powerDOJO

Category: Training

  • What to Learn from Patrick Cote’s Knee Injury

    If you got a chance to catch the UFC on Saturday night and saw Patrick Cote’s knee injury when he was fighting the Spider, you were probably disappointed that the 2 warriors didn’t get a chance to properly finish what they started.

    I sure was. I love getting a chance to watch Silva at work, and I thought Cote showed that he definitely has a chin.

    But what I want to talk about is the knee injury that Cote suffered.

    You could see the shin bone kind of move forward and out laterally when he hurt himself. In some interviews he said that it’s an old meniscus, but from the way it looked, I believe that he hurt his ACL. Often with a buckling type injury, it’s a ligament that gets damaged.

    The ACL functions to stop the shin (tibia/fibula) from sliding forward under the thigh bone (femur), but only when the muscles aren’t there to do their job.

    PICTURE it this way: put your right fist up like at the top of a bicep curl, then put your left fist on top of your right fist. When you slide your right fist forward towards the computer screen, that’s the movement that the ACL prevents, and that’s what happened to Cote’s knee.

    So the ACL will come into play in a really quick pivot type move, like a running back who cuts hard, or during something unexpected, like getting pushed right before you land from a jump.

    The ACL will also work to stabilize the joint if the muscles aren’t strong enough to do the job, so even if you’re expecting the movement or it’s a planned movement, like a hard cut in football, if you don’t have strong muscles, you can still tear your ACL.

    To prevent ACL injuries, you need to make sure your hamstrings and calves are strong and powerful. So exercises like Stiff-leg deadlifts and Swiss ball leg curls are crucial to knee injury prevention. The muscles worked in these exercises do exactly what the ACL does, prevent anterior slide of the lower leg on the upper leg. These exercises are all a part of my MMA Strength and Conditioning program.

    So the lesson to learn here is to keep the muscles strong, but even more importantly, powerful. The muscles need to be able to react quickly, so doing exercises such as repetitive, explosive jumps like squat jumps and others found in my NRG system complexes will train this quality.

    Well that’s it for now, hope you enjoyed the rest of the UFC and I’ll talk with you soon.

  • The Lost Ingredient to Recovery

    After popping my rib grappling on Saturday, I decided to take Sunday off. That lead me to this post.

    There’s one thing that a lot of fighters totally screw up, and that’s recovery.

    Recovery is not just ‘not training’ but can mean a lot of things:

    – Enough quality sleep
    – Nutrition including adequate high quality fats and protein
    – Active recovery modalities such as massage and contrast showers

    But one thing that a lot of people in general miss out on is mental recovery. From this I mean ‘unplugging’ yourself from all of the things on your mind and all of the madness of mainstream society like TV, newspapers, malls, and anywhere else your mind gets bombarded.

    You probably don’t realize it but you’re being hit with 1000’s of messages everyday telling you to buy this or that this is the best offer.

    You need a break from this once in a while! I decided to take a break by going for a long hike on a beautiful sunny Sunday. Check out some of the highlights:

    The entrance to the hike.

    Some nice light.

    Don’t worry, he’s not poisonous!

    The hike even came with free snacks.

    My new ‘Walden Pond’.

    So if you haven’t ‘unplugged’ yourself for a while, I urge you to go for a 1 hour or more hike, somewhere not so busy, and let your mind be refreshed, giving you an edge in training.

  • Medicine Ball High Intensity Interval Training

    Thought I’d make up for last post’s little joke exercise and give you something real.

    Here’s a simple little workout to do instead of standard 1 min hard, 1 min easy running for your interval training.

    Using the medicine ball for side tosses integrates core power in the transverse (rotational) plane (think punches, kicks, throws), and the back tosses train your triple extension (think posturing on the ground and takedowns while standing). So you get some MMA-specific movements while doing intervals. Nice!

  • MMA Conditioning Pyramid Circuit Workout

    I’m currently training for the Joslin’s Canadian Open BJJ tournament in November. Unfortunately I’ve been nursing a sprained thumb over the last couple of weeks, but it should be 100% by next week.

    That hasn’t stopped me from my conditioning though. I went to the park for a quickie and thought I’d share. Check it out:

    On the sprints there was a swarm of mosquitoes, I ate a couple. I guess I saved some money on post-workout protein, score!

    I was destroyed by the end – it was great.

  • Master-MMA.com Intro Video

    We’ve had a few people comment on the intro video over at Master-MMA.com. Here’s the video:

    If you don’t know what Master-MMA.com is – it’s an online mixed-martial arts instructional website started by myself and UFC veteran Jeff Joslin. Jeff’s been out with post-concussion syndrome since April 2007, which sucks because he’s such a talented dude.

    But he’s not one to just sit around and mope, he’s used the time to develop his teaching and MMA curriculum, and part of that work is Master-MMA.com. I provide strength and conditioning workouts, articles, and nutrition advice.

    Anyway, the video footage was taken back in 2007 and was supposed to be used for one of the major MMA organizations for their pay-per-view show, but never made it. So we got the footage and we’ve put it to use! I think it looks pretty tight.