MMA
Strength has always been my weakness. From the time that I was a kid, a skinny kid with little evident athleticism, my capacity to move loads, win arm wrestling matches and throw heavy objects has been an embarrassment.
In highschool , I recall, one science class testing how many Newtons of force each kid could produce, pulling on a spring attached with a poll and measuring it – I was amongst the worst of the boys. Barely a level up above the fattest girl, but out of 15 boys I was joint bottom third or fourth. Ive always been weak.
Not surprisingly I was skinny too. Vanity and insecurity have been a tough to confess aim of wanting to get jacked. But above all, and I always kept this mind over the past 5yrs of training strength, my goal has been to hide my weakness as a fighter and build up my relative strength to an accessible baseline.
Along this journey there were obstacles to take care of: injuries, bad programming, conflicting training targets and three months of chemotherapy.
When I started way back when, I weighed a little over 160lbs (73kg) at 61. Today I walk around at 185lbs (84kg), lean. That took five-years to put 15lbs (7kg) on my ectomorphic body-frame. I want more, for now, its good.
2007-2008 – the pissing about years
At the beginning of 2007, shortly before I started Kick Boxing, I acquired an affordable squat rack from Amazon.co.uk, a barbell, way too small for the rack, some dumbbells, and some weights.
This was the first part of a much greater journey I was entering in my mid-20s . Even though I really didn’t know what I was doing with the weights at the time, I approached my training with a singular purpose and dedication – thinkingin the long term, tenacity and persistence. Disciplined, driven, motivated, and above all, consistent.
But back then, I really didn’t know. The York weights set that I bought came with a poster, still up inside my room, long past its usefulness, illustrating an assortment of exercises, targeting the back, the legs, the biceps, the triceps, the chest the deltoids -ad hoc combination of general and isolated muscle groups.
I had bad form and little programming knowledge, but Id consistently train 3 days per week. I split the week, targeting legs 1 day, arms and shoulders another and chest and back on the final day.
2008 and Starting Strength
By early 2008 I gained more knowledge about strength training through websites and books and learnt how scientific athletic development should be – not in an overly complex sense, but in terms of measuring progress, working with percentages on the bar and numbers of repetitions. I learnt the importance of implementing what now seems obvious – that which we measure, improves.
I learnt and understood the difference between myofibrillar hypertrophy and sarcoplasmic hypertrophy; of CNS activation and the glycolitic pathway; of stress and adaptation, nutrition, periodisation, and the importance of rest and recovery.
Then I stumbled on the book Starting Strength by Mark Rippetoe.
The book is a comprehensive breakdown on training using a barbell. A versatile long section of metal to which you can add weights and train all the most significant muscles in your body. According to the book, using a barbell and a squat stand, all you need to do was concentrate on four exercises which will correctly train all of the muscles you have to get stronger. The squat, the deadlift, the bench press and the military press. The book taught me that all strength work should be built around these big multi-joint movements. which would train my muscles in balance with each other, developing them proportionally and functionally.
Rippetoe advises squatting three times a week – which for any beginner shouldn’t overtax the central-nervous-system (CNS). Along with the squat, he advises to pick another multi-joint movement. As far as I will remember, I split my training week this way:
Monday
35 Squat
35 Bench press / Press (Alternating)
Chin-ups: 3 sets to failure
Wednesday
35 Squat
35 Press / Bench Press (Alternating)
15 Deadlift
Friday
35 Squat
35 Bench Press / Press (Alternating)
Pull-ups: 3 sets to failure
In October 2009 my squat was 75kg for 3 sets of 5 reps. Bench press was 60kg for 3 sets of 5 reps. Military press was 40kg for 3 sets of 5 and deadlift was 75kg for 1 set of 5 reps.
By June 2010, Id added 10kg to my squat, 10kg to my bench press, 15kg to my deadlift and my military press barely improved in any way.
