Mastering Combat Arts Conditioning: A Deep Dive into Energy Systems
In the rigorous world of Combat Arts, conditioning is more than fitness—it's a key determinant of performance, stamina, and resilience in the ring or octagon. To achieve peak performance in Combat Arts strength and conditioning, a combat athlete must go beyond traditional approaches, to focus on aspects like agility, flexibility, speed, and, most importantly, energy systems that power these physical efforts.
Introduction to Energy Systems in Combat Arts Conditioning
When it comes to conditioning, you can’t maximize benefits without maximizing efficiency. Workouts need to be completed in a strategic order with proper rest and recovery in between. Poor planning and execution can lead to mediocre results. Understanding and training using the appropriate energy systems will help you achieve your desired goals.
Our goal at Fighting Arts Health Lab is to help you avoid these mistakes. You don’t need to become an expert in exercise physiology, but it helps to know the basics. Understanding the fundamentals will help you efficiently structure your workouts.
Why Are Energy Systems Important in Combat Arts?
Energy systems play a pivotal role in determining an aspiring MMA fighter's performance. They're the biochemical pathways that supply muscles with the necessary energy to contract, ensuring your knockout punches, powerful kicks, and sturdy grapples. Understanding and optimizing these energy systems can significantly enhance an athlete's capacity to train harder, move faster, and last longer in the ring.
The Interplay of Energy Systems in Combat Sports
Energy systems don't work in isolation. They interact in complex ways, depending on the intensity and duration of the activity. Striking a balance among these systems ensures optimal performance. In MMA, a sport that involves short bursts of intense effort interspersed with periods of lower-intensity activity, understanding this interplay is crucial.
Exercise is defined as either Aerobic or Anaerobic
AEROBIC | ANAEROBIC |
|---|---|
With Oxygen | Without Oxygen |
Aerobic conditioning is usually lighter exercise with higher reps, like a pummeling drill as a warm up for your BJJ class, or hitting the heavy bag with lower intensity. The muscles have access to oxygen throughout the workout.
Anaerobic conditioning is the opposite. It’s high-intensity and shorter duration. Picture lifting heavy weight at low reps. Your muscles need energy faster than the aerobic system can supply it, so they lean more heavily on the anaerobic pathways. The aerobic system still contributes, just a smaller share.
A great example of this would be when the clapper sounds, signaling the final 10 seconds of an MMA round, and the fighter reels off fast-paced combinations, or does an explosive take-down to try and cement the round in the judges’ eyes.
First we’ll take a closer look at the aerobic system: the ‘gas tank’ of a martial artist.
What is the Aerobic Energy System?
Think of the aerobic system as a large, long-lasting energy reserve. It can keep producing ATP for long periods, but how hard it can work at any moment is limited by how well your body delivers and uses oxygen, and by how much carbohydrate you have stored.
The aerobic system utilizes fat, carbohydrates and even protein to synthesize ATP (Adenosine triphosphate - energy). Fat is metabolized during aerobic exercise due to the presence of oxygen.
One popular coaching rule of thumb, the “180 minus your age” formula, gives a rough heart-rate ceiling for easy aerobic work. Treat it as an estimate, not an ideal or a precise physiological threshold: it has little scientific validation, and heart-rate responses vary widely between individuals. Burning a higher percentage of fat at low intensity also doesn’t mean more total fat loss, because total energy expenditure matters more. Beginners, people with heart conditions or high blood pressure, anyone returning from injury or illness, and anyone on heart-rate-altering medication such as beta-blockers (where heart-rate targets don’t apply normally) should get medical clearance before training to heart-rate targets and should progress slowly.
Aerobic exercise improves cardiovascular health, endocrine system function, respiratory function, musculoskeletal performance, and speeds recovery times following high-intensity workouts.
Source: MiggyTube TV, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Source: MiggyTubeTV, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Picture a fighter like Demetrious ‘Mighty Mouse’ Johnson, who repeatedly went five rounds in title fights, compared to a big, powerful heavyweight.
Bigger, more explosive fighters tend to rely more on short, powerful bursts, and without a strong aerobic base their output can drop off sharply if the fight goes into the deeper rounds.
