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Fight Science Made Simple is for fighters and martial artists who want to train harder, recover faster, and stay on the mat for life.
Each week, we break down strength & conditioning, nutrition, recovery, and mindset into straightforward strategies you can actually use in training. Simple, practical, and backed by real fight science—so you can keep chasing your potential, performing at your peak, and becoming the fighter you’ve always wanted to be.
What is going on? Welcome to episode nineteen of the fight science made simple podcast.I'm your host coach adam snyder. I'm a lifelong martial artist. I'm a performance and recovery coach, and i'm an active mma fighter. I missed you last week. I made a commitment last year to post a podcast every single week, and i fell short of that commitment last week. This is not an excuse. It's been a bit of a hectic couple of weeks and it's going to be a couple more hectic weeks.Alexandra, my partner and i are moving to thailand at the end of the month, february twenty seventh, for three months. We're gonna be there till around june, which i'm fucking stoked about. We're heading to puquette, the plan is to be in the bang tau area.I'm gonna train at bang tau [...0.5s] and just live the lifestyle, man, it's something that i've always wanted to do since i was a kid.Alexandra's always want to do that since she was a kid. We're both fairly spiritual. Um, she's a marine biologist, so there's incredible opportunities out there with corals and diving. And it's just time before we start to settle down and have kids, we wanna really go and experience the culture.So needless to say, preparing to that has been a little hectic, which is why i missed last week. I'm not going to allow that to again.So you're gonna get a special double presentation of the fight science made simple podcast this week. I'm gonna be going live and recording on sunday actually with alexandra.And we're gonna be talking about our prep for thailand, why we're going to thailand a little bit more, what our entire process is gonna be like once we get out there. And i'm really gonna be documenting the whole time experience even more on our instagram.So get excited about it and make sure you tune in on sunday for a special double episode to make up for the episode that i missed last week. If you're new to the podcast though, welcome. I typically record these episodes every single week.And the whole purpose of the podcast, like the name the podcast suggests is to make fight science simple.Mma is a little over thirty years old, and it's still super far behind other sports in terms of the science fact deoddribbing care that athletes get take, get when it comes to their strength conditioning, nutrition, recovery and mindset.And so what i wanna do is [...0.5s] reveal, pull back the curtain on [...0.7s] how fighters actually should train to have longevity and success in their careers, recover at a very high level. But take these confusing topics.I know there's so much misinformation out there, and [...0.7s] make it very simple and digestible, so you can walk away with something actionable and actually see changes in your game. Today instead of watching a fucking youtube video, doing scrolling on some content, and then being confused as fuck.I want this to be the most valuable podcast for fighters on the planet. So if you're digging the content [...0.6s] and even watching for a while, thank you. If you haven't followed the podcast already, what are you doing? We're dropping heat over here, can take your game to the next level.And the number one thing that you can do to help the podcast. If you are digging what we're dropping is just share, share with teammate, friend, training partner, someone that, you know, can benefit from this.The more ears that we can get this in, the bigger impact we're gonna be able to have on the fight world is what i'm here for, bro. And girls, i know we got a lot of girls. I got some girls in the team. My audience is mostly dudes, but we got a lot of chicks that are, uh, better check it out as well.Today i got a special episode for you. We're talking about all things power, how to develop power, what causes power, why power is important now than ever, more than ever.It's never been more important to have crazy finishing power. I mean, look at the contender series that is one of the most streamline ways to get on to the ufc, and it's all about finishing fights.Dana started giving out twenty five thousand dollar bonuses for finishes at the beginning of this year with the paramount deal. People want to see finishes. People don't wanna see long decision wins.It's not enough just to win anymore. You gotta finish fights and you gotta finish in them in a devastating manner.I got guys on my team that are professionals with impressive records. They got six wins, they got five wins, they got maybe one or two losses, but they don't have enough finishes. And the ufc's like, bro, we gotta see more finishes and then we'll give you a chance.There are other guys that i know that only have a couple fights, two, three, four fights, but they're four and o with four finishes, and they get contender series shots right away. So being able to finish fights is super important.It's also a very big misconception that power and your ability to finish fights with power is purely genetic.Now don't get me wrong. There are components to power that are pretty genetically determined. And we're gonna talk about that. But if you're someone that struggles with power, you got pillow soft punches, or maybe [...1.0s] power just isn't in your genetics. You doesn't mean that you still can't fucking finish fights. You can generate power.I know because i used to be that person. I'm not