In truth, following a year and half on the starting strength programme, most of my lifts were stagnating. These relatively modest gains in that time period, for a beginner, weren’t entirely due to any flaw in the programme, but because my Muay Thai training took an ever more large portion of my training, and the 3 days per week of squatting left me quickly fatigued and over trained. I could not handle that sort of volume demanded by the programme and had no time to recover. After a year of starting strength, I also began to incorporate other resistance training methods, which I felt at the time were much more important for my martial arts development. This included using complex pairs – such as body-weight squat jumps after completing a final set of max strength squats, or plyometric push-ups after completing the bench press. There were also snatches, and cleans and dumbbell swings. My Muay Thai improved, my kicks, my punches – all delivered with knockout power. But my max strength stagnated. Even worse, I could feel a back injury accumulating.
Years of bad posture had accumulated a very weak lumbar spine which was exacerbated by the three days a week squatting. I could already feel this, but at this point I thought I could simply train through the throbs of pain I got when I tried to sprint or get under the bar.
2010-2011, 5/3/1, injury and also the appeal of bodyweight strength
At the end of 2010, I cam across Jim Wendlers 5/3/1 weight lifting programme.
What I like about the Wendlers 5/3/1 programme is its flexibility – you may strength train four times, three times, 2 times or even once per week, and still progress in your lifts. Its perfect for those for whom resistance training is a secondary goal. This programme is very precise in helping you progress in your lifts – incrementally increase weight from 65% of your 1 rep-max to 95% for any given lift through a 4 week cycle.
Wendler targets on counting the whole number of reps you can perform with a given weight as markers of strength, rather than finding out how much weightyou can lift overall, which is a great indicator of overall strength and lets you know when to increase weight.
The programme also leaves more than enough room for accessory exercises if hypertrophy is the goal or if you want to add extra volume. The upshot is that it allows you to significantly increase intensity whilst keeping volume low. This enables for lots of recovery to concentrate on MMA skills and other conditioning targets.
For the next year and a half, to just about two years, I went through several 5/3/1 cycles. These varied from three sessions a week to 2 sessions a week depending on how much time I dedicated to other training goals. This programme was remarkable in that I put on plates of iron on all my lifts faster than I ever have. Unfortunately, this quick progression led to overconfidence leading to a serious back injury in early 2011.
2011 was also marked with cancer treatment. I was initially diagnosed with cancer in 2010, but then all it took was quick surgery to remove the tumour and I was back in the gym three days later. The summer of 2011, however, took three months of chemotherapy where my muscles wasted and my weight dropped fast.
Throughout the period of injuries and hospitalisation, and in between barbell training, I maintained my strength by adopting bodyweight training. Dips, chin-ups, single-leg squats, hand-stand pushups- these required a higher amount of skill, but I was happy with pulling off up to 10 reps of bodyweight single-leg squats as well as three hand-stand pushups (off the wall).
I did almost no explosive work, like swings and snatches, as I was prohibited by a barely rehabilitated back. For the time being, I was concentrating on my max strength regularly – especially after chemotherapy, which left my red blood cell count and overall cardio-vascular capacity very low. Max strength is all I could do. And, as it turned out, after the end of chemo trreatment in August, my max strength shot-up quickly.
In January 2011 my bench press had reached 81kg for 3 reps, 107 kg on the squat for 3 reps, press was 54kg for 3 reps and deadlift 117kg for 3 reps. By the end of the year, my lifts were back at similar numbers and progressing steadily.
My weight, however, was a constant battle. From a max of 187lbs (85kg) several times I fell down again to 170. Its that 170 is my natural body weight. After and through chemo I was between 170-180. When I became ill for two weeks in November, I went back down to 170-180. Im normally at 185 and aim is to get to 205.
At 185lbs (85kg), my current (estimated) numbers are:
Squat = 110kg = 1.3 times bodyweight
Bench press = 85kg = 1 times bodyweight
Deadlift = 120kg = 1.4 times bodyweight
Pull-ups = 5 with additional 20kg weight
By the end of this year my aim is:
Squat = 1.5-2 times my body weight = 170kg,
Deadlift = 2-2.5 times my bodyweight = 210kg
Bench press = 1.25-1.5 times my bodyweight = 130kg
Pull-ups = 10 with an additional 20kg of weight