The aerobic system is not thought of as a power-generating system. However, the aerobic system is nonetheless powerful in its application for athletes. With proper training and nutrition, it can keep making ATP, the energy currency of cells, for long periods, and it powers your recovery between hard bursts.
Developing your aerobic engine will allow you to perform well and recover quickly. Whether your goal is competition or merely training in the gym, you want an aerobic system that always has a full tank of gas. Think of a fighter like Frankie Edgar, known for keeping up a high pace deep into five-round fights.
What is the Anaerobic System?
We briefly touched upon the anaerobic energy systems earlier. Anaerobic means ‘without oxygen.’ All three energy systems are working all the time; when energy demands rise faster than the aerobic system can meet them, the anaerobic systems take on a bigger share of the work.
Fast and powerful movements drive this shift.
For example, going from a slow-paced, tactical battle of the feet to an explosive scramble for dominant position.
The anaerobic systems (both the ATP-PC system and anaerobic glycolysis) also cover part of the energy cost at the very start of exercise, even at low intensity, because oxygen-based ATP production takes time to ramp up.
At this point, the anaerobic system can take a step back until it’s time for more intense and powerful movement. To fully understand anaerobic metabolism, you’re going to need to understand the ATP-PC and Lactic Acid systems.
Understanding the Energy Systems
The ATP-PC System (Phosphagen System)
The ATP-PC (adenosine triphosphate-phosphocreatine) system, also known as the phosphagen system, is the go-to energy system for explosive, short-duration movements, typically under 10 seconds. This system is responsible for your ability to throw that quick, powerful jab or a swift takedown.
ATP (Adenosine triphosphate) is a molecular unit of currency. Simply put, it’s energy. ATP is involved in many processes of the body. When it comes to training, we only care about ATP’s role in energy production and how it provides energy for muscular contractions and respiration.
How ATP Powers Muscle Contraction
Muscle cells hold only a small amount of ATP, dissolved in the fluid of the cell. During contraction, ATP binds to the myosin heads (the cross-bridges) and is broken down to release energy, forming ADP (adenosine diphosphate) and a single phosphate (Pi).
ATP has to be remade constantly, and each energy system does that in its own way. The aerobic system does it in three main stages: Aerobic Glycolysis, the Krebs Cycle, and the Electron Transport Chain. We’ll cover those first, then come back to the phosphocreatine side of the ATP-PC system.
This is the initial phase of aerobic output. Glycolysis breaks glucose (sugar) down to pyruvate, making a small amount of ATP. During exercise, much of that glucose comes from the working muscle’s own glycogen, especially at higher intensities; blood glucose, which the liver’s glycogen stores help maintain, supplies the rest. Glycogen is the storage form of glucose.
Fat doesn’t wait for glucose to run out. It is burned alongside carbohydrate at every intensity, entering the aerobic system through its own pathway (beta-oxidation) rather than through glycolysis. The harder you work, the more your muscles rely on carbohydrate.
Glycogen stores are limited, holding only a couple of thousand calories of energy, and they can run low after around 90 minutes of hard, continuous exercise. That is why endurance athletes take in carbohydrate from sports drinks, gels or food during long events. Fat stores are far larger: even lean athletes carry tens of thousands of calories of fat energy. Fat is a useful fuel for low-intensity aerobic work, but it can’t be broken down fast enough to fuel high-intensity efforts.
Aerobic training does make your mitochondria better at using fat, which spares glycogen during easier work. But a high-fat, low-carb (ketogenic) diet is a poor fit for fighters: in trained athletes it has been shown to impair exercise economy and performance, and combat sports depend on repeated high-intensity efforts fuelled by carbohydrate.
The Krebs cycle is the second phase of aerobic metabolism. The Pyruvate created during phase one (glycolysis) enters the mitochondria. Mitochondria are the power plants of every nucleated cell in the body.
Here, the Pyruvate is converted into acetyl coenzyme A (acetyl-CoA). Acetyl-CoA combines with a four-carbon compound called oxaloacetate to form citrate (citric acid).
