Fight Science Made Simple

 Welcome to the first episode of the Fight Science Made Simple podcast. If you're new to the Fight Science Collective, welcome. I am coach Adam Snyder. I am a lifelong martial artist. I'm an active MMA fighter. I'm also a performance and recovery specialist. I've dedicated my entire life to helping fighters and martial artists like you train harder, recover faster, and stay on the mat for life.

Um. I've been doing this for a long time. Like I said, I've been training since I was five years old. I started with kickboxing a few years later, transitioned into juujitsu. I've been competing since I was eight or nine years old. I went to school for exercise science. I have a degree in sports science.

I'm a certified strengthening conditioning specialist, and I've been coaching fighters and creating content around performance recovery, fighting since 2019, so quite a good amount of time that I've been doing this. I finally decided it's time to take the plunge and jump into the podcast side of things, and I wanted to create a podcast really for two reasons.

The first was to go deeper and give more detail on what we do at the Fight Science Collective and how we help fighters. We handle everything off the mat. The way I like to think about what we do is like the UFC Performance Institute in your pocket, so we handle strengthening conditioning. Nutrition recovery mindset.

We handle a lot of lifestyle things as well with our clients. From finances and budgeting to relationship advice to scheduling and time management. We help our fighters with a lot, and most of my content is done through Instagram, and Instagram is a very short form platform, and so I can only help and I can only give you so much in the Instagram format.

And what's great about a podcast is because. There's no algorithm that's pushing my content or deeming it good or bad, depending on its length or the the hooks that it uses or things like that. I can talk about when whatever I want for however long that I want. And if you like it and you dig it and it's helpful, you're gonna watch more and it doesn't vibe with you, that's great.

Or probably not a good fit for each other, and that's okay. Anyway. I probably can't help you and there's probably better content out there for you. A podcast just lets me go deeper into what we teach and what we help fighters with the Fight Science Collective. The second reason that I wanted to create a podcast was to build our community even deeper and even stronger.

That's why we're the Fight Science Collective, a group of people sharing a common goal, a common desire, a common passion. I was really lucky and fortunate since a child to have incredible coaches and teammates and just a community of fighters around me. I was still super close with my coach from when I was a kid.

He's like my second dad, and even now the gym that I'm in in Tampa, I have a great team, great coaches. My best friends are from this gym, and so I've just been fortunate, but I recognize a lot of you don't have that. And I wanna, I wanna provide that for you. 'cause everyone knows we go further faster with a solid group of people around us, and it's just more enjoyable.

Let's face it. Fight sports are hard. They're hard physically and mentally, emotionally, spiritually. So having a group of people, like-minded people that are on the same path that are in it together, even though it's, you know, me versus me, and then that opponent in front of me in the cage. It's still so much better to have a team behind you whether you're trying to do this at the highest level and accomplish your fight goals, or you're just a hobbyist and you wanna protect your family and you love the sport.

I want a community where we can grow and connect. So that's why I wanted to create this podcast. My goal is to keep these podcasts episodes as short as possible. 15 minutes tops. That's my goal. We'll see how that works. I'm a bit of a talker, which you'll see. This one may be a little bit longer just 'cause we're doing this intro here.

Um. Then we're also gonna sprinkle some longer form episodes in one hour, two hour episodes, once or twice a month, uh, with one of my boys, David Panero Macias. David's my best friend. He's also an undefeated professional fighter, um, and a fight science client. And so we just wanna shoot the shit. Talk, build our community further, uh, and also share what it's actually like to be a fighter.

We both have jobs. I own this business and coach, and David is a full-time designer. We have girlfriends that we live with, and so we just wanna share the journey, the struggles, the challenges, the. Lifestyle, the wins, the just everything that comes with chasing your dreams and living life to your fullest at its edge.

And so that's the premise behind the Fight Science Made Simple podcast. I hope you're really excited about it. I'm really excited about something that I want to do for a while. If you're sold on it already, you're like, fuck yeah dude, this is great. Then why don't you just go and subscribe, follow the podcast, share it with some teammates, 'cause you already know it's gonna be great.

