[markskarl]

Okay, my next grappling competition is in about a month. My first one was a couple months ago, and while I was either training or running for miles every day for the month leading up to it, I was still mad tired after my fights. One of them went into an overtime round and I ended up on my back and just couldn't do **** since I was so tired. So the question is, are there any specific cardio routines that are better suited for what I'm doing? I bought a kettlebell for all that new age core strength **** that's the rage these days, but I guess that works in with cardio stuff too? Don't know what though. Let me get some advice.

[Titan]

In my eyes, the point of running long distances is to keep the weight down and get good enough cardio to help perform at a higher average level in training. The specific type of running you'd need to do for fight sports is sprint intervals and hills. That's similar to fighting: you go easy, you explode, and then you try to go easy and recover so you can explode again. Keep going and going to build up your lactic acid tolerance or whatever it's called. I think in your case, it sounds like you need to work on reaching and working at max pulse for a period of time, and then train getting from there to resting pulse as quickly as you can. This is something a lot of wrestlers work at, and are really good at.

Depending on the level of competition you get on the mat in training, it can be enough to go at an intense pace on the mat and skip the running. Go at it for as long as a fight in your upcoming competition is, and make a real good effort after each round to reach that resting pulse. Gassing out could be for a number of reasons. For competitions where the fight starts standing up, it's important to keep working that part of the game really hard because if you don't, you're going to gas out standing, and once it hits the ground, you're going to be too tired physically and mentally (won't think clearly.) This is also a good strategy if you meet someone that's good on the ground but not so good standing up: to go in there and make them work really hard standing for a few minutes, as they'll get tired and stressed, and once you feel their wear and tear, you start working the takedown. Once on the mat, you've got the conditioning advantage.

Another point is what you do on the mat. You need to have a "default gameplan" if you don't know your opponent's strenghts and weaknesses. This gives you somethng to fall back on regardless how tired you are, and have your coach in on the default gameplan to remind you all the time. A default gameplan is to have yourself brainwashed that when you're in guard, the objective is to pass the guard. You don't win a fight sitting there. Pass pass pass. When you're in halfguard, the objective is to pass the halfguard (or darce, Japanese necktie, or whatever if they give it to you.) When you're in sidecontrol, you want to smash their face in with your shoulder. When you transition from there to knee-on-belly, you want to make it hurt so bad they give up the mount just to get away from it. Play a physical game. The more pressure you put on them, the better. The standing game is a beast of its own. Some schools, like the Russian wrestlers, have a style where they stand and wait for the right opportunity and explode. US wrestlers, on the other hand, are more aggressive and keep moving and faking and then hitting the takedown. I like the aggressive style. I think it reduces risk to keep moving and faking. And I think the US style is the easiest to adapt to for anyone that hasn't wrestled since they were 4 because it's going to be too hard to spot that perfect shot and come in low, fast and hard enough from a standstill without having done it full steam ahead thousands of times before. Easier to keep moving and faking and take a fairly high shot -- the higher you shoot, the faster you move -- or armdrag or whatever you like. Keep working things all the time. Keep faking the shot, keep going for the armdrags, try getting the underhooks, pull on the neck, push them, necksnap, etc.

Train how you fight. Train the standup and the ground game. Work out intensively on the mat, and make sure you get control of that resting pulse. You need to tell your training partners once a while that this time we're not going to shake hands, we're not going to give away sweeps, and we're not giving up position. We're not going to break each other's limbs, but we're going to take this round seriously, forget we're friends, and go at it like it's a competition.