naturally athletic at all. And it's kind of interesting, like growing up when i was sparring as a teenager, i was taking my first kickboxing fights when i was in college.I always in the back of my not mind, never identified myself as someone that had power. I just thought it was something i naturally lacked.Then through studying exercise science, getting a degree in exercise science, becoming a certified strength and conditioning specialist, working with some of the best athletes in the world, i realized, oh fuck, you can generate power.And then i learned how to generate power, and i finished my first two fights, my third fight, my first mma fights [...0.6s] in the first round, my third of may fight was a war that guy just had a chin, and in my fourth of may fight, i dropped the guy pretty early, so and caught him pretty bad.So you can generate power, and i'm living proof of it, and i'm gonna teach you how to do it today. I'm gonna fucking drop some heat on you guys, so get a pen and paper, get ready, cause this episode is about to be fire.Okay, so it's very important we have to understand first what causes power, and then once you understand what causes power, then you can start training it.So we're gonna talk about what is power, what causes it, [...0.6s] how to train for punching power, for finishing power, and then when the best time to work and train your finishing power is.Okay, so [...0.8s] first and foremost in terms of power, let's talk about the physics behind it. Power is simply the product of force times, velocity. Force is what it sounds like how much force you can generate, and velocity is how quickly you can get from point a to point b. Power is when you bridge the gap between the two [...0.6s] with force.It's all about being very, very strong, producing as much force as possible, but i'm not too concerned about speed.So we all know those people that are strong as shit, they can squat and deadlift and bench a lot, but they're fucking slow and so they have no power on the other side of the things, velocity is how quickly you can move.We know all those people that are really, really fast, but they're fucking weak and so they have no power.And so what differentiates power from force production and strength or power from speed. And velocity is what we call rate of force development, how quickly you can get from point a to b, and how much force you can produce as quickly and violently and aggressively as possible.Okay, [...0.7s] we're gonna dive back into that little physics equation and to learn a little bit more about how to specifically train your force and velocity in a little bit. But before we go to that, i wanna talk about the energy system that's responsible for giving you devastating finishing power.If you listen to this podcast or even following on instagram for any amount of time, i talk a lot about energy systems. Your body uses three energy systems to produce energy. Everything that you do requires energy. And that energy comes from one of your body's three energy systems.The aerobic system, which is [...0.5s] really long duration bouts of activity like running a marathon. Okay, you are anaerobic lactic system, which is like up to ninety seconds of really, really intense exercise. Think about like a wrestling scramble. And then you have your a lactic system or your atp [...0.6s] gospel creatine system. This is your fastest energy system lasting up to ten seconds.It fatigues and burns out very quickly, but it also is very, very powerful for how quickly it produces energy. This atp foster creatine system, pcr, atp pcr system, we're gonna call it the atlantic system for short, is the energy system that is responsible for causing finishing power.Okay, if [...0.5s] you are struggling with power, it means that you either need more force, [...0.5s] you either need more velocity, you need to increase your rate of force development, or you need to specifically target your galactic power in a specific way.And we'll talk about that in a little bit. The other caveat is technique. Your technique might suck, so you might have a lot of natural power, but you're technically awful, and don't execute your strike sufficiently. And, and that leaks power.But we're not a skills coach, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking specifically about the athletic quality of power, so let's understand how the a lactic system works.Okay, [...0.8s] i want you to think about [...0.5s] currency. Okay, the currency that your body uses for energy, your body's energy source is called [...0.6s] adp [...0.7s] adysine tri phosphate. I said adp, [...0.5s] atp adysine tri phosphate.So you have this head, it's an adysine head and you have three phosphate tails on it. And these phosphates, they're bonded together and they're bonded to this addison head. And there's a lot of fucking energy built up.I want you to think about, like when you were a kid and you were in school and you had three kids on the school bus sitting in the same seat and they were all crammed up. There's a lot of tension. There's a lot of energy.And when your school bus driver sits back and yells at you, hey, break it up! Two and a c and one kid releases, what happens? The other two [...0.7s] they spread out all that energy releases.And that's what happens with the a lactic system. You have atp that's already available in your muscle. And when you do something like throw a knockout punch, this has to happen really rapidly and really quick and really explosively until your body needs immediate energy.So what it does is it breaks apart one of those atps. It basically removes one of the kids out of the bus seat. It releases energy boom. And that's what causes a finishing strike.Okay, that's what causes devastating power. The thing is you only have so