Archive for November, 2011
I Slept In
The reason that the good guys at y0ur gym are the best is very simple – they have trained longer, harder, thought about it more, sacrificed more and made it their mission to be the best they can be.
If you have just read that and thought ?yeah but I have a life?, then news flash – they will always be better than you. In all of my 20 plus years in martial arts I have heard all the excuses; I slept in, I went out the night before, I had something on, and the list goes on and on. The people who come up with these excuses, in my experience, have not gone on to be one of the top dogs in the club. The people that go on to the top level seem to train as much as they can and don?t make excuses when they can?t make it.
Everyone has seen the young guy with all the talent in the world give up the sport because Friday night drinks and chasing girls becomes more important. Or the guy with all the athletic ability in the world who goes on to the next thing because they don?t dominate everyone after six months of training. Then an average Joe turns up to most sessions and improves at a steady level without setting the world on fire then before you know it they are giving the good guys some grief in sparring.
In my experience the guys that put in the most time are usually the best. With MMA there is a direct link between what the top guys do and how they progress. It sounds obvious, but if it is so obvious why aren?t more people doing it? So here is the secret – the guys at MMA that are the best at BJJ train BJJ on their night off, the guys that are the best wrestlers wrestle on their night off and the guys who are the best strikers do striking training on their nights off. Then for the big shocker the guy that can keep up with everyone at everything does BJJ, Wrestling and Kickboxing.
Yes, doing all that training is hard, especially if you have family and a job, but the good guys seem to find a way to get to training and fit everything else in. I believe the best way to think of this is the old saying – ?if you want something done give to someone that is busy?. Again they do not make excuses they just find a way.
Therefore if you are truly into your training and you want to make gains then you will find a way. You will not be the person that sleeps in for the morning training, goes out the night before training or would rather stay at home instead of training.
Stop making excuses and train.
Gareth Lewis
Head MMA Instructor
Fuel The Machine
You do a lot of sessions to get your skills up then you find it hard to get out of bed in the morning, either through poor recovery or poor nutrition. And for the record, poor nutrition leads to poor recovery. In terms of nutrition is pays to keep it simple as most of us are not dietitians, so here are a few simple guidelines to keep in mind for your diet.
Keep it simple – if you can spell it you can eat it. Look at the ingredients of what you are putting in your mouth and if you do not know what it is then you shouldn?t eat it. There are a lot of chemicals in our food that our bodies are not designed to deal with. If you think for 1000?s of years we have eaten things that come from the earth – both plants and animals. Our bodies have not had to digest such things as Butylated Hydroxyanisole, also known as BHA. If you saw some BHA in a labelled container chances are you would not want to try it for fear of what it would do to us when ingested, but as soon as someone else puts it on some food and packages it we don?t seem to mind. BHA is is a phenol-based food preservative that prevents food from going rancid. It is commonly added to cereals, potato chips, chewing gum and vegetable oils. In short you can spell steak, carrots and so on, so stick to them.
Keep it simple with fluids too. All you need is water on a non training day – you should drink 0.03% of your body weight in water, so if you weigh 100kg you should drink 3 litres a day, and if you are training then your water intake will need to increase. Sip the water throughout the day as the body is not good an dealing with big volumes of water at once. Avoid ?sports? drinks and especially stay away from ?energy drink? – they are just pure evil.
The other basic rule is eat clean before and after training. Having some junk food is normal, but it comes down to the timing of when you do it. If you are on the way home from training it is best not to stop off and get some takeaways as this is when your body needs the fuel to repair itself from all the hard work. The same applies for before training – if you have a big session the next morning then eat clean the night before. Eating clean is just eating natural foods, which is food that you can spell.
Do not avoid one group of food. There is a nasty rumour going around that carbohydrates are bad and fats are bad – this is not true if you are active. You need both otherwise your performance will suffer. For those of you not sure what a fat, protein or carbohydrate is here is a simple guide – if it has eyes it has protein, which usually has some fat with it (nature designed it that way for a reason). Vegetables fruits and grains do not come from anything with eyes, so they are usually higher in carbohydrate.
For those of you who a bit more scientific here is a more detailed version of preparation and recovery strategies. For those that go on to read there is mention of carbohydrates and protein so here a little guide to know which is which.
At the end of the day anyone can train hard. How you recover and adapt will determine just how hard you can train and therefore how you can get gains in your performance. Here are some strategies that athletes use to maximize results:
The times immediately before and after exercise are vital. Follow these guidelines to ensure that your training has maximum impact.
In the 4 hours before training/competition
? Eat 150-200g carbohydrates (CHO) in the 4hrs pre training – this is a lot of food by the way
Examples:
Cereal bar = 20g CHO
Banana = 20g CHO
Honey sandwich = 50g CHO
To find out food composition of your favourite pre- and post- workout meals, there are all sorts of websites that tell you the nutritional content of foods that you can check.
