Coach Paulie (he typically only goes by his first name) separates his competition/fight team from his regular clientele. The fight team is on any given day less than 10% of the people who attend classes, but of course they are also the people who have been around a long time and show up the most consistently. Paulie is very tough, and does not allow people to fight who are not willing to train to his standards. We put in a ton of hours on the mat, and today I'll talk about that.
Guys on the fight team are expected to train 6:30-9:00pm Monday to Friday. If I could change one thing, it would be the timing. Right around 3 years ago I suddenly became a morning person. I usually wake up at 6am or earlier even though I never set an alarm. But it makes sense to have this as the practice time for a number of reasons; most guys on the team have regular jobs, and also fights occur at night so you might as well get used to it. But it really fucks with my sleep, which is not great most of the time, but almost always terrible during fight camp.
At 6:30-7:30 every day we do an hour of striking. Paulie is an experienced and very knowledgeable striking coach. He sees so many things that I am doing that need correction, and notices when I am doing them better. The style he teaches is mostly Dutch kickboxing with elements of traditional Muay Thai. I won't go too far into the differences here but Muay Thai has a focus on kicks, knees and elbows (less on punches), and heavy emphasis on clinch work. It tends to be slower-paced, and less emphasis is placed on evasive movement. (The Thais tend to admire fighters who stand toe-to-toe and trade heavy strikes.) Dutch kickboxing places significantly more emphasis on combinations that start with punches and finish with kicks and sometimes knees. On Lions' Instagram page you can see some of the combinations we do.
So from 6:30-7:30 we practice striking techniques and have a lot of conditioning (sprawling, jumping, sprinting, pushups, situps, burpees, that kind of thing) thrown in at the end. On Tuesdays and Thursdays there is *light* sparring during this hour as well.
From 7:30pm onwards on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the hardest sparring happens. The fight team puts on full protective gear and goes into the ring and goes into battle. Usually fighters who have fights coming up are the focus. For example with my fight coming up, last week I had to do four 5-minute sparring rounds consecutively against four fresh opponents. Then I got a break, and had to do four 5-minute grappling & MMA rounds, again against fresh opponents. When I am not in fight camp and others are, I am one of the fresh opponents. It's probably obvious but I'll say it anyway: having a fresh skilled opponent every 5 minutes while you yourself are tired from the previous opponent, makes you feel incredibly incompetent. It's often a struggle to even keep your hands up and do basic movements, much less stay on the offence. But you battle through.
By the end of the night, I am absolutely gassed when I get home and can do nothing other shower and lie on the couch. I am often so wired and fatigued that I have trouble falling asleep, and sometimes will randomly wake up at 3am with insomnia. For over three years now I've experimented with pretty much every sleep supplement known to man (melatonin, tryptophan, GABA, ZMA, magnesium, CBD, and more), but nothing has been all that effective.
Monday and Wednesday are similar to Tuesday/Thursday except the emphasis is more on groundwork instead of striking. Friday is a more technical day involving both standup and ground work but usually involves heavy conditioning at the end.
Saturday is a more optional day -- there is training, and we are encouraged to go to it, but it is not mandatory. Personally I am mostly doing weights on Saturday because I think weight-lifting is important for strength and also to protect my joints against the rigours of training. Sunday is usually a complete rest day for me with some swimming/jogging at most.
If I had my druthers, I would have Wednesday as a rest/strength day, and Saturday as a replacement hard day. Getting through Thursday/Friday with no rest days is brutal, and a mid-week day off would be huge for me and my aging body. It would enable me to train a lot harder on MTTF.
So that's evenings. What about mornings? Well, the mornings are when I get to coach myself, so this is where I try to do the more sciency bits.
One of the apps I use is called Omegawave. Included in Omegawave is something that claims aerobic/anerobic readiness. Here's a screenshot from this morning's reading:
In theory, Omegawave is telling me that relative to my usual level, aerobic readiness is higher than anaerobic readiness, so I should focus on more aerobic activities. And so I went out for a long run and bike session this morning.
I don't always listen to this; if I have a strength day planned, I'll usually just go through with it, unless Omegawave (or the other app I use, Bioforce) tells me I'm really not ready for that. There's definitely a danger of obsessing over personal data instead of just "doing the fucking work".
If I can find a willing partner at the gym, I usually do drills/techniques in the morning, when I'm mentally sharp and my brain and feet are working well.
Throughout the day, I will also do mobility work. I work with Kate Galliett of Fit For Real Life, who is a genius when it comes to biomechanics, movement, neural control and so on. I did a 6-hour session with her at her home in Salt Lake City and she gave me tons of daily and weekly "homework". I'll talk more about that some other time.
So if I had to give you a typical day/week, it looks something like this:
Monday/Wednesday/Friday
7am: wake up, drink coffee, do light mobility work and foam rolling
8:30am-9:30am: either skills work (striking/wrestling practice OR aerobic work (shadowboxing, running, swimming) OR weight-lifting, followed up by a 10-minute sauna session
10am-12pm: breakfast, do sedentary computer things, run life errands
12pm: lunch and some more mobility work
1pm: nap
4pm: do the remainder of my mobility work for the day, run life errands
6pm: go to gym, start warming up
6:30-7:30pm: kickboxing/striking practice and conditioning
7:30pm-9pm: wrestling/grappling/MMA
10-11pm: dinner and bed
Tuesday/Thursday
7am: wake up, drink coffee, do light mobility work and foam rolling
8:30am-9:30am: either skills work (striking/wrestling practice OR aerobic work (shadowboxing, running, swimming) OR weight-lifting, followed up by a 10-minute sauna session
10am-12pm: breakfast, do sedentary computer things, run life errands
12pm: lunch and some more mobility work
1pm: nap
4pm: do the remainder of my mobility work for the day, run life errands
6pm: go to gym, start warming up
6:30-7:30pm: kickboxing/striking practice and conditioning
7:30pm-9pm: striking sparring
10-11pm: dinner and bed
Saturday: heavy weight lifting, lots of mobility practice (~3 hours), and maybe some MMA training.
Sunday: mobility work and some light aerobic work, but mostly rest. As an aside, for the rest of fight camp, I'll also be fasting (zero calories) until dinner on Sundays. I like to incorporate a 24-hour fast on recovery days not just because it helps me drop weight, but because it gives me a nice little reset for the system after a hard week.
These are hard weeks. When you train this hard and make it through the other side (hopefully) injury-free, it's hard not to have confidence on fight day.
That's what things will look like until the very last week before the fight, when the focus changes to a very different battle: the weight cut.