And that would be really helpful. And if you're not sold, that's cool too. I encourage you to stick around to the end, listen to the whole podcast. If you love it by the end, you got a lot out of it, then you should follow the podcast and share it. And if not, that's cool too. Like I said, there's probably a coach content podcast out there that's better fit for you.

So without further ado, let's jump into episode one of the Fight Science Made Simple Podcast. We're going to be talking about why most fighters gas out. Cardio is huge. Whoa. Cardio is huge. Everybody knows that cardio is king. You have the best skills in the world. You can be super talented, super explosive, but if you gas out, if you blow your load in the first 30 seconds of a fight, you're not gonna have a very successful fight career.

Especially on the mats too. Like if you're gassing out every single round, you're, you're not gonna wanna go back. It's not going to be fun. So building a relentless gas tank is a necessity. Not just to have success in competition, but for hobbyists as well. Now the problem is everyone knows they need cardio, but most fighters and martial artists go about building their gas tank wrong.

They usually think they either need to do a lot of road work runs, maybe some sprinting, maybe some hip circuits, or they just need to do more mat time. I gotta train harder. I can put more time on the mats. And there are. Inherent flaws, which with each of those systems. So I'm gonna talk about the flaws in the old school approaches.

We're gonna talk about what a better approach can be, and then we're gonna talk about how you can start implementing it into your training regimen right now. You can start doing it today. Uh, so the inherent flaws, the first, let's talk about running. Okay. Long runs. It's a boxing thing first off, and then it's just has bled into the MMA and juujitsu space wrestling space.

Uh, I need more cardio, so I'm just gonna go on runs. It's gonna make you have better cardio. You're gonna go on runs, you're gonna have better cardio. 100%, but, excuse me, but that's all you're going to have. You're just going to have better cardio. You're not gonna have fight specific conditioning. A run is the same space pace, it's slow, it's control.

Unlike a fight, right? In a fight, you are not maintaining the same pace consistently for a long period of time. You're sprinting and moving and resting in between rounds. It's high burst, followed by pullback. You're grappling, and then you're, and then you're striking, and then you're clinching, and then you're doing jiujitsu.

There are so many variables and demands energy wise in fight sports. That running alone will only hit one piece of the puzzle. It's only gonna scratch the surface. So then, okay, cool. I'm gonna run and then I'm gonna put a lot of mat time in to, to fill those gaps. And on paper it makes sense. But the issue with that is I'm a big believer that our mat time.

For developing either our skills or developing our tactics. We do not use mat time to build physical athletic qualities. That's what strength and conditioning is for. If we need to build conditioning, if we need to build strength and power, we do that off the mat. If we want to get better at our martial art and our skill and our competitive tactics, we do that.

On the mat. And so all of our energy should be invested into building our skills. And so if we're using our mat time to build our cardio, it's taking away from our skill development. The other reason I'm not a fan of using more MAT time for cardio and conditioning development is because of the injury risk.

If you need to push harder and longer round on the mat in order to build a bigger gas tank, and let's say your gas tank is growing and growing, that means you have to push harder and longer in order to keep your gas tank growing. You are a. Ruining your technique because now you're performing your techniques in an exhausted state, and B, you're at a higher risk of injury because your body's fatigued, your body's beat up, and you still need to push the pace really, really hard.

And so what I am a huge fan of is targeted specific data-driven conditioning that trains every area of conditioning that you need to have a relentless gas tank. As a fighter. And so, okay, great. That makes sense. But what are those areas? What are those, we call them pillars and there's three of them. What are the three pillars of a relentless gas tank that you need to succeed as a fighter?

And so the, the first pillar, we already talked about that. Okay, this is your cardio base. This is your long runs, this is your sustainable conditioning. Anything that you can do at a sustainable pace for. 30 to 60 minutes or more? Well, I mean, honestly, once you cross the two minute mark, you're tapping into that aerobic zone.

