This weeks question came from a young amateur boxer, wondering what the best amount of S&C work is around your skills training. read on to find out.
There really isn't the perfect amount, what works for one person may be completely the wrong fit for another. The number one thing to ensure, is that it is the optimal amount for you specifically.
2 sessions per week is the norm
At Elite Step, we usually see our athletes 2 x per week for strength. We had previously tried 3 but this was too much, especially for MMA fighters. 2 seems to be the optimal amount for progression without overtraining.
We have found that with an already busy schedule, trying to get anymore than this amount will not work, most importantly, because it has a knock on effect to their skills sessions. Boxing sessions and MMA sessions are the priority so sacrificing this for an extra strength session makes no sense.
Separate conditioning sessions
Again, this is just the methods used at Elite Step but our success of our fighters has come through splitting up strength and conditioning sessions. What we found, when doing conditioning after, is the quality drops. The athlete may then miss out on an extra 10% performance benefit which at the highest level, is massive.
We prefer to have these as 2 different sessions, usually having the first in the morning and the second in the afternoon. This can be harder for MMA guys, due to having more sessions per week, but we do still manage to get this is. We just have to streamline and give them exactly what they need, in as short a time as possible.
Round up
The most important thing is to make sure your training is set up optimally. If you can get 2 x strength sessions and 3 x conditioning sessions in per week then great, if you have to combine, do it.
For boxers we use 3 conditioning sessions and for MMA only 2. Both of these will do 1 x capacity run (longer duration with low heart rate) for recovery and then we fill in the blanks depending on their weaknesses and gaps from skills sessions.
Thanks
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