thing we have ever done and we feel the whole world is watching (and for some that might even mean the whole world is waiting to see them fail).

I have competed at a state, national and international level since I began training in BJJ 15 years ago and have spent plenty time preparing not only myself, but my training partners and students for competition. It has been an eye-opening process to see the way people respond to the pressure of the impending competition date: how it changes the way they perform during class, their intent, focus and their mental and emotional states.

The vast majority of students tend to drop back in performance when competing. Whether it be 5% or 50% most will find they lose some skill due to nerves, anxiety, fear, or fatigue. A very small percentage of the competing population enhance their performance in competition, as they feed off the nerves and excitement, their game improves.

Following this logic you could say that competing is not for everyone, however I believe the opposite is in fact the case. Competing is for everyone. I do not mean to say we are all champions. To quote Sun Tzu, “victory is reserved only for those willing to pay its price”. And there is a high price to pay in order to be the best – the question I put to my fighters is: ‘are you willing to pay it?’

Competition drives us to improve our game. Regardless of the result, we will have accelerated our learning/training process simply as a consequence of preparing for the actual competition. The result of the fight is irrelevant to this gain. Even if we lose in the first round we will have pushed our game forward at a greater rate than usual. The competition itself tends to dramatically improve our training directly AFTER the competition as well, for it brings into focus areas that need work, exposes us to different styles of play that exist outside our usual training partners/academies, and motivates us to be better.

Through the rigours of competition training, students learn a lot about how they deal with pressure and stress. From personal experience, I know that how a person deals with stress on the mat is no different to how they deal with it in any other area of their life. Competition is like a magnifying glass, and as such it is a great opportunity to see what habits have been created over the years and address any that need changing.? ?It doesn’t matter what martial art discipline we choose, MMA, BJJ or Muay Thai, we should all compete at least once in our lifetime. If not once a year? Not for the little medals or the accolades (although they are nice food for the ego) but simply because of how it accelerates our growth in our chosen art, martial artist, and as a person.

Dave
DMMA

Next time you look at the person next to you on the mat and ask yourself, “How did they get so damn good?!” re-read this.

WHO AM I?

I am your constant companion.

I am your greatest helper and heaviest burden.

I will push you onward or drag you down to failure.

I am completely at your command.

Half the things you do, you might just as well turn them over to me and I will be able to do them quickly and correctly.

I am easily managed – you must merely be firm with me.

Show me exactly how you want something done, and after a few lessons, I will do it automatically.

I am the servant of all great men and women; and alas, of all failures as well.

Those who are great, I have made great. Those who are failures, I have made failures.

I am not a machine, though I work with all the precision of a machine plus the intelligence of a woman or man.

You may run me for profit or for ruin – it makes no difference to me.

Take me, train me, be firm with me, and I will place the world at your feet.

Be easy with me and I will destroy you.

ANSWER – I AM YOUR HABITS. Anonymous.

Train Smart!

First and foremost, we are all human, and to become superhuman takes time, appropriate stimulus, and appropriate rest to allow adaption. In saying that my first suggestion is to respect the S.A.I.D principle (Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand). The basic rule here is that one needs to introduce density of exercise and intensity of exercise at an appropriate rate, coupled with an appropriate amount of rest, to enable adaptation to the newly imposed demands. As one adapts, ones ability to deal with higher loads of stress improves, so the density and intensity of the stimulus can be increased. Basically that means you can safely train harder. There are some ‘buts’ with this.

The buts are as follows:  The bigger the human, the longer the recovery time, in general. This is true during workouts and between workouts. Also, the degree to which you can push yourself is indicative of the degree to which you need to rest. Regardless of how close you are to your natural end potential, your capacity to work to your current potential is fairly constant, and as you push those limits, you will find you require more rest to recover.  Examples of this are; the week following a competition, everyone has felt the flatness that that week provides, and/or just having a mammoth session. The S.A.I.D principle, as stated above will minimise this to a degree, but there will often be moments and days where your Physiological Load and/or Training Load will stretch your current potential to its limits, and this will require more time than usual to recover from. Train hard, rest hard, it’s that simple really.

Based on your knowledge of Physiological Load, how it intermingles with Training Load, and how your Training Load should progress (the S.A.I.D Principle), you should now hopefully understand why most sessions should be easy, and moderate, and why the hard sessions should be few and far in-between. That’s not really enough though. One needs a method for deciding what hard actually is and what easy actually is etc. For simplicities sake, the easiest way to decide this is to monitor your breathing. That is to say, use the conversation rule. That may not be scientific enough for some, but it is a valuable method used by some of the top coaches in the world to monitor their Olympic and world champion athletes. One such coach is Dr Jeff Spencer who outlines the approach below.