But to really start seeing improvements to your conditioning, you need to be maintaining that pace for at least 30 minutes. Um, this cardio base is training something called your aerobic system. Your aerobic system is what cardio is. We're using our cardiovascular system, our heart. Our veins to send blood and oxygen all throughout our body to provide our muscles with energy to then do movement and activity.

And so what's great about the aerobic system is that it's very sustainable. You can use it for a really long time because it's not very fatiguing. That's the beautiful thing about oxygen. We have oxygen, we can push the pace for a really, really, really long time. The downside to the aerobic system is that once we cross the threshold, this is called our lactic threshold.

Once we cross that threshold of where we're primarily using oxygen, this is called your aerobic system, to then where we're primarily not using oxygen. This is called our anaerobic system, and we'll talk about that in a second. Once we cross that threshold where we're no longer relying on oxygen for energy, now we're going to gas out very quickly.

We're starting to push into more powerful, intense zones, and we just don't have enough. Oxygen to push the pace, and so we start to gas out. Okay. So when should you be training your aerobic system? Well, we have a, a subjective measure how you're feeling and an objective measure, actual numbers and data to gauge if you should be focusing on your cardio base or not.

Uh, the first is the, the subjective, how you're feeling if you find yourself struggling to maintain a pace. Once you cross that two minute mark. And you're using a sustainable pace and you're just starting to gas out, you're starting to huff for air, or you're a naturally explosive person and you just can't sustain pace for a long time, and it's probably a good idea to focus a little bit on your aerobic conditioning.

If you have a higher resting heart rate, it's typically a good idea to focus on your aerobic conditioning. I recommend elite athletes or any martial artist really try to hit. Resting heart rate of the low, fifties or lower. I have guys in the low forties, 43, 42 beats per minute, but if you're at 51 52 beats per minute, this can be a pretty solid place to push the pace aerobically, and you probably don't need to do any more aerobic work.

The reason a lower resting heart rate is so important is because let's say your heart rate's at 60 beats per minute. It is a normal, healthy adult human, and that means your heart beats 60 times in one minute and it needs to beat 60 times in one minute at rest to be able to provide your body with oxygen to keep it alive.

On the other side of that, you have one athlete. Their heart beats at 60 beats per minute. You have another athlete. Let's see if I can sync that up. Yeah. You have another athlete and their heart beats at 40 beats per minute. That athlete with a lower resting heart rate is sending the same amount of oxygen and blood throughout their body to keep them alive at rest with their heart is beating 20 less times, which means it's working less hard, not as hard to supply the body with oxygen and keep it alive.

So if we can get you to have a lower resting heart rate, that means you can do the same amount of work with less effort, which means you can push a pace longer without getting. Gassing out without getting hurt, uh, and also lets you recover faster in between rounds or after intense spurse. So that's the first pillar.

This is what most people think of. I need more cardio. I'm gonna work on my cardio pace. That's pillar. Pillar one. Most fighters do not need to improve their cardio base. Most fighters need to either focus on pillar two or pillar three. Pillar two. We call this hard pushes. Our hard pushes are our intense flurries of strikes.

There are big wrestling scrambles, anything from 30 seconds to two minutes where you're pushing the pace and you're going hard, and you're starting to feel that heavy burning sensation in your arms. In your legs that maybe lactic acid feeling. It's not actually lactic acid, it's actually other metabolic waste byproducts like carbon dioxide and heat and things like that.

But for the sake of simplicity, we'll say lactic acid, even though it's not really lactic acid, you start to feel that lactic acid buildup. Now you know, you're pushing into what we call the lactic energy system. This is an anaerobic energy system, meaning that we are not using oxygen for energy, and so it's more powerful than the aerobic system, but it also gases out quicker than the aerobic system, but still really important for combat sports, especially my grapplers.

They're gonna be grappling a lot. MMA fighters gonna be grappling a lot. Your arms are gonna get heavier, your legs are gonna get heavier. You're gonna be dipping into your lactic system, and so we need to. We need to train it. And so there are two ways that I love to improve our ability to push those higher intensities for those harder pushes.