much atp available, and then after you throw a couple punches for ten seconds or some knockout strikes or some powerful kicks, you're out of atp [...0.5s] and then you fatigue. You're not able to be powerful anymore. That energy is not available.It takes about two to three minutes for that atp to repair. Basically what happens is you have something called phosphocreatine, creatine available in your blood, and that creatine is a phosphate and it basically reattaches to adp adocene diphosphate.The atp breaks apart. It becomes atp, and then creatine phosphate binds to it, and it becomes atp again. But it takes a while. It takes about two to three minutes for that atp to be regenerated into atp.This is why, you know, it's very, very rapid, how quickly you can be explosive and powerful, but you can't be powerful for long.Okay, quick little bio energetics [...0.5s] lesson for you on how you get energy for power. Okay, now when it comes to actually improving power, you have your galactic power, how much force [...0.7s] and [...0.6s] power and velocity your fast twitch muscle fibers can actually produce, right?How quickly you can produce that power. And then you also have a lactic capacity, how long you can sustain your power for. Now a lactic power is much more trainable than a lactic capacity, a lactic capacity.When people say power is genetic, they're thinking about a lactic capacity because a lactic capacity, how long you can sustain power for is determined by the total amount of fast twitch muscle fibers that you have.And that's genetic. You're born with the fast twitch muscle fibers that you're born with. You don't really grow more fast twitch muscle fibers. And so your a lactic capacity, how long you can sustain your a lactic system, a lactic power for [...0.6s] is pretty genetic. It's pretty fixed.Now if you've never trained for a lactic capacity before, then there is some room for improvement.And you can do this by some with something like a lactic capacity intervals where maybe you're doing like a ten second sprint and then you're resting for an incomplete rest time, maybe twenty seconds, maybe thirty seconds. You're not allowing your atp system, your atp pcr system to fully regenerate. And so you're just training your body's ability to repeat explosion.Once you've trained a couple phases of that, you're gonna cap out how much a lactic capacity you can actually develop. And so it's probably not the best use of time to develop a lactic capacity if you've already trained that.And you wanna spend more time focusing on improving your a lactic power, how much power fast, which muscle fibers can produce, and how quickly they can produce that power.Okay, [...0.7s] now [...1.1s] sciencey complicated stuff out of the way, we're gonna go back to talking about our forced velocity curve, how to actually train power, because you're going to improve your alactic system. In your alactic system ability to improve power by training.What we talked about a little bit earlier, your force and velocity power [...0.5s] sits on a curve that we call the force velocity curve.So you have an x axis, you have a y axis, at the very top of the force velocity curve, you have force, [...0.8s] the very bottom of the force velocity curve, you have velocity, and in the middle of the force velocity curve, you have power.Okay, you develop [...0.5s] your finishing power by working all parts of the forced velocity curve, typically focusing on what your weakest in. Okay, so if you're someone that's really, really strong, but you're slow as shit, you probably wanna spend a little bit more time on the velocity side of the curve.If you're someone that super fucking fast, [...0.7s] but you're weak as shit, you probably want to spend some time on the foreside of the curve.If you're pretty strong, or you've spent time building strength, [...0.9s] and you're pretty fast, or you've spent time building velocity and speed, then you wanna spend time in the middle of the curve, where we bridge the cap between force and velocity, and you start to train power. Okay, [...0.7s] now how do you train each of these different qualities?There's some other parts of the curve, strength speed speed, strength, but for simplicity state sake, we're just gonna talk about force, power and velocity.Let's start with the force side of the curve. If you're weak, [...0.6s] if you have a hard time squatting, if you have a hard time benching, if you have a hard time deadlifting, you feel weak in the gym, you don't have a lot of strength, you need to spend time on the four side of the curve.Typically you're going to train your force output in the off camp or the pre camp. Okay, training for max strength or max force output can be pretty fatiguing because it requires a lot of recruitment and a lot of neural drive.Your nervous system goes to work. So it can be pretty fatiguing on your nervous system, not on your body. And doing too much heavy lifting like that in camp could crush some of your recovery and take away from your skill sessions.So it when we're in the off camp, when we're in the pre camp is when i like to really develop high levels of strength.My athletes that need it. My athletes are typically lifting heavy year rounds or even if i have a fighter in camp, or usually doing like heavy doubles or heavy triples, but at a very low volume just to maintain their force output.If you need to build strength though, your volume is gonna be a bit higher than it would be when you're in camp, and it's gonna be more of a focus on strength.Now you build force, you build max strength through heavy compound movements, squat variations, deadlift variations, bench, bench press variations.Horizontal rose impresses, vertical rose impresses. The actual movement doesn't matter as