These chemical reactions create ATP. During this phase of aerobic output, carbon dioxide (CO2) and hydrogen are produced as byproducts. The CO2 is exhaled during respiration and the hydrogen finds its way to the electron transport chain by the carrier molecules NAD and FAD.
Oxaloacetate (oxaloacetic acid) is the end product. It is also the starting product of the Krebs cycle, hence the “cycle” name being given to this energy pathway.
Did you know that pantothenic acid (vitamin B5) is a vital component of mitochondrial metabolism? B5 is part of coenzyme A, which picks up the acetyl group removed from pyruvate so it can enter the Krebs cycle. To learn how other vitamins and minerals impact performance, read our article on Nutrients.
Now we come to the third and final phase of the aerobic energy system, the electron transport chain. The carrier molecules (NADH and FADH2) hand over their electrons to a chain of protein complexes in the inner membrane of the mitochondria.
These electrons then undergo a series of redox reactions, which release a substantial amount of energy in order to re-synthesize ATP.
That energy is used to pump protons (H+) across the inner membrane. As the protons flow back through an enzyme called ATP synthase, they drive the production of ATP. At the end of the chain, oxygen accepts the electrons and combines with hydrogen to form water, which is why this stage needs oxygen.
The electron transport chain is by far the highest energy-producing phase of the aerobic system. It makes the large majority of the ATP, compared with just a few from glycolysis and the Krebs cycle.
Compare this to anaerobic glycolysis, which nets only two ATP from the breakdown of one glucose molecule. The aerobic system, in contrast, makes many times more ATP from the same glucose molecule. The aerobic process is slower but has a much larger capacity. This is why energy supplies for low-intensity activity are so large.
Back to the ATP-PC System: Phosphocreatine
This is where the “PC” of the ATP-PC system comes into play. PC stands for Phosphocreatine. PC is another high-energy molecule stored in the sarcoplasm of muscle fibers. The enzyme creatine kinase breaks PC down into phosphate and creatine, and that phosphate is used to rebuild ATP from ADP.
"Fire in the Hole"
This reaction releases energy that is used to re-synthesize ATP at a fast rate, albeit only for a short time, because the body holds only around 120 grams of creatine in total (in an average-sized adult) and muscle PC stores are small.
Stored ATP runs out very quickly, providing only enough energy for a few seconds of all-out effort. The breakdown of PC then keeps ATP topped up for a few more seconds. The ATP-PC system dominates roughly the first 10 seconds of maximal effort, but it never works alone: glycolysis ramps up within seconds, and the aerobic system contributes from the start.
When physical demands continue past this time period the body relies more heavily on the other energy systems to create ATP. PC stores refill quickly at first, roughly half in about 30 seconds, but near-complete recovery takes about 3–5 minutes. This means that if you repeat all-out efforts without enough recovery time, your maximum performance quality will deteriorate. Match your rest to your goal: long rests for maximal power work, shorter rests only when you are deliberately training repeated efforts.
Pros and Cons of the ATP-PC System
Pros
Cons
The Oxidative System (Aerobic System): Endurance Fuel for budding MMA Fighters
The oxidative or aerobic system is your endurance powerhouse. It uses oxygen to produce ATP and is capable of supplying energy for prolonged periods of lower-intensity activity. It's the system that keeps you going round after round in a grueling workout or MMA bout.
The oxidative system uses oxygen to break down carbs, fats, and proteins to produce ATP. It’s a slower process but provides a steady, sustained supply of energy, making it essential for endurance.
Consider Your Body's Aerobic Gas Tank. Just How Full Can it Get?
In MMA, the oxidative system underpins your stamina. It keeps you moving, defending, and responding throughout the entire bout, enabling you to maintain a solid pace and recover between high-intensity bursts of activity.
Longer duration, lower intensity training activities like distance running, cycling, or swimming help enhance the oxidative system. It's also beneficial to incorporate active recovery periods into your training to increase aerobic capacity and improve recovery times.
What is the Lactic Acid System?