The first, it's actually through an aerobic style of training that we call threshold training. I talked about our lactic threshold earlier, where on one side you have oxygen and the other side you have not. Oxygen, aerobic, anaerobic. And once we hit the intensity where we're relying on that anaerobic system more, we've crossed that lactic threshold now.

More powerful, but we're gonna gas out pretty quick, probably within two minutes. And so what we can do is we can increase our lactic threshold, and by increasing our lactic threshold, you can then increase how long you can push the pace at an anaerobic energy zone. An aerobic energy zone, excuse me. If you increase your anaerobic threshold, then you can push longer in the aerobic zone.

And so what I recommend you do is something where you can maintain zone four heart rate zone for three to five minutes. You can do three to five rounds of this a couple times a week, and this is gonna be massive for your cardiovascular development, also your conditioning development. Pushing out of the aerobic training into actually directly target your lactic system.

We can do intervals of incomplete work to rest ratios. So this could look like an airdyne bike. This could look like circuit training. This could look like bag work. And what you're going to do is pretty simple. Let's say Tabatas is a great example. You push for 20 seconds, you rest for 10 seconds, push for 20 seconds, rest for 10, 20 seconds.

You can do 30 seconds on 15 seconds off. As long as it is an incomplete work to rest ratio, you are good to go. You're working more than you're resting. What's gonna happen is you are going to build that lactic waste, all of that metabolic waste in your muscles. Then your body's gonna get better at buffering it and clearing it in a controlled state.

So then when that happens in training or it happens in a fight, you're more conditioned for it, and so you're not gonna gas out as quickly. So that's the second pillar to building a relentless gas tank, those hard pushes by training our lactic system. The third pillar is very important. This is your explosive activity, explosive work.

We do this by training, what we call the. A lactic system. So think about your knockout punches. Think about your big shots on a takedown. This is very quick, very explosive, very powerful. Up to six seconds. But you can probably only do one or two of these, and then you're gonna start to slow down. You're gonna start to fade.

Um, and so what we can do is we can directly target our, a lactic system, and we can do this through sprinting. I love top speed sprinting for this, sprinting for six seconds all out and then rest. And we want complete rest, two, three minutes of rest when we do another sprint all out. And the reason we want to do this is because we first want to improve our a lactic power, how much total power you can produce.

Once you've improved your total amount of power, then we can start decreasing the rest and improving our a lactic capacity. So let's say you start and you do a couple months of a lactic power, and then you start cutting the rest down to one minute. Then 30 seconds, and now we have less rest. And so now we're working really hard, being really explosive.

And now we have to increase our repeatability. We have to be able to repeat that power over and over and over again. Uh, and that's going to help you make sure that you can wrestle harder, strike harder, maybe throw 3, 4, 5 high power knockout strikes in a row instead of just one or two. Another thing that you can do to help with this is supplement with creatine.

Creatine is an unbelievable supplement. It's the best supplement, the most tested supplement. Every person, every human should take it. It's great for your brain too, but specifically for the a lactic system, your body uses creatine to perform explosive activity. You have a limited amount of creatine available to you.

So as soon as you run outta creatine, that's when your power starts to fade. So if you're supplementing with creatine, you have more creatine in your blood, more creatine in your system, more creatine available, that means you're going to be able to push that a lactic system longer. Now it's gonna be marginal, you know, maybe one extra rep, two extra reps, but you add that over time or even in a fight, squeezing out one extra power shot.

It could be the difference between you finishing dominantly or losing a fight. And so we want every single edge that we can get, and that's the third pillar. That is your explosive work. That is your a lactic system. Now the key to building a relentless gas tank is training all three energy systems. Now, some people like to train them all at once.

I am not necessarily a fan of concurrent training. I like to train them phasic, but it really depends on a couple things. First, depends on the athlete. What are your strengths and what are your weak, what are your weaknesses? If you're super explosive. Then you probably should invest a lot of time on the aerobic side of things.

