martin
Martin, I love this site! I am going back over all the Q&A and I want to thank you for sharing all the information. This section has made me a better trainer. Speaking of training, I would like to know what has been the biggest breakthrough for you this year in your own training? I am sure this answer will move me further in my training like this site has already. Thanks in advance, Tim Silverman
Pictured are World, Pan American and European Champions Roger Gracie, Romulo Barral and Braulio Estima all monitoring their heart rate recovery during training.
Tim,
Thanks for writing in and for the feedback about the site. As I have found, the more you share, the more comes back to you in training and in life. If you have read "The Secret", you will learn about the law of attraction which I believe is true, but there is also the law of reciprocity: help enough people get what they want and you will get what you want for sure.
As for biggest breakthrough in training, that is hard to decide on. I am always trying to put my training "white belt" on and see things from the eyes of a beginner. Since I really started doing this, I have had breakthroughs in many aspects of my training. I will say that one area I dont think I paid enough attention to was monitoring heart rate and heart rate recovery during training sessions. Now I am doing this consistently and not only is it teaching me a lot about myself and my athletes, but it is also teaching me about the exact demands of my exercises as well.
Below is my take on this style of training:
At the 2007 ADCC Championships, I saw the epitome of physical conditioning during many of the hard and long fought matches. I was extremely happy that 5 athletes (Roger, Rolles, Kyra, Flavio, Braulio) I have worked with brought home either a silver or gold medal. I was even more satisfied that even when multiple matches went 20 minutes for my athletes, they were still focused and fresh. This event compelled me to reflect on how my training for cardiovascular conditioning has changed over the years to create this result. The following addresses my current view of this style of training for combat sports.
A common mistake of athletes and trainers is to solely focus their training on what they are good at or what they enjoy most. When I began training athletes, I was no exception to this statement. At the time I began this training over a decade ago, I was very strong, but surely did not have the endurance to match this strength or the endurance needed to be a world class athlete in many other sports that had a different energy requirement.
I have since challenged my thought process about our physical preparation. I realized that the enemy of becoming the best at something was simply being good at something to start with. I began to realize that getting great at your weaknesses and making them your strengths was a key to both physical and personal growth. This new way of thinking forced me to concentrate on the two most important pieces of anatomy for sport training: the brain and the heart.
Initially all I could find on Heart Rate was training and identifying Heart rate Maximums and working within a “target” heart rate for weight loss. We started here by simply measuring our heart rates with our fingers pressed to our necks, but I quickly realized that we were not making progress. The target ranges were too continuous, too long, and did not match the demands of an actual contest. Unfortunately first for my fighters, we then pushed the training to the opposite end of the physical continuum. We began to push our limits with torturous sessions that had the fighters crawling in their own sweat and sometimes vomiting at the end of each session. After analyzing this “hardcore” training, not only did I find that this was not helping performance, but was also deterring the athletes from wanting to train at all. This pressed me to study the exact demands of the sport in terms of length of time for the fight, and energy system requirements for the fight and then apply that to the specific fight style and usual fight architecture that an athlete would use. From here, I created our hurricane training. This style of training is a cyclical form of anaerobic training that is brief, yet demanding, and then followed by adequate rest to then repeat the training again. I started to apply this training to all of my athletes according to the energy system demands of the sport that they played.
For the last number of years, my hurricane training sessions have served me well, but as with anything, I am always trying to improve on what we are doing. I was trying to uncover how to keep the mind under control even though the athlete was under great physical stress during these hurricane sessions. I realized that since the athlete had no reference point for this style of training in terms of biofeedback, it was difficult for the athlete to manage and or determine the level of progress and overall conditioning. In weightlifting, the athlete can easily determine if they are getting stronger by the change in weights and can determine the intensity of any workout by the weight that they select. For cardiovascular training, however, this was much more difficult. It was then that I searched for this feedback mechanism and found it in heart rate monitors.
If you never had a speedometer in your car, how would you ever know what 55 mph “felt” like? It was only through the practice of looking at the speedometer and matching it with your velocity that you learned what 55 felt like and then began to understand how fast you were moving at a certain “feel.” The same is true for heart rate. If you don’t know what it “feels” like when your heart is at 170 beats per minute or you cannot match an intensity level with this rate, you are essentially exercising as blindly as driving a car without the speedometer. Every session, whether it is running or lifting, my athletes now wear monitors to not only let me know their status at any time during the session, but also so that they can develop a sensitivity to connect their heart and mind to better understand themselves. This is known as biofeedback and is critical for an athlete to start to better understand their own body and how it responds to, and as you will see in the next paragraph, recovery from bouts of exercise.
The most important recent discovery I have had from this type of training was finding that heart rate recovery was an important aspect of training I was not focusing on and neither were my athletes. I realized that although it is important for athletes to be able to perform at a high heart rate and intensity, it is also important for the heart to be able to learn to quickly recover. This is now known in science as Heart Rate Variability (HRV) and is becoming seen as a most important ability to work through progressive, cyclical training. HRV can simply be described as the capacity of the heart to recover and do work. Without this ability, the stage can be set for disaster. In our cyclical training we not only monitor the maximum heart rate during activity, but also the speed at which the heart rate returns to our accepted value to tell us that the athlete has recovered. If you are not looking at and training this variable, you are only doing half the work.
If you do not have a heart rate monitor or don’t monitor this value in training I suggest you get one. Without this information about yourself, every cardio session is essentially guesswork. It would, in essence, be like lifting with a blindfold on so you never knew the weight you were using. Without the properly trained endurance, you can be the strongest, fastest athlete and still be in big trouble. Endurance is the key to success and matching it with an understanding of mentally knowing where the body is at and what it has left in the tank through trials and errors working with biofeedback. According to Marcelo Aller, Performance Consultant for Polar Heart Rate Monitors and personal friend, more research is identifying the critical moment in sport in which even though an athlete may have more physical attributes like strength and explosiveness, an opponent that is better able to control their HR and recover may have a better opportunity to make the right decision at the right time. This can and does lead to success in sports all the time. Some may call it strategy, but now science is finding that the connection between the heart and mind play a big role in victory.
In addition to monitoring physical training like lifting and running, I think that monitoring sport specific training will also be very important in the future of sport. By better understanding the physical demands of certain positions and situations in a actual game, coaches and athletes will better learn how to relax, improve technique, and control their bodies and emotions. This will surely be where I next take my training of these athletes. Until we exactly understand the demands of sport, how can we ever adequately prepare ourselves for it?
To summarize, your training should be brief, cyclical and mimic the demands of the actual sport. Every training session should be monitored, and not only should you be looking at HR max, but also the heart’s ability to recover in terms of rate and time. This will create more time for overall recovery, prevent injury, and give the athlete a much better understanding over his or her self. In the great scheme of training and the martial arts, that self awareness is, after all, the ultimate goal.
I hope this helps everyone take their game to another level,
Martin
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