"Whether you’re a veteran of the sport trying to prolong your career or just training for fun and fitness, if you value your performance as well as your health, your goal should always be to maximize your skill development while minimizing the amount of stress and damage done to your body along the way. Anyone can go into the gym everyday out and train their guts out, but the real key to achieving your goals is to find a way to train smarter rather than harder."Jamieson says that too many combat sports athletes spend too much time in the middle zone of conditioning: too hard to easily recover from, too light to force new adaptations in strength, explosiveness, or endurance. He suggests instead splitting the training week into two max effort days, three light days, and two days off.
One thing that stands out compared to how I've been training all year is that I have four or even six max effort days a week (including the time I did 4 day a week BB training earlier this year). Even the schedule I'm looking at for the rest of this year: two days of jiu-jitsu and two days of strength training, gives me four days on intensive work.
My guess is that Jamieson would encourage me to do my strength work on my jiu-jitsu days, ideally, I suspect, in the early morning, to give me the chance to recover ahead of jiu-jitsu training that evening. To say that's something I'd never considered is an understatement. But as I recover from my second bout of ill health since July, I'm wondering if it might be worth it to make a change.
