Any serious combat athlete will pay as close attention to their nutrition for MMA as they do their training. This includes eating a healthy breakfast on a regular basis. Here are some of the excuses my clients give me about why they don’t eat breakfast…

• “I don’t have the time.”
• “I don’t feel hungry.”
• “I’m trying to cut weight.”
• “I don’t enjoy typical breakfast foods.”

The bottom line is that these are just excuses. Decide now to do the right thing when it comes to eating breakfast and your MMA training will truly be optimized.

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Hard work and discipline are the key ingredients to obtain success in MMA! It will also be beneficial if you have a background in a discipline related to MMA such as wrestling or boxing. Regardless of your experience, here are 4 excellent tips for those new to MMA.

Tip #1: Be patient when you are new to MMA
If you have never learned to throw a punch properly, it might be too optimistic to think you’ll be a professional cage fighter in a month; however, there is no reason to take the other extreme view either. If you’re waiting until you’re an expert in everything, be prepared to wait a very long time. Hopefully you will have a good coach who can help you decide when you will be ready to jump in the ring or cage.

I constantly have guys coming into the gym telling me they want to be in the UFC and make money fighting. While I commend these people for setting lofty goals, few of them follow through. They lack the patience and discipline necessary to reach their goal.
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Real Mixed Martial Arts Schools versus McDojos

Since the recent explosion of MMA, I’ve seen more and more “Mixed Martial Arts Schools” popping up everywhere. Some are traditional martial arts schools who are trying to capitalize on the popularity of MMA, others are schools that don’t really have a specialty and try to be all things to all people. I certainly don’t blame anybody for attempting to implement clever marketing strategies to help make a living. It’s when people start “selling out” and do questionable things like giving away belts or use false or misleading claims that it becomes a problem.

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In sports dominated by men, it’s not always easy for women to find their niche. Women’s Mixed Martial Arts athlete Gina Carano and female grappler Kyra Gracie have proven that women can be just as, if not more, skilled as men in combat sports. Whether you aspire to earn your living with these sports or you simply want to get into better shape while learning self defense, these sports can transform your body. In addition, these sports can empower you by instilling a sense of confidence that you can handle yourself in difficult situations.

Here are 3 tips you should consider if you’re training (or considering training) in women’s Mixed Martial Arts and/or grappling:

Tip #1: Train at an academy that you feel most comfortable in:

If you train with a serious attitude, you should be taken seriously. Don’t be intimidated by the men training there. The gym you train at should be considered an investment. Find the right one and start attending classes.

Make sure the instructors help you feel comfortable and are focused on teaching you the proper techniques. Hopefully the instructor knows enough to match you up with another female or a smaller male that will be a good partner to work with. Be proactive and try to match yourself with an appropriate partner or uki (the partner in judo that gets thrown).

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All types of martial arts are full contact sports that test your endurance and pain threshold. In order to dish it out and defeat an opponent during a fight you have to be able to take a few hits, punches and chokes without going into shock. The best way to ensure a high level of performance and effectiveness during a martial arts bout is to prepare your body and mind during training through conditioning and desensitizing exercises. That does not mean you should let anyone beat you into oblivion, but rather try to gradually adjust to a higher pain threshold.

The mixed martial arts fighter, Caroline Portugal, says:”My body is adjusting very well to the conditioning and desensitizing training. All athletes must heal and rest. When you are doing high impact training by taking hits deliberately it adds a lot of stress to your body. Therefore, it is important to help your body recover and eventually adjust by giving it time to heal.”

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One day, a curious teenage daughter asked her mother, “Mommy why do you always cut off a third of the loaf of bread before baking it?” “Because that’s what you’re supposed to do,” responded the mom. “I just don’t understand why you can’t bake the whole thing,” said the young girl. “Well my mother is the one who taught me this. I’ll just call and ask her to settle this once and for all,” said mom. Ring. Ring. “Hello,” says a voice on the other end. “Hi mom. It’s me, your daughter. I just wanted to know why you’re supposed to cut off a third of a loaf (of bread) before baking it.” “Oh no sweetie,” her mother chimes. “You’re not supposed to. I just always did that because our oven was too small and I couldn’t fit the whole loaf. I wish I didn’t have to waste all that bread.”

It’s easy to fall into the same trap the mother in the story fell into with your fitness and martial arts training program. A training partner passes along an exercise or nutrition tip. Then you pass it on to several others. Before long the same tip gets circulated around the whole gym so you figure it must be true. But training mistakes and half-truths could be stopping you from reaching your full potential. Here are the Top 3 Mixed Martial Arts Fitness Mistakes and the Truths that can help save your workout plan.

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Cage Fitness™ was developed in conjunction with The Martial Arts Industry Association (MAIA) and nine-time welterweight MMA Champion Matt Hughes.  Matt is a huge advocate of health and fitness in general, and is very excited about Cage Fitness™ and the success of the program thus far.

The most obvious benefit of Cage Fitness™ is its ability to bring in new members. You will attract new members by having the right to use Matt Hughes’ name and image. It is a huge draw to have a celebrity fighter promoting your school.

Cage Fitness™ also offers a great workout in just 30 minutes. The program achieves this by what is known as interval training. Interval training is basically performing exercises at maximum effort, then slowing down or stopping to rest, then jumping right back into the max performance mode, and then rest. With Cage Fitness™, participants repeat these intervals five times, through five, 5-minute rounds with one minute breaks in between. That’s the interval. They start with a warm-up to get the heart rate up and get blood flowing to the muscles. They then move into an upper body round where they push their upper body muscles, and end the round with a ground and pound. This is repeated through a lower body round, cage combo round and core/cool down round, giving the participants the maximum calorie-burning potential and helping increase metabolism.

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