Yoga for MMA
Jan. 6th, 2009 at 4:36 PM
I got an e-mail from Greg Negrete asking about yoga for MMA. He mentions that it’s becoming very popular among fighters in California, where he lives. He says, ‘I like the idea of using my training time for maximum benefit. I'm curious if you think yoga falls into this?’
Your training time has to be specific to what you do. With regards to yoga, it rather depends what is being practiced. Is it the complete system, or is it specific asanas? To work on the complete system would be crazy, in my opinion. As far as specific asanas, some of them might very well be beneficial to a ground game. Eddie Bravo’s rubber guard would be more easily applied if you could put your foot behind your own head to start with. But you don’t have to do yoga to learn to do that.
Flexibility and the ability to maneuver your body is naturally important, particularly on the ground, so as to put on holds and escape them. But the dynamics of these movements in fighting are never static. So if we were talking about flexibility within a range of movement, it needs to be dynamic flexibility we’re addressing, not the static poses of yoga.
I’ve seen some Brazilian ‘Gynastica Natural’ used as a warmup, and I would say that this is more applicable to the ground fight than straight yoga. But I personally wouldn’t use it. I’d rather extract from the fight the movement patterns that I perceive to be essential within the fight, and work on those patterns in a warm-up, for example, always switching from one pattern to another. I wouldn’t want to be dictated to by a prescribed routine or statically held pose that’s been taken from a training system that is a long way removed from the fight.
With regards to the above, there is obviously the possibility of connections between Yoga and Kalari Payat, and when I look at it, I can see that one of them seems to have influenced the other, but it’s hard to be sure which came first. And in any case, yoga has gone off in its own direction.
The problem I see with static-held position is that it sets a low neural drive and slow-twitch fibre motor recruitment, and there is evidence to suggest that this type of warm-up or flexibility training is inappropriate when performed before a dynamic workout.
http://www.brianmac.co.uk/articles/scni43a4.htmhttp://www.readysetgofitness.com/newsle ... types.htmlUnless, of course, the static-held positions are done within an isometric framework and the slow-moving patterns are performed in a dynamic tension framework. If you do work isometrically (with an internal sense of explosiveness), you do elicit higher neural drive and high fast-twitch motor recruitment. But it’s only a CNS prep; you must then almost immediately go into explosive movement to train the fast-twitch and superfast twitch fibres specific to what you need to do. I’ve written about this phenomenon in some detail when describing the isometrics we do at Primal--just have a look under the 'isometrics' tag on the left side of the page.
This kind of approach, for me, makes sense of Tai Chi, particularly the Chen System, where there is exaggerated eccentric loading and dynamic tension movements that follow, as well as explosive movements within the form; it's a way of prepping the CNS for explosive force development. There’s explosiveness concealed within the movement. It’s not just slow movement.
One of the links above compares the percentage of slow-twitch, fast-twitch, and superfast-twitch fibres and shows that although you might be genetically predisposed to a given ratio of these fibre types, if you specifically train in an endurance, non-explosive way, then you’ll develop more slow-twitch muscle fibres, even if your genetic predisposition is toward explosiveness. And vice versa. So the way you train really matters. If you are going slow and doing this static stuff, you have to add the explosiveness. Presumably the MMA fighters doing yoga have plenty of explosive work elsewhere in their training, but you have to make the most of limited time in the gym, you don't want to be doing too much slow work at the expense of the explosive work.
I practiced yoga, but it was about the challenge of the postures for me; I wanted to be able to put both feet behind my head and walk on my hands, but it wasn’t connected to martial arts. It was simply a physical challenge. And I’ve always found personally that if I did any static stretching prior to a workout, my performance went down. I’ve observed in others, who were extremely flexible, that they had a certain disconnection when fighting on the feet. Their kicks, for example, were as high and as pretty to look at as you can imagine, but they carried no power. Whereas I’ve seen other guys, who were not as flexible but more connected, find a way to get the kick where it needed to be and still produce the power. So I’m wary of getting too caught up in flexibility.
If you want to play body chess on the ground, then flexibility could be a great bonus. But it would be better to look through what the yoga guys have got to offer and extract the dynamic movements that seem to be appropriate to an actual MMA fight. When I look and see what a lot of trainers are doing on You Tube with regard to MMA, a lot of it has no connection to what the fighters have to do in the ring. The fighters go along with it anyway because they trust their trainer. They waste a lot of time on something that's non-essential.
This kind of static stretching is often put at the end of the session, as a cooldown, but I don’t do that. I want my guys to go out with a high-firing neural impression of what they’ve been doing in the training, which they can bring to the next sesssion. I don’t want them finishing on a low neural drive impression. So if you’re going to do any static or slow stretching, then do it separately to everything else, and do some other form of warmup beforehand.
On Sunday, I noticed at Primal that my guys’ hip flexibility wasn’t what it should be. The range of motion they had available to them wasn’t enough. The hips are an important link between the legs and the trunk, and so they need to produce stability, but that stability has to be accessible through a range of dynamic movement. The movement of the hips facilitates punching, kicking, throws, and changing of position on the ground. So I showed them some exercises I do, but we don’t need to make a big production about it. They’re very simple, and you don’t need a yoga teacher or a lot of time and effort to do them.
So the short answer is: extract what you can use if you think there are some specific exercises that will help you, but don’t get caught up in a fad.