much. Like, [...0.7s] obviously you're gonna be able to load a back squat more than you're gonna be able to load a zirker squat.However, let's say you've got a fucked up neck and you can't axial load, like you have a hard time loading a bar on your back.Then loading it anterily with a zirker or a front squat is gonna be fine. Like, you're gonna be able to build strength, so we wanna use multi joint compound movements, and we wanna be heavy.Like, you want your intensity to be high, like eighty, eighty five percent of your one rep max or more zero to two, zero to two reps in reserve.We're keeping the volume genuinely generally, jesus, i can't talk [...0.5s] generally low. So we're looking at anywhere from, like, one to five sets of, like, one to three reps. So it's low reps, low volume, but the weight is really high.We don't care about speed, how quickly you move here. You should be trying to move the bar as fast as possible with as much fucking intent as possible. It's just not gonna move fast because it's heavy as shit. If the bar is moving super quick, then you need to put more weight on the bar. You're not lifting heavy enough.Okay, so that's the force side of the curve. On the other side of the curve, we have velocity how quickly you can go from point a to point b. If you're pretty strong, but you're really slow, then you wanna train velocity.Also with our clients, we're typically training velocity more heavily when we're in camp. I always have some kind of high velocity dynamic effort movement throughout every single training phase for our clients.Our clients are always doing pliometrics, they're always doing olympic variations, but they have a higher volume of velocity and dynamic effort work when they're in camp because it's not very fatiguing.It's not going to take away from their skills training in the tactics for their fight. And we're maxing out their power the, the power adaptations. Let's say you train power consistently for two months, and then you go back into like a strength block or you go into a muscular endurance block.You will detrain power very, very quickly within a month. Where if, like you spend three months building strength and then you go solely focusing on power, your strength is gonna carry over for a couple months.And so the d training of power is much faster than the d training of other athletic qualities. The d training of velocity, rate of force development, which is why we increase the volume of those things when we're in camp.Now velocity, how quickly you can go from point a to point b. We're not really worried about weight or load to this much intensity is really dependent on your output.You have to go fucking a hundred percent. You have to move as fast as you can with as much intent as you can. We're talking top speed sprinting.We're talking high level pliometrics things like bounce things, like depth jumps, things like fucking triple jumps, putting everything that you have into those movements.You can use some lighter ballistics, but typically like when we're building velocity with our clients, we're fucking just focusing on jumping and sprinting. We might use some [...0.6s] compound movements with accommodated resistance.So like banded bench press squats with chains to add a little bit of an acceleration component because like when you squat with something like a chain gets heavier as you increase as you come out of the hole. And so that requires you to have acceleration throughout the entire movement. You have to get faster. Whereas like if you don't have it in combination resistance, you don't have bands or chains, then most likely you're gonna get slower as you come out of the hole.And so [...0.9s] volume for this again, we're keeping it moderate to low. We're looking at anywhere i would say like one to ten sets. And again the volume, the reps on these are super low, one to three reps. Again, we want full intent, max power.We talked about it, any kind of movement that comes from your a lactic system is gonna burn out very quickly. You only have about ten seconds. So you were only getting about ten seconds of work here.Like if we're doing sprint interval, you're gonna sprint for ten seconds and then you're gonna rest for two minutes. You're gonna rest for three minutes. You're going to allow your body to regenerate its atp so you can put full effort into every single rep that you do.So that's the velocity side of the curve to bridge the gap and focus on training power directly. Once you've built strength, once you've built velocity, then we can really start focusing on power again.I train power with my clients year round, phase round, just depending on the phase that we're in determines how much direct power work we're gonna do, just like velocity. If i'm in camp or we're getting closer to a fight, we're gonna have a higher volume and a higher focus on power work.If we're out of camp, we're focusing on other athletic quality strength, aerobic capacity, cardiac power. Maybe we're adding some muscle, maybe we're changing weight classes, maybe we're addressing injuries.And so there's still gonna be some direct power work. It's just gonna be a little bit lower [...0.5s] the way that we train power. Now we're keeping weights in the equation.Now we're going to lift with weights. However, unlike max strength work, force work, we are now concerned with the rate of force development. Now i wanna move a moderate to a light amount of weight anywhere from like thirty to sixty percent of your one rep max as fast as fucking possible.That shit has to move like when i was in college, i interned with my school at the temple university, at the division one college. I interned in the olympic sports department, and this is where i learned a lot about using the conjugate method with athletes.And we did