Training to Train, Part I: Misadventures in n=1

Unlike athletes in a sport, we don’t really have “the big game” or “the main event” to prepare for. Instead, we often find ourselves training…to train. I recently did have to prepare for “the big game” in the form of the Level 4 Krav Maga instructors course. Through much research, experimentation, and trial and (lots of) error, I think I have put together for myself a pretty good training method that served me very well for my latest adventure at Krav Maga Worldwide West LA. Just so there can be no claims of false advertising, I’ll disclose now that I will detail this method in Part II of this series. Part I will focus on the methods used and lessons learned from the training for the first three instructors courses.

This post has been a work in progress for over a year. I didn’t complete it because it felt… well, incomplete. It wasn’t until I finished the Level 4 instructors test that I knew I had at least reached a meaningful mile marker on what has at times been a bumpy road of self-education. I offer what follows not as a paradigm of exercise science or as some sort of look-what-I-can-do braggadocio. I wasn’t training for a powerlifting meet or the CrossFit Games, so while it was important to get stronger and faster, I wasn’t concerned with adding a truckload to my total or shaving seconds off my “Fran” time. I just wanted to kick ass, and the methods outlined below had varying degrees of success and failure. My hope is that if you find yourself needing to prepare for an event such as this you can have a much less steep learning curve by avoiding my missteps. Alternatively, just find a good trainer and pay him or her handsomely to fuss with the minutia for you!

One more note: For those people who can just naturally kick ass without any regard given to specialized training and nutrition—I hate you with the fiery passion of one thousand suns.

Junk in, Junk out—Let’s Start with Fuel

Training can be rendered almost useless if you’re not also providing proper feeding for fuel and recovery. I still don’t have this stuff perfectly dialed, but I’m zeroing in. I’ve written briefly in the past about Paleo eating, so I won’t go into specifics but rather what I’ve tinkered with. I would also like to specify that I eat this way because I genuinely feel and perform much better when I do; I don’t do it to be some smug hipster…

Performance nutrition isn’t something you can do the week before or, in my case, the week of the event. What I have done for the last two instructors courses, and what I presume I will do for subsequent ones, is as follows: I maintain a somewhat strict Paleo diet year-round, I’ll be very strict in the training block leading up to the instructors course, and I’ll be as strict as travel and a tiny refrigerator allow during the course.

But here’s the evolution 😉 :

Phase A

Phase A (the Level 1 instructor training and test) was actually pre-Paleo. Back in 2008, Danelle and I had no special nutrition plan. We didn’t know much back then, other than we needed “carbs” to survive the week. Cereal, sports drinks, PB&J, fruit, and end-of-the-day Quiznos subs were staples. The funny thing is that we felt great in Phase A. (Well, as great as we could feel doing something like that!) I can offer no explanation other than we were four years younger and taking in just enough chow to fuel seven days of very hard training. I really couldn’t imagine doing that now with the same results.

Phase B

Life intervened and we didn’t make it to Phase B (the Level 2 instructor training and test) until 2010. In between A and B we began experimenting with the Paleo/Primal lifestyle. It wasn’t new by any means in 2009, but it was less nuanced than it is now. The blanket recommendation back then was to be fairly low carb (50-150g/day) with most carbs coming from sweet potatoes post workout (PWO) only. I was also very into CrossFit at this time (more on that later), and there were legions of firebreathers who were fueling their stunning work capacities like this. But CrossFit is not seven 8-hour days of glycogen-draining activity. I have no doubt our lowish carb approach hamstringed our performance. Halfway through the test I was running on fumes. This was partly because of the beastly nature of the test itself, and partly because I was under the delusion that I could, like Grok, fuel it largely with fat stores and gluconeogenesis from lots of protein. Alas, I couldn’t run the engine at full throttle with a carb intake of salad greens and veggies, a couple sweet potatoes a day, and no sports drinks.

Lesson learned. The very hard and very painful way.

