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When most people talk about MMA workouts, agility training often gets carelessly left behind. But if you’ve ever wondered what you can do to increase your overall athletism, then don’t overlook this important aspect of your training. So if you’re game, I’ll share with you several sure-fire ways to boost your agility and improve your athleticism.
There are a number of different variables you want to address when designing your MMA workouts. Right now let’s focus exclusively on just one important variable, agility. Agility drills are perhaps the most underrated exercises when it comes to conditioning for combat sports. I don’t know why this is.
By adding these exercises to your mixed martial arts workout, you essentially kill two birds with one stone. On one hand, you improve your agility, your speed, your ability to move quickly, and your explosiveness. And if that wasn’t enough, these exercises can also push your cardio to a very high level.
For these reasons, you’d almost have to be a little nuts not to include them in your workouts.
It doesn’t matter what type of combat athlete you are. Whether you’re a wrestler, submission wrestler, judoka, boxer, Muay Thai kickboxer, or full contact fighter, you need to incorporate explosive exercises into your routine.
What Explosive Drills Should You Include in Your MMA Workouts?
Basically any and all jumping drills are great for building lower body quickness and explosiveness. You will see fighters like Georges St. Pierre and Randy Couture utilize a lot of these exercises in their training. These exercises include box jumps, squat jumps, side jumps, jumping lunges and one legged squats.
You can create a variety of MMA workouts using these jumping exercises alone. However, you want work on your upper body explosiveness too.
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To do this, you can include exercises like medicine ball throws, plyometric pushups, and other explosive pushup variations.
Because of the explosive nature of these exercises, they are very high intensity and get your heart pumping very fast. Thus, they are perfect for mimicking the explosive quickness needed in combat situations.
Let’s look at how other professional mixed martial arts and grapplers use explosive conditioning drills.
You have probably seen fighters like BJ Penn and Frank Shamrock utilizing a ballistic ladder. A ballistic ladder is simply a ladder shaped grid that you roll out on the floor. You then use it to quickly step in and out of the squares while running down the ladder. This builds foot speed and quickness.
Having an agility ladder is not a bad idea, although you can do the same workouts without one. Just imagine where the ladder would be on the floor and run through your drills accordingly.
I have talked many times about the importance of circuit training for MMA. The rules of circuit training still apply when training for agility. You can add explosive exercises like squat jumps to your circuit training workouts. Not only does this crank up the intensity of your circuit, it also builds speed and explosive power.
If your circuits do not include explosive drills, you are shooting yourself in the foot. But here’s another way to include agility drills into your workouts.
You can dedicate one workout per week to nothing but agility drills. The thing with explosive agility drills is that you don’t want to perform them all the time. If you try to do them daily, you’ll regress instead of progress.
Anywhere from one to three days a week is ideal. It really depends on how you structure your workouts. One thing is for sure, if you add agility drills and plyometrics to your mma workouts, and don’t overdo them, you will see almost immediate increases in your speed, quickness, explosiveness and overall athleticism.
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