Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Combat sports demand a lot from you: strength to hold position, power to finish, speed to react, endurance to continue, and resilience to hold on. Whether you practice boxing, judo or another martial art, you need a body capable of meeting the demands of your chosen discipline.
The problem ? Many fighters still view training “hard” or doing “more” as the only parameters that matter. More circuits. No more tricks. No more exhaustion. But proper strength and conditioning isn’t about chasing away fatigue – it’s about focused training that allows for adaptation and makes your skills work more efficiently. Smart S&C builds the physical foundation that allows your technique to shine under pressure.
Your sport/discipline comes first
Your S&C program should support your sport, not compete with it.
If you want to become a better boxeryou have to box. If you want to improve your grappling, you need mat time. Nothing in the gym can replace quality technical practice.
What S&C does is fill in the gaps that your sports training doesn’t fully cover in specific incremental doses:
- General strength and power
- Speed and responsiveness
- Adds strength to joints and tissues
- Develops energy systems adapted to your sporting requirements
Done right, S&C allows you to perform your existing skills faster, harder, and longer, without breaking down.
Strength: the basis
Power is defined as force × speed. If you want to punch harder or perform faster takedowns, you need to be able to apply more force.
It starts with strength.
Strength training for fighters is not about bodybuilding. It’s about training your nervous system to recruit more muscle fibers, more efficiently and with better coordination. The result?
- Cleaner, crisper movement
- Higher force production
- A more “connected” feeling when hitting, landing or throwing
Stronger muscles, tendons and bones are also more resilient. They tolerate impacts, hard landings and scrambles better, which means fewer injuries and longer training.
All things being equal, the stronger fighter, the stronger human, has the advantage.
Speed and multidirectional movement
Strength creates potential. Speed transforms this potential into performance.
Fighters must produce force quickly: sharp punches, quick level changes, quick transitions to the ground. Ballistic drills, jumps, sprints, and medicine ball throws help you learn to express force quickly, not just express it slowly.
How you move is just as important.
Most gym workouts take place in the sagittal plane (up-down, front-back). But the fights are complicated and three-dimensional. You cut angles, spin through punches, kicks, pivot, sprawl and spin around the opponent.
To reflect this, your S&C should include work on all fronts:
- Transverse (rotational): rotating and anti-rotating work
- Frontal (side to side): lateral leaps, lateral movements, lateral lunges
- Unilateral and unilateral work: to develop balance, stability and realistic strength
These moves help transform raw strength into the type of agility, balance, and rotational power that can actually be applied when striking, taking down, and shoving.
Conditioning that actually transfers to combat
Good conditioning isn’t just random high-intensity circuits that leave you lying on the floor. It’s about training the relevant energy systems so that you can repeatedly produce high-quality efforts over rounds, not just survive.
A balanced approach works on three main intensity zones:
1. Low Intensity – Build the Engine
Regular, low-intensity work (road work, light steady-state cardio, shadowboxing, or easy jumping rope) builds your aerobic base.
Benefits:
- Better recovery between trades and turns
- Lower heart rate for the same work output
- Improved ability to handle higher training volumes
2. Moderate Intensity – Learn to Work
Tempo runs, controlled circuits, and moderate-intensity intervals fall in the middle zone.
These sessions:
- Develop your ability to maintain a rhythm under fatigue
- Improve your ability to buffer and eliminate lactate
- Prepare for extended wrestling exchanges or high-pressure rounds where you can’t back down
3. High intensity – short, sharp bursts
Short sprints, high-intensity intervals, and short bursts near maximum effort build your high end.
Used sparingly and intentionally, they:
- Increase your ability to explode when needed
- Support for finishing power – whether it’s a burst, a takedown attempt, or a decisive scramble
The key is not to live in one area all the time. Great fighters layer all three intensities throughout the week instead of doing each session like it’s a brutal “endurance test.”
Mobility: the silent key to longevity
Mobility is not just about being flexible; it’s about being able to move freely and efficiently through the ranges demanded by your sport.
Poor mobility can:
- Wasting energy through “leaks” in your movement
- Limit your ability to produce energy
- Increases the risk of injury when you are forced into uncomfortable positions
Areas that every fighter should take care of:
- Spine: for rotating punches, throws and evasive moves
- Ankles: for crisp, responsive footwork and stable landings
- Hips: the engine behind punches, kicks, level changes and bridges
- Shoulders: especially important for attackers and anyone who does a lot of grappling
You don’t need hour-long mobility sessions. Consistent, focused work around these key joints can pay huge dividends in terms of technique, power transfer and career length.
Organizing your week: the top-down approach
The classic fighter mindset is “go hard or go home” – every day, every session. It works…until it doesn’t. Eventually, performance declines, injuries occur, and you’re more often tired than sharp.
A better approach is Up-down training methodpopularized in sprinting but very useful for combat sports.
The idea: alternate demanding, high-intensity days with lower-intensity days focused on quality of movement, technical work and recovery.
For example:
- Monday – Top: Strength and power training
- Tue – Bas: Aerobic conditioning and mobility
- Wed – Up: Sparring/rolling plus explosive work
- Game – Low: Core, light technical work, mobility/recovery
- Fri – High: heavy lifting and/or work on mats/randori
- Sam – Low: Shadowboxing, light aerobic work, movement
- Sun – Off: Complete rest
This structure allows your nervous system to recover between big efforts so that when you go hard, you can actually perform at a high level, not just survive another session.
Over the weeks and months, this means more quality workouts and fewer unnecessary sessions performed in a state of constant fatigue.
Recovery: where real progress happens
Training is only half of the adaptation process. The other half is what you do outside of the gym.
Main pillars of recovery:
- Sleep: Aim for consistent, high-quality sleep to support hormonal balance, tissue repair, and mental acuity.
- Nutrition: Eat enough to fuel training, recover and gain weight sensibly – not through last-minute drastic cuts.
- Hydration: Small, consistent habits during the day beat last-minute bingeing at night.
- Load management: Use offload weeks, rest days, and smart cutbacks before the competition.
If you ignore recovery, it will eventually force you to quit. If you stick to it, your training can really add up and move you forward.
Key principles for training
There is no “magic” exercise or secret circuit that will make you a great fighter. What works is applying the fundamentals well, over time, with intention.
- Build a strong foundation of strength to support power.
- The speed and direction of the train changes so that force can be used quickly and in all planes.
- Condition over a range of intensities, not just hard.
- Keep mobility and joint health a priority for performance and longevity.
- Recover like it matters – because it does.
Do it regularly and you’ll move sharper, hit harder, and stay in the sport longer.
In combat sports and martial arts, having more usable strength is rarely the problem. Being strong is never a disadvantage.
Contributing authors
Richard Bennett is the founder of Caliber Performance Coaching, which offers strength and conditioning services, boxing coaching and personal training in Redditch, United Kingdom. With over 15 years of training experience and a long history in combat sports, he has worked with professional boxers, competitive judo athletes, amateurs and everyday clients who want to train like fighters and perform at their best.
We thank Richard Bennett for his valuable contributions.