Easy sessions can be deciphered by the awareness that you could quite easily keep up a full conversation with someone whilst exercising. There would be no real need to stop to take a breather from the conversation. It’s a good idea to break up your hard sessions with 2 to 3 easy sessions each week.

Moderate sessions will leave you feeling like you can talk in sporadic bursts of words, but unable to create full sentences and as a result will most likely not actually want to talk.  Try to separate your moderate workouts by a couple of days to promote full functional recovery. And what I mean by that is recovery that a) returns your system back to homeostasis (balance) and b) as a result, has allowed some conditioning to take effect.

Hard sessions are ones in which it is basically impossible to talk. You are too involved physically and mentally to be able to spare the energy and breath. These types of workouts should be done once, maybe twice, a week, allowing about 3 days in-between to recover.

Probably the most important point to remember here is that you won’t improve by making your easy sessions slightly harder and your harder sessions slightly easier. This would leave you with the conundrum that I have experienced, and that so many athletes have and continue to experience. It’s the more is better approach. It leads to all workouts having similar intensities and very often leads to frustration at the lack results, and suboptimal performance in competition, because of overtraining. Make your easy sessions easy, and your hard sessions hard!

What you will find if you get good at following these guidelines is that your overall effort should decrease, and your conditioning will increase and maintain itself better. What you are striving for is a healthy overall Training Load. Remember that your Training Load will effect your overall Physiological Load, and vice versa! The necessity for balance here is why one needs a flexible approach to their training regimen. Routines and plans are excellent for self-discipline and motivation, just don’t let ego get the better of you. If you feel smashed, you probably are, take a day off. If you feel like you are dragging your feet around and motivation is lower than usual (and I don’t just mean the old ‘it’s cold, wet, and dark, I want my bed’ process) chances are you need an easy session or a day off. Learn to listen to your body. If you start doing this, you may find you suddenly have time to do that technique, mobility, flexibility, rehab and prehab work that you keep promising yourself you’ll get to.

As a final note, here are some good guidelines as to whether you were successful in looking after yourself during any particular training day:

• You actually feel better after the workout than when you started.

• You should have quick and full recovery. A prolonged recovery is a sign for taking it easy. To elaborate, read the next point.

• You can experience soreness but beyond 2 days is getting excessive. Excessive soreness is often the result of not respecting the S.A.ID Principle or sometimes just putting in a mammoth effort. A conditioned body will feel exercise enduced soreness with less and less severity and frequency. When sore, it’s a good time to throw in some easy workouts.

Above all remember that you are an individual, with individual capabilities, an individual Physiological Load, and unique genetics that help determine how you will respond to it all.  As frustrating as this may be sometimes, it means your approach needs to be you specific, and not like the freak you are training next to, whom we all want to be.

• Listen to your body

• Remember the body doesn’t differentiate from stress, and stress is cumulative

• Be flexible in your training

• Keep your easy sessions easy, and your hard sessions hard.

• Strive for balance in your routine, recovery properly, and excel!

Train smart!

It is no great secret that the benefits of exercise are propagated while at rest. Yet it seems our natural instinct, or at least our ego has other beliefs and ideas. Do more, more is better! Personally, as a competitive person with a strong work ethic, I am excited by being worked and pushed to my limits constantly. As a male this is compounded by my basic psychological make up which is designed in such a way that when preparing for a competition/fight/event, the little voice in my head will only ever be encouraging if I can prove to it that I have done more, trained harder, and put myself through a more rigorous preparation than my competitor(s). As a result of these traits, I’ve struggled with the less is more concept for most of my martial arts and particularly competitive career.

Life has a very abrasive way of teaching us lessons at times, and my last 3-4 years of absence off the mat is evidence for that. Now that’s a long post workout recovery! Seriously though, my more is better approach to most things in life led to a slow and incredibly heart-braking downfall which left me with a plethora of health conditions to overcome. BJJ was my passion, and my lifestyle stole it from me. Some of the result was Adrenal Fatigue,  which led to Chronic Fatigue and  Testosterone production that was almost non-existent, Dysbisois, Mitochondrial Dysfunction, and more…. I WAS NOT HAPPY!!!! It’s taken a long time, but I’m now thankfully about 90% recovered.