Phase C and Expert Series I

For Phase C and Expert Series I, I still maintained a fairly strict Paleo diet because I knew what I did wrong for Phase B, and I do feel and perform better when eating quality whole foods. The adjustment I made was two-fold: I ate much more total food, and I added in a lot more dense carbs. Whereas in Phase B I kept carbs stupidly low with some sweet potatoes at lunch and dinner after blocks of training, for the Level 3 and 4 tests I stuffed down much more sweet potato and didn’t restrict it to “PWO”. After learning about developments in the Paleo movement through the Paleolithic Solution Seminar and listening to hours of Robb Wolf podcasts, I also added white rice to the mix. Other important additions were coconut water, lactose-free whey protein, grass-fed butter, and gluten-free oatmeal. So, I wasn’t 100% Paleo by the strictest definition, but I wasn’t willing to be dragging ass come test day!

I didn’t measure anything. I ate past the point of satiety whenever I could safely do so [BURP] to ensure my total calories were high enough to keep me chugging along. If I had to guess, I’d put my average daily calories at roughly 4,000 with carbs, protein, and fat at roughly 300g, 250g, and 200g, respectively. Four thousand calories was actually too low because, despite feeling good and recovered, I still lost weight precipitously. But eating is difficult enough after such intense training, to say nothing of eating well past the point of comfort. This is definitely an instance where the short-term consumption of non-Paleo liquid nutrition like whole milk would be of great benefit, but I unfortunately had no way to refrigerate a worthwhile volume of the stuff!

Having successfully used this approach twice, I can say with some confidence that I will use it again. It didn’t make me Wolverine, but it provided lasting energy, I recovered well day to day, and I was never hungry in the middle of a long training block. On top of that, I believe it kept a lot of systemic inflammation at bay, which, combined with programming and omega-3 fish oil supplements, allowed me to train really hard for the three-month lead-up without a bunch of nagging little overuse injuries.

 

The Training: I’m Not Doing That Again

Now that the boring and controversial food stuff is out of the way, I’ll get into the stuff that’s the only reason anyone has skimmed this far.

I’ve written about augmenting Krav Maga before (Part I, Part II), and I stick with the stance that training Krav Maga itself will more than meet the fitness needs and desires of most people. If your technical skills aren’t up to par, no amount of running or lifting is going to help that. As an instructor training with other highly skilled instructors, I not only had to be sharp technically, but I had to be able to do it explosively, repeatedly, all day long for a week. Again, I say this without arrogance; these things do not come to me naturally, so I have to work very hard to even come close to the requisite level of proficiency.

Phase A

For Phase A, Danelle and I did Krav classes five nights a week with lots of early AM and weekend skills sessions. I also went to BJJ classes and we did lots of Bas Rutten and Ross Enamait workouts. We didn’t create a “program” per se; we trained a lot and took days off as needed. I think my gas tank was about as good as it could have been for the week in LA.

Phase B

For Phase B, I anticipated much more sparring and groundfighting, and I did not want strength to be a factor. No matter what anyone tells you, strength does matter in the fight, and I’ve never been gifted in the raw strength department. Heavy lifting needed to find a place in my preparation. Like for Phase A, I did not have a specific program but more of a checklist for the week: Krav and BJJ classes, skills sessions, and strength and conditioning workouts. The S&C consisted of some Bas and pad work, but mostly a lot of CrossFit and CrossFit Football.

I bought into the CrossFit Golden Hammer big time. I drank the Kool-Aid with reckless abandon and did way too much of that and not enough “sport-specific” training. While my baseline strength and conditioning were indeed better, they didn’t carry over to hitting pads and making explosive defenses for hours (and hours) on end. There are some fundamental issues with CrossFit and how it’s changed over the last few years that I’ve come to disagree with, and I wish I had realized this before training for Phase B. I’ll save further commentary for another time, but I’ll link to this article that summarizes most of my hard-learned misgivings. I’ll also say that this is my personal experience and that it is a great generalist program—in theory. Some people can even utilize it successfully for their specific sports. However, typically the “CrossFit” that really does work is not actually CrossFit, but smart trainers with more than a two-day certification under their belts who create solid programs and use the brand name to get butts in the door. CrossFit has, in essence, attempted to trademark “working out” so that it is given—or it takes—credit for any protocol that contains mixed modalities or burpees and barbells in a circuit. But that’s all I’ll say…

