Training Periodization

[Nick Fletcher]

For the past few months Ultimate Grappling magazine has been running a series of conditioning articles by JC Santana. He seperates fight training into four training cycles: conditioning, strength, power, and power-endurance.

If you haven't read the articles, they started with a general overview of how the training camp should be seperated with ample amount of time to train, then how to break it down into shorter cycles for fights that you don't have several months to prepare for, and now each month it describes one of the training cycles.

So far the general conditioning cycles and strength cycles have been talked about, but I haven't been able to figure out what types of exercises are done in the power and power-endurance cycles. I am thinking explosive/plyometric type exercises done in sets for the power cycle and the same type of exercises done as circuits for the power endurance.

One of my training partners has his first mma fight in two months and I'm hoping to help him push his conditioning to an extreme level but I don't have time to wait for the next magazines to come out. We have a pretty good program in place now that I've used with success but I was hoping to get a little more scientific with it.

Thanks and sorry if any of this is hard to understand. I'm tired and I get hit in the head...a lot.