Jason Curtis - Strength and Power Exercises for Fighters: Over 40 effective exercises to improve strength and power for combat athletes

Strength and power are the essential components in combat that govern your ability to strike an opponent. Understanding how to develop them is key to your progression as a fighter.

What is strength & power?

Strength is the ability to produce force . The more force you can produce to overcome a resistance, the stronger you are.

Explosive strength is the ability to produce maximal force in minimal time. An example of this is a fighter rapidly creating total body tension to hold their opponent down.

Power (which results from explosive strength), refers to force (strength) multiplied by velocity (speed), and is measured over a set distance. For example, power is needed to make an effective strike.

Strength (Force) x Speed (Velocity) = Power!

The terms muscular endurance and strength endurance are used to describe the ability of a competitor to express force many times over (i.e. making repeated hits and combos).

However, just because someone can produce a huge amount of force, it does not necessarily mean they can effectively use this force explosively.

This brings me to the paradox that exists between muscle force and velocity. Both force and velocity are required to produce power. Force can create faster movements, yet the corresponding muscle tension restricts speed. During a strike, therefore, its not only essential for fighters to contract their muscles hard they also need the ability to relax their muscles to create maximal speed.

In other words, during an outward strike, the initial movement contraction has to be followed by a relaxation phase, which is then quickly followed by a secondary contraction, just before the strike lands. The secondary contraction creates total body tension and puts the fighters whole bodyweight behind the strike. This is referred to as the double pulse .

Striking performance is not just about how fast a muscle can produce force its also about how fast a muscle can relax to allow greater joint velocity.

Both the contraction and relaxation phases need to happen during every strike, and this is one of the reasons why big, strong people who havent been trained to fight, can often throw a single hard punch, but look sluggish when attempting to perform numerous strikes against a moving opponent. They lack the motor skills to repeatedly execute the production of maximal force and joint velocity.

One aspect of strength that is often overlooked is that it ultimately dictates the robustness of your skeletal system and soft tissue. Without the ability to accommodate the loads or stresses placed on them, an athletes development will be slowed or prevented by aches and injuries .

How do we develop strength and power?

Any form of movement/exercise will strengthen your structure to some extent, but our aim here is to optimise the benefits of training. If you have just 2 hours a week to dedicate to strength training for combat, what are the best exercises to perform, and how should we perform them?

When choosing exercises and deciding how to perform them, consider these three points.

The exercise should:

1. Maximise the weight that can be lifted i.e. maximise performance.
2. Maximise the work required by the muscles ( positive/adaptive stress ).
3. Minimise the negative/maladaptive stress placed on the supporting structures.

Building strength is a balance between these three points and the importance of each depends on your goals.

If you perform a full-depth squat (ass to grass), it will maximise muscular effort, but will also place more stress on the knees and reduce the amount of weight you can lift compared to a parallel squat.

On the other hand, a parallel squat allows you to lift heavier loads with less stress on the supporting structures. But your overall strength and muscular development wont be as good because the muscles arent stressed through their full range of motion.

You need to find the optimal balance to achieve the best results for your body and your chosen sport, and this varies from person to person. Strengths and weaknesses differ, and so do the needs of different sports.

The most common method of strength development is to work at maximal or near maximal load for low rep ranges.

Dynamic effort

Less well known is the dynamic effort method. Dynamic effort lifting is simply lifting submaximal weights as fast as possible through the entire range of motion. This style of lifting helps you to get faster and stronger, as it teaches your nervous system/muscles to fire quickly. This generates more power than moving a weight slowly. However, caution must be taken as lifting weight at speed is stressful on your body.

It is important to lift heavy loads, as this will elicit the most strength gains, but you must also lift submaximal loads with maximum speed to develop your rate of force development.

Its clear that the ability to develop and unleash force quickly is essential for fighters: If you can produce force quickly, you will hit both harder and faster.

In this book I will introduce you to exercises that are optimal for strength and power development in fighters. I will teach you how to program these exercises and use accommodating resistance to maximise your benefits.