Part of my purpose in writing this is that I see a lot of people on a daily basis heading down the same path, and not heeding the advice they are offered. Maybe they don’t know where I’m coming from, my experience makes it easy for me to advise, and meaningful for those willing to listen. Let me just clarify for a second that there are multiple stressors that cause a downfall from health like mine, and abuse of the stress known as ‘exercise’ was just one of the causative factors for me. But it still played a massive role. Your stressors may be different, and your outcome will most likely be different but it all points to one interesting principle.

THE BODY DOES NOT DIFFERENTIATE STRESS, AND STRESS IS CUMULATIVE.

Read that a couple of times. This is a very important point to elaborate on when determining how much is enough.  Everyone is unique. Yes, we all know we look unique, but we, as cybernetic organisms, are unique in more ways than that. We all have a unique capacity to handle stress as a whole, and we all have unique capacities to handle individual stressors. The net effect of this on us as individuals is known as our “physiological load” (a term Paul Chek’s courses has taught me). Put simply, this is the total amount of strain our system is under at any one time.I refer to it as your sh*t bucket. With that analogy it should be fairly clear to you that if you aren’t working continuously on emptying your bucket, the contents are going to spill over. How do you know when this has happened you ask? You become symptomatic.

What I mean is you will feel the strain, but in ways you may not connect with your bucket being to full. Some examples of symptoms caused by an overflowing bucket are Cancer, Auto-Immune Diseases such as Rheumatoid Arthritis, Allergies, Migraines, Chronic Fatigue, Adrenal Fatigue, Dysbiosis of the Bowel, Endocrine (hormone) Dysfunction, inability to heal wounds and/or injuries, multiple and re-occurring micro injuries, some Mental Illnesses, and personality changes, to name just a few. I can’t impress upon you enough the importance of learning this concept and as a result working on finding out what your optimal load is as this will help you decide what Training Load is right for you.

Your Physiological Load is tied in closely with your Training Load and both effect the other. Understand that on any given day your Training Load will be different. How much sleep you have had the last few nights, how much good food and water you’ve ingested, how much training you’ve done recently and how hard that training was, how much emotional stress you are under, how much, how much…. It’s all stress, and it is all cumulative. I strongly suggest you get flexible with your approach to training. Push that little voice way back to the recesses of your mind and actually listen to what your body is trying to tell you.

This is an incredibly hard skill, and as I briefly noted above, is as much about listening to your body as it is about vanquishing your ego. Easier said than done. Your ego will always battle you, telling you that you are weak, you can do more, you should do more! Yes you can, yes you could, but trust me when I say, whether today or tomorrow, eventually you will break, and you will begin to manifest symptoms unless you can sometimes convince your self to take a step back, or even do nothing. Training programs are a helpful guide, but they need to have inbuilt flexibility. You need this inbuilt flexibility to achieve balance. When you have achieved balance, you will realise what the “more” is in the “less is more” concept.

The more is progress, the more is improved performance, the more is development with the absence of significant roadblocks and or plateaus. This is offcourse, until your natural potential is reached. That’s right, we aren’t all omnipotent, and we will eventually end up pushing close to as far as we can go. Everyone talks about reaching their potential and being better then. There’s no denying they would be better, but if they keep talking about it, then in my opinion it’s because they haven’t put in the work to reach it (for whatever reason) or they’ve reached it and aren’t willing to admit it.

Any one who’s done a lot of training in martial arts or weight lifting of any kind will be all to aware of the dreaded plateau. When it comes to exercise, my experience with myself, my training partners, and my clients, suggests that plateaus come from a lack of insight in to the fact that what is currently being done is losing it’s effectiveness and needs to change! This is when human nature and stubbornness come to the fore and result in us, all too often, trying the more is better approach. Surely if I do the move more, do weights more, or force the addition of more weight or exercises, I’ll progress!? Sometimes more is the answer, but then something has to change, you must see progress. If not, you’re acting out the definition of stupidity. We’ve all been guilty of it.

With the Dominance Strength & Conditioning classes starting this week, and people being told they must have an assessment with me to be able to attend, I thought it a good idea to put up a quick explanation of what the assessment process actually entails and is designed to highlight. First of all, some basic ideas….

Observation and qualification of movement is a coach’s best tool. The whole point of the assessment, is to observe you so as to allow qualification for the approach/training style I see as best for developing your conditioning, and as a result will want to utilise most. The method I’ll be using when performing the assessment will be driven by and encapsulated by knowledge of how the body dissipates load. This is the crux behind a good strength & conditioning program, and behind me as your coach, not breaking you. I’m interested in your ability to control your dynamic posture. Optimal dynamic posture will come from optimal mobility, stability, and strength. The correct mixture of these will result in the expression of power, one of our end goals.

