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I’d like to share this video to highlight the importance of mma conditioning… or conditioning in any sport for that matter. This is an amateur fight I had about 3 years ago. It was one of three that day. I had been trying to cut weight the week previous, aiming at coming in at the under 60 kg class.
It was a five hour drive to the event and so we left at about 4 o’clock in the morning, and I drove.
I had hardly anything to eat all week , hardly trained and had only one banana all morning. I still weighed in at 61 kg so I missed out on the 60 kg class, which didn’t really matter because there was no one else there in that weight class anyway. So I was put in the under 70 kg class, which most of the other guys cut from about 75 kg to get into.
My trainer Mick had been to the event for the previous couple of years and said that the competitors were mainly amateurs. This year though, the competition was a bit tougher and many of them were semi-professional or training to be professional and trained two hours a day, five days a week.
At the time I was training one day a week!
Considering how ill prepared I was and that it was my first time competing, I was reasonably happy with my performance. I was a little dissapointed at losing the two fights that I did because of;
1) the way I lost both fights was by rear naked and guillotine chokes which I don’t think I had ever been submitted by in training and..
2) that I was doing well in the first fight and was winning the second fight until I gassed out… both in the last ten seconds of the round!
This is not to take any thing away from my opponents who did very well.
The rules for this comp where no striking to the head whilst standing and no striking at all on the ground. Although the no striking to the head rule took away many of the setups, feints and combos that I use, I was sort of relieved for ’cause my head would have been at a perfect height for this guy to snap me with his jab and probably would have given him more things to hit me with aswell.
The video cuts out before you can see it but i catually went to sleep and the ref did not realixe. My opponenet had the choke on for a good ten seconds after I went out!
Lucky for me, Mick was standing close by and realized I was unconscious and stepped in.
Although I was a touch dissappointed with my performance I had accomplished a goal that I had set for myself, which was to have a couple of amateur fights.
I also faced a fear (curiosity?) which I have always had which was being choked unconscious.
I think that I earned some respect and some what ‘stole the show’ that day, being the only guy who didn’t tap out when faced with the prospect of being put to sleep!
So, I hope this helps illustrate the importance of mma conditioning.
I have seen it hundreds of times in the octogon and felt it many times myself. You can be fast, explosive, strong, powerful, technical and all that but if you don’t have any gas in your tank then you may as well have nothing and all your flashy skill set wil be useless!
