The last week or so I decided to dig back into Joel Jamieson’s Ultimate MMA Conditioning for maybe the third or fourth time. Why am I digging into again? Because I am reminded of something I may have forgot and I also learn something new every single time I read the book – its chalked full of great information on conditioning.

1. There is a difference between building bigger muscles and building muscles that can perform.
2. Strength and power are only as good as your ability to use them.
3. You could have the strength to squat or bench a Mack truck, but it won’t do you any good in the ring or cage if you can only do it for one rep.
4. You can have great strength and power, but without proper cardiovascular development and muscular endurance, you won’t have the energy you need to put your strength to good use as the fight wears on. Likewise, you might have great endurance and be able to run a marathon, but if your weak and have no explosive power, you can end up getting pushed around and controlled by a bigger, faster, stronger opponent.
5. If you want to improve your conditioning and turn it into a weapon then you must work on it year round.
6. The true role of strength and conditioning is to develop the physical preparation necessary for an athlete to effectively utilize their skills as fast and as long as possible.
7. The vast majority of injuries happen because of either A) a lack of physical preparation, or B) a poorly managed training program.
8. What really matters most is not the exercise you choose or the method you use, but rather the adaptations that result from using and applying them.
9. The better your level of conditioning, the more fuel your muscles have and more power they’re capable of generating, plain and simple.
10. Conditioning is a measure of how well an athlete is able to meet the energy production demands of their sport.
11. The goal of training is to increase how fast your muscles can contract and relax (power) while also simultaneously improving their ability to do so for prolonged periods of time.
12. Conditioning is about how fast you can produce energy, how long you can produce it for, how much total energy you’re capable of generating, and of course, how efficiently you use it.
13. Sports that last more than a couple of minutes invariably rely on aerobic energy production and it’s also the system you rely on to fuel your muscles and vital organs in everyday activities and at rest.
14. The aerobic system also serves the role of “refueling” the anaerobic system.
15. Without a well developed aerobic system, your body’s anaerobic systems are also limited because it takes much longer before they are capable of producing energy again.
16. Your goal in training should be to maximize how much power your alactic system can produce while subsequently improving how fast the aerobic system can refuel for repeated use.
17. More important than what exercises you select, is how you choose to use them to create specific demands on your different systems.
18. You always want to use the lowest intensity and least amount of volume that will stimulate adaptation.
19. The more muscle your nervous system can use at once in a coordinated fashion, the stronger you will be.
20. Never use more advanced methods than necessary or you will not get the most out of them and they won’t be as effective later in your training.
21. If there’s one overriding principle I’ve come to learn over the years of coaching, it’s that everyone is different and has different needs.
22. There is no one size fits all program, no sample workout, and no magic exercise that everyone can use to get the best results.
23. The longer you spend developing something, the more stable the result adaptations become and the longer they will stay with you.
24. Developing the heart correctly is an extremely important component of conditioning because it serves as the engine that drives the entire aerobic system.
25. All the training in the world won’t do you any good if you can’t recover from it.