Getting Ripped for MMA: Results

For the last month I’ve been smashing the weights gym to prepare myself for a return to Mixed Martial Arts. I set out this plan to get in shape throughout July.

Through June, I’d stopped doing weights in favour of purely gym classes. Some classes were hard graft- others were not. I fell out of shape a little. Then in July, I returned to hard weights- focussing on the movements that would help me the most in MMA. Shock- I’d lost strength. With almost every machine I used, I couldn’t match my record.

Lat pulldown (wide grip)- down two notches.

Same with close grip- down two notches.

Situp Machine- down one notch.

Cross trainer- 100 metres down from my 10-minute record.

Rowing machine (cardio)- over 100m down.

Seated row (weights)- down three notches.

I could continue. Generally, I was doing poor. There were exceptions…

Ten minutes on the hand bikes- my record was 2.81km. I went up to 3.12km. A good improvement, although the last time I tried this movement was in April.

I notched up the hip adductor one plate. This is the inside thigh machine, and a perfect exercise for MMA as it improves the fighter’s ability to hold someone in “guard”. Lying on his back, the fighter will trap his opponent’s body between his thighs with his ankles crossed at the small of his opponent’s back.

I cracked on with the challenge for the whole of July.

My cross trainer record- 0.49Km in ten minutes- went down to 0.48Km and up to 0.50 by the end of the month. I do this as a warm-up for every session.

Reviewing the exercises is a little complex- I was training in a series of 45-minute sessions, six days a week. I used each cardio machine for ten minutes each, and each weight machine for about the same length of time. I chose that many exercises to work on that it took a few weeks to run through them all in a series of gym sessions. So by the time I’d finished testing all of the movements, I was stronger and fitter than I was when I started. In theory. Not only that, but throughout the month I only had the chance to work some of these movements just once. So time will tell if the exercises work in the long run.

Regardless of all this, I don’t look much fitter. That’s because there’s a factor that I hadn’t considered throughout all of this until I'd finished the challenge- my diet.

I’ve been cutting corners, buying more and more Tesco Value products. It doesn’t take a dietician to tell you that these foods are full of salt. Salt makes you fat. Fat slows you at the gym. If I’d have been eating better, I’d have performed better. So- the next task- cut out cheap food. Keep working on weights. Attend the best classes. THEN, get back into MMA.