Author: Eric Wong

First, let’s define what ROADWORK is traditionally defined as…

“Roadwork is jogging at a slow, steady pace for 3-5 miles, often at a frequency of 3-6 times per week used by boxers and other combat athletes to develop cardio.”

I’d like to add that roadwork keeps your HR in the 140-150 bpm range, giving you lots of room before you hit the anaerobic threshold. You’ll know you’re doing it at the right intensity if you can talk fairly easily during it.

Now, the classic definition may or may not include a gang of Filipinos joining you…

If you don’t have access to a group of Filipinos who want to follow you on your runs, don’t sweat it. I’m pretty sure it’s not a requirement.

Roadwork has been used in boxing forever, but has received a backlash since the emergence of Tabata’s and HIIT methods, which alternate moderate-to-high intensity intervals with recovery intervals.

Let’s talk about the benefits of each…

Benefits of Roadwork

Roadwork provides a few different benefits that interval training methods don’t:

• Develops cardiac volume, which helps your heart’s chambers get bigger, which allows the heart to fill with more blood and then have more blood pumped through your body
• Can do it without getting sore or taking too much out of the nervous system, allowing you to get more training in without hurting recovery too much
• Can speed recovery from more intense training and even serve as a form of meditation for you

So you see, it’s not useless or pointless and can help you reach your fitness goals.

Now, let’s look at interval training…

Benefits of Interval Training

• Develops cardiac power, which helps your heart get stronger and pump more blood through your body
• Takes less time and can go by super fast because you’re forced to be focused on the task at hand
• Increases strength and power of the muscles involved

When it comes to interval training, there are many different methods to use, with anywhere from 5 second super high-intensity work intervals to up to 8-10 minute moderate-intensity work intervals.

Recovery intervals can also range anywhere from 10 seconds to 2-3 minutes.

The exact method to use depends on the phase of training you’re in, i.e. how far out from a fight/competition you are.

If you’re not training for a fight or competition, the key is to strategically order the phases so each builds upon the last.

Enough background.

Let’s cut to the chase.

The bottom line is (drum roll please)…

Roadwork is useful for boxers and other combat sport athletes, as are intervals.

I know everyone likes cut and dry answers like, “You pussy, you don’t need to run slow. Just do HIIT!”

But I’m not like that.

Maybe it comes from my Chinese-Canadian-Jamaican background (Google – you’ve got every image I could ever ask for and more), or maybe it comes from reading Tao of JKD and The Importance of Living (by Lin Yutang) over and over that influenced my thought patterns to avoid black and white and dogmatic thinking and be open and free to all possibilities.

Actually, it’s all of that (and more).

Either way, while it can be more complicated to adopt this mindset, do so, commit to educating yourself and you’ll learn to fine-tune to get better results in less time.

Now, when it comes to roadwork, you don’t need to be doing it everyday.

In fact, I recommend you do traditional roadwork 1-3 times per week, max.

Much of your actual combat training, especially more technical classes, will give you similar benefits to roadwork, so you don’t need to be doing them for conditioning.

However, if you need to drop a lot of weight (put those cheezies down, NOW), a higher frequency is beneficial because it helps you burn fat without smoking your muscles and nervous system.

Just know that there are minimal conditioning benefits beyond 1-2 times per week, as long as your sessions are 40-60 minutes long (the less time you spend, the more sessions you need – aim for 1-2 hours of total roadwork per week).

Because your main goal is making your heart adapt, you can use any type of cardiovascular exercise or even other exercises (like my A+A workouts) – so when doing a more traditional form of roadwork, switch it up between things like jogging, boxing, stairclimber, skipping, etc in 10 minute blocks. I first learned this method from Joel Jamieson, who is a brilliant strength and conditioning coach.

Here’s an email I got from Rocci Williams, a bloke who I’ve profiled on this site before, about his experience with roadwork:

As you can see, the hype behind the, “Cardio is DEAD” movement is not built on solid ground.

Next comes interval training, which I generally recommend you do twice per week. [The right # of intervals, work and recovery periods depend on the phase of training and I outline exactly what to do in all of my programs]

Do this and your heart and lungs will get stronger and more powerful.

And don’t forget, circuit training is another thing to throw into the mix.

Depending on how you setup your circuits, they can be more like interval training or more like roadwork.

Not to mention resistance training… But now we’re getting off topic.

The key thing is that you’ve got to have an open mind and take a wholistic approach to your training.

You’ve got to use the best available methods at the right time, not just throw workouts and training phases together randomly, hoping to come out on top.

Yes, doing something and training hard will get you in shape.

But there’s a way to refine it all down to the minimum necessary so that you can train less while achieving more.

And that’s what I’ve done with all of the programs I’ve created.

I’ve applied the best of science and experience and laid it out in a step-by-step format that you can easily follow.

So if you want to take your training to the next level, choose one and follow it through to the end and you’ll see what it feels like when you train smart.

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MMA: Ultimate MMA S&C Program

Boxing: The Program 4 Pugilists

Advanced Conditioning Methods: CAGE Cardio Bodyweight Edition