As a strength and conditioning coach, I feel there’s a duty not only to educate and learn from fellow sport-specific coaches on proper implementation of strength and conditioning programs but to educate and learn from the athletes as well.
Most high school athletes today see what has been commercialized in magazines such as “Muscle and Fiction” promoting a workout to get “bigger arms in an hour” or pursue a body split type workout that Ronnie Coleman or Jay Cutler endorse as their own.
About three months ago, I met a young man named Greg Benenati, who is a former nationally ranked and state champion wrestler out of Missouri. He had expressed a serious interest in becoming an MMA fighter. I asked him what his workouts consisted of and he proceeded to tell me the following:
Day 1: chest
Day 2: shoulders and traps
Day 3: legs
Day 4: arms
Day 5: back
Day 6: who knows
Day 7: who cares
Now, this type of workout may be beneficial to an aspiring bodybuilder loading up on supplements. However, such workouts lack structure and purpose. So we started from the beginning, implementing the philosophy to “train the movement” and stay away from isolating each individual muscle group. This is a philosophy well-known to many strength and conditioning coaches.
Greg became familiar with GPP and body weight mastery—something that all athletes should become accustomed to before earning the right to incorporate external resistance (as stated by Alwyn Cosgrove). We addressed the need to increase his work capacity and took a “chaos” type approach to his training.
A sample workout of his now looks like this:
Objective: Increase athlete’s work capacity.
Warm-up: dynamic/mobility movements
Main session
1. Pull-ups, 3 X AMAP*; jog two minutes on treadmill
2. GPP circuit (3 X through)
Prisoner squats X 30
Push-ups X 20
Mountain climbers X 50
Toe touches X 25
Jog two minutes
3. Tire flips, 3 X 5; jog two minutes
4. Sledge hammer chops from knees, 3 X 10/each way; jog two minutes
5. Ladder drills (on all fours), 2 X down and back /movement; jog two minutes
6. Circle of death (push-up variation at different levels), 3 X through; jog two minutes
7. Sled push/pull variations
AMAP = as many as possible
I would like to stress that not all of his workouts are consistent of endurance training, but they include a variation of the Westside for Skinny Bastards templates among other methodologies.
Hopefully, you’ll be able to spot this young athlete in the future as an upcoming MMA fighter. Until then train hard and learn harder.
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