Most MMA fighters will split their training time between fighting mechanics/practice and general fitness. If you’re following a similar schedule, alternate your fighting days and stick to the fitness regimen.
For example, on days where you’re sparring or practicing your MMA mechanics, you might spend 75% of the time on BJJ techniques and 25% of the time working on your striking combinations.
No competitive MMA fighter is successful by skipping entire elements of the sport. Being well-rounded is key!
The benefit of periodization is that it allows you to compartmentalize the different skills and master them in isolation. The difficulty curve resets with each group of training sessions, which gives your body a break when things get hardest. For BJJ, you might work in an order of: escapes, wrestling reversals, chokes, Kimura submissions, rolls, then armlocks. For striking, you could go: jabs and straights, hooks and uppercuts, kicks, combinations, combination fluency, and accuracy.
Many MMA fighters will work on form or do extremely light legwork or cardio on their recovery days. That’s perfectly fine so long as your body can handle it!
If you’re new to the gym or dojo you’ve joined, this is also a great way to meet potential sparring partners for the future!
If you are looking to get into the professional fight game, vet your trainer carefully and look for someone who has trained pro fighters before.
If you hire a trainer and you can’t find a sparring partner on your own, the trainer will be able to hook you up with someone on your skill level.
Other popular grappling disciplines include judo, wrestling, and sambo. However, BJJ is seen as a more essential school to master among most MMA fighters.
Striking disciplines include boxing, muay Thai, Krav Maga, karate, and taekwondo.
You can focus your training on a different ground discipline, like wrestling, but BJJ is widely considered the superior school for MMA since winning by submission is a major path to victory. Other ground games don’t focus on submission the way BJJ does.
At a bare minimum, at least learn the key moves in BJJ and the major striking disciplines. For BJJ, learn how to guard your hip, triangle choke, and escape with a bridge and roll. In striking, boxing is the core competency you’ll want to master. Jabs, hooks, uppercuts, and straights are all key moves to know.
A good grappler can use their skills to smother a great striker, while a striker with a weak grappling game won’t be able to stave their opponent off. This isn’t to say it’s okay to ignore striking skills—just that you may want to lean more towards BJJ if you plan on going pro.
Every fighter is different. Don’t force yourself to stick to some kind of arbitrary deadline in the name of progress.