Within 5 minutes of finishing training or event
? Drink fluids (water)
? Eat carbohydrates and protein
? Warm down with a light jog walk for 5-10 minutes then stretch
Within 10 minutes of finishing training or event
? Keep drinking fluids (water)
? Keep stretching
Then if you are really keen:
? Ice buckets ~ 10C submerge: 3 x (30-60 seconds in / 2 minutes out)
OR
? Contrast showers: 3 x (30-60 seconds cold / 2-3 minutes hot)
? Always finish on cold
Within 60 minutes of finishing training or event
? Keep drinking fluids and you should have drunk 500-1000 ml by now
? Continue to eat and you should have eaten 1-2g CHO per kg of bodyweight and 10-30g of protein by now.
? Glutamine may improve glycogen synthesis. This is probably a useful supplement.
? Ask yourself – what did I learn from this training/game?
Evenings
? Work on stretching and self-massage to stretch out tight muscles
? Massage/self-massage 2-6 hours after trainings can improve recovery
? Ice any injuries (10 minutes ice/10 minutes light stretching movement/10 minutes ice every 2 hours) don?t stop doing this till swelling and pain is gone.
? Relaxation work and meditation, yoga, music, reading.
? Have some fun and change the mood
? Go to sleep no later that 10.30 pm.
? Light pool work can be useful: 10 min spa, hydrate, stretch 10 min, 2-5 min floating
The day after
? A light recovery walk or jog (25-35 minutes) at a low intensity ie. Below 65% of maximum heart rate.
In short, be good before and after training or competition and this will aid with recovery and performance – it is a very simple formula.
Gareth Lewis
Head MMA Instructor
Pressure
The old adage ?pressure will turn coal to either diamond or dust? basically means you either crumble under pressure or perform ? which one are you?
The pressure that most people think of is the pressure that others put on you. When you are the favourite in a fight and everyone expects you to win and no matter how you perform you can only meet their expectations. This type of pressure is what the All Blacks go through week in and week out – if they win it is expected, and if they destroy the opposition then they played well. If they lose, however, then all hell breaks loose. The big problem with this type of pressure is that in the build up for the fight all you hear is that you are going to kill this guy, and it seems like everyone tells you that you will smash through your opponent. When everyone tells you this it becomes hard not to believe it and that can make it very hard to keep the hunger and the focus for the fight. Your opponent for that fight however will have no problems keeping focused for the fight as everyone is telling them that they are turning up to their execution. When you are the under dog the worst thing that can happen is that you lose and everyone expects that, but if you give the guy a run then in most people?s eyes it will be close to a win.
The other type of pressure, what I consider to be the worst, is the pressure that you put on yourself. This can be to keep a perfect record, because that is what your favourite fighter has or have each win by knock out as that is what the popular fighters do. Whatever it is that makes you measure yourself against others is the pressure that you put on yourself. This also flows through to training when you are one of the top guys at training then you must prove it at every session. Everyone there lifts against you because you go hard and they will remember forever the night that they get the best of you. This pressure causes you to work your A-game each time because anything less, heaven forbid, may result in defeat at training. All this pressure does is stop you from working new skills at training due to the pressure you have put on yourself to beat everyone at training.
With the nature of fights generally your first fight isn?t too bad as you are up against another person who is unsure and inexperienced. This is usually the same thing for the first few fights you have. One night you will turn up and find yourself standing opposite a guy who can match you in every department. What tends to happen in these fights is whoever has been pushed harder in training will come through. The guy that is used to beating everyone all of a sudden finds his moves are not having the success that he is used to and his opponent has an answer for everything that he does. One of two things happen here – they lift their game and take it to the next level as they know sooner or later the other guy will crack, or they clam up for fear of losing as the pressure has just got to them.
There are many examples at the top level of guys making stupid decisions on the big stage, doing things that they have never done before, due to pressure. Your body has muscle memory and knows what to do, and when you try and make minor adjustments in the heat of battle you interrupt the muscle memory and it can end up making things worse.
The best example of muscle memory is golf. Players may have a four foot put to win the US Open – a putt that they would hole 99 times out of 100 as they have drilled it so many times. However this the pressure makes things different and they start thinking about things with their stroke that their body usually just takes care of, when this happens they brain can get in the way and they miss the putt. The good thing about fight sports is that a lot of the time we are in reaction mode, because of the speed of the sport, but there are moments that everyone has done over-thought something and missed the technique – I would be surprised if someone has over thought and got the move!
The moral of the story is that pressure is there either from other people or the pressure you put on yourself, and it is how you deal with it that is the key. Keep in mind that your body knows what to do and your brain will only get in the way. Think of the best sparring that you have done and how much thinking was done, it is all about being in the moment and letting your body do what it knows how to do. However don?t confuse a fight plan and tactics for over thinking as they are separate things completely. Over thinking is usually when you worry about what happens after the move and not about getting the move right. Stop thinking and just do ? Enjoy.
Gareth Lewis
Head MMA Instructor