If you can push the pace all day long, but your punches are pillows soft, then we need to work on your explosivity and we need to work on your power output. So that's really important. We also have to take a look at the different phases of the fight cycle. Where are you in regards to competition? If you're in camp and you're getting ready for a fight, it's probably not a great idea to focus on your aerobic system or your lactic system, a the aerobic system.

Is not very specific towards your fight and competition. So it takes away from the adaptations and the performance and the things that you're working on, on the mats to peak for competition. Um, and as far as the lactic system is concerned, it's so fucking fatiguing to train your lactic system. You're gonna be so sore from doing it that if you do lactic training in camp, it's going to, you're gonna feel it on the mats.

It's going to impact your sparring and it's gonna impact your mindset as well. So I love focusing on the aerobic system or the lactic system out of camp. Because A, you can afford to those longer durations of work that aren't going to take away from your fight night performance, and there's a lot of transferability.

So if you build your aerobic base outta camp, you're still going to have that aerobic foundation when you're in camp and when you're fighting. And with the lactic system, you have the ability to push the pace and build up a little bit of extra fatigue without it. Impacting your mat performance too much.

You're obviously gonna feel it on the mat, but that's okay. Like you go into that knowing I'm building my lactic system, and so it's not gonna hit your cardio. And again, then, or your confidence rather, and then that'll carry over into your, your fight camp. On the other side of things, I love to train the a lactic system while we're in camp because a, it it's not very fatiguing.

We're not trying to get sore or kill ourselves here. We're just trying to be as explosive as possible, so you're not going to build up a ton of fatigue. Building the, A lactic system, a lactic system as well, like power, doesn't really have a lot of transferability. So what I mean by that is like if you are in an, a lactic or a power focused phase, three months out from a fight, and then you get into fight camp and you, you stop and you focus on something else.

Your power level's gonna go down, it doesn't transfer over as well as something like your aerobic system. So that being said, we can peak our power very close to a fight, and then we're going to have the most power available for that fight night. And so I, I recommend doing a couple things. Knowing where your strengths and weaknesses are at the Fight Science Collective, we do this through testing.

We call it system diagnostic. All of our clients gets runs through a system diagnostics week, the first week of their program, and we test their strength, power, mobility, strength, power, mobility, endurance, so we know exactly where they are, where their strengths and weaknesses are, and so then we can build their program to turn those weaknesses into strengths.

And you also have to know what phase of the fight cycle you're in. I really highly recommend you invest in a heart rate monitor. Uh, doing conditioning without heart rate data is like lifting without knowing how much weight is on the bar. We never do it, and it's super random. So you can specifically target the energy system that you want to improve with your heart rate monitor without guessing.

And this is massive for recovery as well. Uh, and. In addition to improving your resting heart rate, I also would love for you to increase your heart rate recovery. If you can bring your heart rate down faster than your opponents, you're gonna be able to push the pace longer, round, after round, and it's great for your recovery as well.

So. There you go. That is, that is really the number one reason why fighters are gassing out, is because you're focusing on the wrong things when it comes to your conditioning. You don't need harder work. You don't need to do more cardio. You need to know what energy system you're weakest in, and then you need to target it.

I hope you loved it. I hope you got a lot outta this. I had a ton of fun doing this. Uh, if you did dig this and you haven't already and you suck around this far, please share this with the training partner. Please follow and subscribe and leave comments and like, and all of the engagements so more people will see this.

It can reach more people and we can keep doing more things like this. Uh, my goal is to have a podcast every single week covering strengthening conditioning, nutrition, recovery mindset. We're gonna be talking about, like I said, scheduling. We're gonna be talking about relationships, we're gonna be talking about finances, everything you need to be the best martial artist and fighter and human possible on and off the mat.

So thanks for being here and thanks for sticking around. I can't do this without you. We're gonna keep all of this coming and pumping it out. Until next time, catch you later.