The Lactic Acid system (the glycolytic system) is another anaerobic pathway designed to manufacture ATP. It does this through anaerobic glycolysis: rapidly breaking glucose down to pyruvate to form ATP. When glycolysis runs faster than the mitochondria can use the pyruvate, the pyruvate is converted to lactate.
The Lactic Acid system generates a lot of power, but not as much as the ATP-PC system. However, the Lactic Acid system can perform much longer than the ATP-PC system, making it the predominant energy system for a large array of athletic activities.
This system doesn’t wait for the ATP and PC stores to run low. It ramps up within the first few seconds of hard effort and takes over as the main supplier as PC stores fall, allowing the athlete to keep working at a high output for longer.
Its process is more complex than that of the ATP-PC system, so it can’t match the phosphagen system’s peak rate of energy release. Even so, it supplies a large share of the energy in efforts lasting only a few seconds, such as a short sprint or a flurry of strikes.
Think of a pressure grappler who uses a relentless pace to grind opponents down over several rounds. That style repeatedly taps the glycolytic system during scrambles, takedowns and ground-and-pound, but the pace itself is sustained mainly by the aerobic system, which also drives recovery between those bursts.
Push the pace too hard and a fighter burns through phosphocreatine and builds up fatigue faster than the aerobic system can clear it, and performance drops off. The best pressure fighters manage their output, grinding and resting just enough to keep opponents fatigued while staying fresh themselves, a skill built on a big aerobic base as much as on anaerobic capacity.
In anaerobic glycolysis, glucose is turned into Pyruvate as it produces ATP. During hard efforts, much of that glucose comes from glycogen stored in the working muscle itself; blood glucose, kept up by the liver, supplies the rest.
Can the Lactic Acid System Last Longer Than the ATP-PC System?
The glycolytic system is the main energy supplier from roughly 10 seconds to about 2 minutes of hard effort, depending on the intensity of the exertion and the training adaptation of the individual. In fact, after about 75 seconds of maximal effort the aerobic system is already supplying the majority of the energy. As glycolysis runs, pyruvate is converted to lactate and hydrogen ions accumulate, so the muscles become increasingly acidic.
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The limiting factor isn’t a simple lack of oxygen. Lactate is produced even when oxygen is plentiful, whenever glycolysis runs faster than the mitochondria can take up pyruvate. The limit is the build-up of hydrogen ions and other metabolites during hard efforts, which contributes to the muscle burn often (but wrongly) attributed to lactic acid.
Lactate vs. Lactic Acid
So the idea that lactic acid accumulation causes muscular fatigue or soreness is misguided. Lactate and lactic acid are closely related: lactate is the form lactic acid takes once it gives up a hydrogen ion, and at the body’s normal pH almost all of it exists as lactate. The two terms are often used interchangeably. Lactate is cleared or used as fuel, typically within about an hour after exercise, and it doesn’t cause next-day soreness.
Forming lactate actually uses up hydrogen ions, and lactate is also a fuel the body reuses, so its production helps limit acidity in muscle cells rather than causing it.
It helps performance as opposed to hindering it. Glycolysis causes Hydrogen ions to accumulate rapidly.
When they build up faster than the body can buffer and clear them, the muscle becomes increasingly acidic. Together with other metabolites, this contributes to the burn that you feel so deeply during intense exercise.
The acidity build-up is the result of accumulation of Hydrogen ions that cannot be cleared before the muscle becomes overly acidic. Lactate is formed when one Pyruvate molecule attaches to two Hydrogen ions.
Producing lactate at this point helps protect the cell from becoming too acidic. However, when energy demands are too high for too long, hydrogen ions build up faster than your body can buffer and clear them, and performance drops. We often see this play out in MMA competitions when a fighter goes too hard too fast and burns themself out.
Designing an MMA Conditioning Program Targeting All Energy Systems
The ATP-PC, glycolytic, and oxidative systems don't work in isolation. They dynamically cooperate during a MMA bout, with the predominant system shifting depending on the intensity and duration of the activity. Understanding this interplay is critical for an efficient MMA conditioning program.