Phase C

CrossFit was out. I could have gone back to what worked for Phase A, but what I had learned in the meantime about program development (and the lessons learned from complete randomization) required I put more thought into prepping for Phase C. I knew I’d be sparring and groundfighting even more in Phase C, so I wanted to keep dedicated strength training in the mix. Where I really went wrong for Phase B was with the conditioning, so I wanted to do something much simpler with a much higher ROI. In the end, I modeled my program after the Randy Couture Xtreme Training Manual. I followed the first six weeks pretty closely (subbing my own classes and skills sessions), but then adapted the next 6-8 weeks to better fit my goals, which were:

1. Waste neither time nor energy on activities that won’t positively contribute to preparation; skills training is the priority.
2. General workouts would focus on strength training. Conditioning would come from specific training (e.g. sparring, pad & bag work, drills). To paraphrase John Welbourn, no one ever got in shape to play football by not playing football.

My first 6 weeks looked something like this:

• M: AM – Strength Training¹; PM – Krav skills session + Krav class
• Tu: AM – BJJ class; PM – Krav skills session or rest.
• W: AM – Circuit Training²; PM – Krav skills session + Krav class
• Th: AM – BJJ class; PM – Krav skills session or rest.
• F: AM – Strength Training³; PM – Krav skills session + Krav class
• Sa: BJJ class or Krav skills session or rest
• Su: Rest

¹ Dynamic Warm-Up and Core Circuit; 5×5, 5×3, or 5×2 Power Cleans or Hang Power Cleans; 3×5, 3×3, or 3×2 Back Squats; 3×6, 3×5, or 3×3 Bench Press; 5×5 Weighted Pull-Ups; 2-3 accessory lifts in the 8-10 rep range.
² Various time-indexed circuits containing med balls, ropes, sledgehammers, and basic pushing, pulling, squatting, and jumping movements.
³ Dynamic Warm-Up and Core Circuit; 5×5, 5×3, or 5×2 Split Jerks; 3×5, 3×3, or 3×2 Front Squats; 3×6, 3×5, or 3×3 Press; 5×5 Weighted Pull-Ups; 2-3 accessory lifts in the 8-10 rep range.

My second 6 weeks looked something like this:

• M: AM – Strength Training¹; PM – Krav skills session + Krav class
• Tu: PM – MMA class
• W: AM – Rest; PM – Krav skills session + Krav class
• Th: AM – BJJ class; PM – Krav skills session or rest.
• F: AM – Strength Training¹; PM – MMA class
• Sa: Krav skills session
• Su: Rest

¹ Lower volume and lower intensity Olympic lift variations and powerlifts.

Other notes:

• Although I won’t wow anyone with my lift numbers, I didn’t roll into this program as a purely novice lifter. After doing Starting Strength and CrossFit, I did the Wendler 5/3/1 program for six months over the winter between Phases B and C. I ate like a pig (mostly Paleo + milk), put on 20lbs, and made big gains in my lifts. This allowed me to use the above program more effectively than if I had little to no experience with barbell training.
• If I was feeling completely obliterated, I would take the day off or reduce the training intensity. It’s hard to know when you want a break and when you need one, but I tried to err on the side of recuperation.
• I used a foam roller and lacrosse ball several times a day and took them with me to LA. Good stuff.

Overall, this approach worked very well. In retrospect, however, there was still too much time and energy spent on strength training for the level of raw strength I needed for the course, and my conditioning was very good but still not where I wanted it.

Expert Series I

I felt the best for the Level 4 course than I did for any of the previous three. I used Joel Jamieson’s Ultimate MMA Conditioning to build my own program tailored to my specific needs and deficiencies. I am, after all, a unique snowflake. I’ll detail the program in Part II…

 

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Photo credit: GILD Bookbinders, on Flickr