a lot of band resisted squats with athletes. And when i was with the football team for a little while, d one football team bro, these athletes were doing, like, ten sets of two reps, and they would come out the hole and at the top of the squat, it would sound like they were dropping the bar on the ground.That's how much noise it made, because that's how [...0.6s] fast they were fucking moving with the bar on their back. So your intent here is everything more important than the reps, more important than the sets, more important than the weight or the bands that your, you use is your fucking intent.You have to put a hundred percent of yourself into everything that you have exercises that i love for training power directly.Nothing beats olympic variations. Your cleans, your clean pulls, your high pulls, your snatches, your jerks things that get your ankles, knees and hips to triple extend, just like when you throw a punch. Those three things just triple extend.That's what generates power. Your power is coming from your hamstrings and your glutes. You got a fucking triple extend. Olympic variations are the best way to do this. I also love accommodated resistance movements like banded squats, banded deadlifts, banded bench presses.Chains can be great. We can use them for both velocity training and direct power training. Direct power training, [...1.2s] i, you can also use just regular, like a lot of my clients will do barbell jump squats, will do dumbbell jump squats.If they have a lower training age in the weight room, or they're just not as technically proficient some of these other movements, we can still generate a lot of power.You know, a clean jump shrug is a great example, or a trap bar clean pull is a great example because it's easy. You just have an athlete getting a trap bar [...0.7s] squat down, hinge down, grab the bar and then just fucking jump and you're gonna be able to develop power.Um, ballistic exercises here are also great medball slams, netball throws, ballistic bench presses with a smith, smith machine, something that gets you to throw an external object and move it through air really, really fast, is going to allow you to produce a lot of force very quickly, and you're going to improve your rate of force development.Okay um, and so [...1.0s] that pretty, pretty much sums up my overview on [...0.5s] finishing power. Okay, [...1.1s] very important you can train finishing power, you gotta be strong, [...0.5s] you gotta be fast, and then you gotta be able to produce that force as fast as possible.You have to understand how [...0.5s] your atp pcr system works. Atp phosphor creatine, it's an anaerobic, so there's no oxygen, a lactic system, so no lactate is being produced. It's your most violent aggressive system last up to ten seconds. It fades very quickly, but bro, that shit is powerful, be strong, be fast, be powerful.One more thing that you can do to help with your power output is to supplement with creatine.Creatine is a number one supplement. Every fucking person on the planet, not even athlete, should be taking it. Not only is it unbelievable for your athletic performance, but it's very good for your brain as well. And as combat athletes, we need all the help that we can get.Quite honestly, [...0.5s] the way creatine works and why it's so beneficial is because when you supplement with creatine, your muscle gets saturated with creatine. And so typically when you use your atp system, atp pcr system, it burns out fairly quickly.Well, [...0.7s] when you're saturated with creatine, it takes just a little bit longer for it to burn out. That creatine is more readily available, and then it's gonna regenerate a little bit faster session to session. You're not gonna see massive gains.You know, if you could typically squat three sets of three with three fifteen on the bar, maybe you're gonna squeeze out a set of four [...0.5s] or a set of five.You might be able to do a couple extra reps in a movement per session, session to session, it's not that big of a deal, but an extra rep [...0.9s] each session, each month, each year. That's a lot of extra reps, and that can create a lot of extra gain. So you'll be silly not to be supplementing with creatine.But that's it, that's all i got for you, a quick power guide. Start training power right away if you want help developing power, cause i know it's a lot, and look, this shit is confusing. There's a lot of information out there, especially if you wanna succeed as a fighter. You don't have a lot of time to make it in this sport. Your window is small. I went to school for four years of learning this shit.I've been training mma since i was fucking five years old, and i'm still learning shit every single day.This is my lifetime, and it took me a long time to master these things. I'm telling you if you wanna make as a fighter, you don't have the time to learn all by yourself, and you probably don't have the enjoyment or desire to do it. You just wanna fucking train.You got enough shit to worry about. So if you're serious, and you want help, and you need to develop finishing power, cause you do. If you wanna make it, you gotta develop the finishing power.I love to see how we can help you reach out to me on instagram, dm me the word collective. I'll reach out. I'll say i can help, we'll put you on a plan, we'll get you finishing fights.I got five guys on my team this year that are looking to make contender series run, so we know what the fuck we're talking about. If you want help, hit me up. I'll see you on sunday when we break down thailand.It's gonna be alexandra's first appearance in the fight science made simple ponds podcast. I'm fucking hype. I hope you're fucking hype. I hope you have an incredible rest of your day, and i'll catch you next time. PeacePeace