Principles of Program Design for MMA Conditioning
Effective MMA conditioning targets all three energy systems, balancing high-intensity, explosive exercises with endurance training. Rest periods, nutrition, and hydration are vital factors too. Each workout should aim at enhancing power, stamina, and recovery while minimizing the risk of overtraining. To learn more about Program Design, read our article on Cardiovascular Conditioning.
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MMA conditioning focused on energy systems not only boosts your strength, speed, and endurance, but also enhances your recovery rate. With the right training, you can throw faster punches, grapple longer, and maintain peak performance from the first bell to the last.
Sample MMA Conditioning Program Emphasizing Energy Systems
A comprehensive MMA conditioning program could start with ATP-PC training like explosive weightlifting or plyometrics (“11 Ways to Enhance Combat Arts Power Using Plyometric Training”).
This could be followed by glycolytic training such as high-intensity bag work or grappling drills (“Grappling Endurance that Grinds Opponents into Submission”). Finally, the session could end with a low-intensity, long-duration activity like running or swimming to stimulate the oxidative system. Explosive and high-intensity work is demanding, so build up gradually. Beginners, anyone returning from injury or illness, and people with heart conditions, high blood pressure or on heart-rate-altering medication should get medical clearance first and progress slowly.
Finally, Consider this about Energy Systems
In any complex and demanding sport, such as martial arts, you’re going to have a massive amount of interplay between these energy systems. Martial arts is dynamic.
The landscape of a match, training session, or live-sparring can change in an instant. You need to have the metabolic flexibility to answer to these changing demands if you want to perform at your best.
In contrast to a linear sport (think 100-meter sprint), you must adapt your training to meet diverse energy demands. You can’t just train with powerful, ATP-PC-dominant movements or else you’ll tire too quickly. Conversely, you can’t train purely with low-intensity aerobic workouts or else you’ll be unprepared for explosive movements. It’s important to develop a well-rounded machine.
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If you’re a powerful athlete but struggle with cardio conditioning, it may be time to focus a little more on bolstering your aerobic ‘gas tank’ or raising your lactate threshold (you can learn more about this in our Cardiovascular Conditioning section).
Taking a more well-rounded approach to your energy system development will not only benefit your health and longevity, but it will also increase your performance and efficiency on the mat.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Energy System Does MMA use?
MMA uses all three energy systems at once, with the balance shifting constantly: the aerobic system for overall stamina and recovery between exchanges, the anaerobic lactic (glycolytic) system for hard efforts lasting from several seconds to a couple of minutes, and the anaerobic alactic (phosphagen) system for the most intense but short-lived bursts of effort.
How Do You Get Energy For MMA?
Energy for MMA is acquired through balanced nutrition and efficient training of all three energy systems. Consuming carbohydrates, proteins, and fats provides the necessary fuel, while diverse and targeted training helps condition the aerobic and both anaerobic systems to meet the varied energy demands of MMA.
What are the 3 Main Energy Systems?
The human body operates using three main energy systems: the aerobic (oxidative) system, which uses oxygen to create energy; the anaerobic lactic (glycolytic) system, which rapidly breaks down carbohydrate without needing oxygen and produces lactate; and the anaerobic alactic (phosphagen) system, used for the shortest and most intense efforts. All three work together, with their share shifting as intensity and duration change.
How Long Should You Rest Between Explosive Efforts?
It depends on what you are training. Phosphocreatine refills roughly half in about 30 seconds but needs about 3 to 5 minutes to recover almost fully, so maximal power work such as sprints, jumps or explosive lifts calls for long rests to keep quality high. Shorter rests deliberately train your ability to repeat efforts while tired, which is closer to a fight. Build up gradually, and get medical clearance first if you have a heart condition or are returning from injury.
Does Lactic Acid Cause Muscle Soreness After Training?
No. The burn you feel during hard rounds comes from hydrogen ions and other metabolites building up, not lactic acid itself, and lactate is cleared or used as fuel within about an hour of finishing. The soreness that peaks one to three days after unfamiliar or intense training is delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS), which is not caused by lactic acid. Severe muscle pain, weakness or dark urine after a hard session is different and needs prompt medical care.