The assessment highlights your current posture, mobility, strengths & weaknesses. My job is to then give you mobilisations, exercises, and stretches, to fix all the weak links I find. Understand that pain is the biggest re-programmer in your body. Old injuries and limitations, as much as current injuries and limitations, can create inefficient and detrimental patterns of movement, or lack there of as the case may be. I do not want to become a part of your downfall! That is why you will be assessed, so there will be no guessing!

Then we can get on with the job at hand, which is to improve your strength & conditioning. The information I collect will be used in the classes to improve you, and improve your function. Once achieved, it’s your job to learn how to express these enhancements on the mat, and in the ring. One massive advantage I have here, is a good amount of experience in the disciplines offered at Dominance, and plenty of experience in applying strength and conditioning principles to those pursuits. So if you get stuck, ask questions. With me actually getting on the mat a little bit now, you can show me first hand how well your program is working!

Train Smart.

Robert Drysdale Film from Bobby Razak on Vimeo.

See you on the mat.

Dave Hart

My philosophy on life and the activities we fill it with is very holistic. You could say I’m a bonafide hippy

This philosophy is very present in my approach to training. For now, I’d like to touch on a small but incredibly important aspect of training – bad habits and strength biases.

Human beings have a saying that creates sub-optimal results and overall bad habits, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Strength and conditioning, in my opinion, is the antithises of this when done properly. The whole purpose is to improve the organism, be it as a whole or in parts, before it has a chance to break. A truly holistic approach to this would require the strengthening of the athletes system from the inside out, and the outside in. That means better psychological habits, nutrition, hydration, sleep, breathing, stress levels (this includes chemical, environmental, emotional, physical, thermal, and nutritional) and the obvious, a better exercise regimen. If you impose greater demands on your system without providing greater reserves and greater balance, you will break. It’s only a matter of time.

For some this may happen many years after their martial arts training has finished, and the event may be something fairly obscure as far as they are concerned. A lot of people who break do so doing unrelated activities to that which broke them, and at a time in the future that is distant enough to remove the cause activity from their list of potential reasons.

Contact Martial Arts represent some of the most highly repetitive, unilaterally biased, and physically grueling sports. Bad habits and strength bias’s amass quickly and efficiently. Everyone has a favourite kicking leg, a favourite sweeping leg, a favourite “x” that they almost always do to the same side. This repetition is what creates the skill and makes the move work, that’s why it becomes the favourite! As a result our bodies become slowly but surely imbalanced by the strength biases we create in our musculature and nervous system, and the bad habits we practise as a result. An example of this would be sitting with your left leg crossed over your right, exacerbating the facilitation of the left psoas (hip flexor – the muscle that pulls your thigh closer to your body) which has become overly tight and strong from being your kicking leg/sweeping leg.

Once a muscle is facilitated, it’ll contract with more effectiveness and efficiency, too the exclusion of balancing musculature, on a more frequent basis. When strength biasis create facilitation, or vice versa, and bad habits follow, it takes 3500 -5000 correct repetitions to undo this engram (an engram is like a computer program, but in the nervous system). So, now that you are all depressed about how imbalanced you may be, what can you do to counteract and better yet prevent this? Strive to balance your body daily (as a whole, or if needs be, concentrating on isolated weak areas). Prevention is better than cure! We all know that.

Maybe it’s time to create some good habits, and fix (read, “ improve”) things before they break. Let yourself play a bit more in your art, explore your capabilities and push yourself to try movements on your “bad side”.  Strengthen the weak areas of your game, and the flow on effect should be the strengthening of the weak areas of your body. Not only will you improve physically, but your entire skill base will take a dramatic leap. It’ll make you a better martial artist, and a better competitor. Obviously, an appropriately prescribed holistic strength and conditioning program can aid enormously in this process of improving the self. A well constructed program will promote balance by preventing strength bias’s and improving areas of weakness. As a result it’ll help prevent almost any mishap from interrupting/stopping you from doing what it is you love.

Train smart!

We are jumping straight into the deep end with the Dominance Blog. With a multitude of content on its way from the instructor crew at Dominance Mixed Martial Arts we will be covering news, insights, information and training advice to inspire you on your own personal martial arts journey. We will also be featuring a number of interviews from local and international champions and trainers in MMA, BJJ, Muay Thai, Judo, Boxing, and Strength & Conditioning. Lets get it started!!!