As a combat athlete, you are training hard, and training often. But are you consuming enough calories to allow your body to repair itself and grow stronger?

A common problem is that many athletes try to eat less and exercise more, in the hope of gaining strength and dropping fat. This is a problem because you cannot train for one goal but eat for another.

By training at a high intensity multiple times per week to develop strength and endurance, but not eating enough calories your body will likely start using muscle tissue for energy. As you can imagine, less muscle mass is not great for MMA performance. It doesn’t help you look any better to the opposite sex either!


A vital principle of strength & conditioning to remember is that you should always plan your training around your recovery. Don’t plan your calorie intake after deciding on what your exercise program will be. This is because recovery (meaning nutrition and sleep / rest)is the biggest part of growing stronger and improving performance. How can this be?

Simple: we spend approximately 3-4 hours per week training in the gym. This means that we spend on average 164 hours per week recovering. Therefore we can see just how important recovery is.


Remember, exercise stimulates your body by breaking the muscles and tissues down. Your body then demands a sufficient amount of calories to repair this damage and grow the tissues back stronger than before. In other words, recovery burns calories too. And when you work at higher intensities, your body burns even more calories when regenerating.

In essence, if your calorie intake doesn’t match your calorie expenditure, you won’t get stronger, faster or better. In fact, you’ll end up getting weaker, slower and smaller as your muscles get burned away to make up for the energy you are not giving your body.



A perfect example of a coach who understands this is Amir Kahn’s strength coach, Alex Ariza. Since working in Freddie Roach’s camp for the last several months, Kahn has seen a huge improvement in skill, athleticism and physique. This was clearly evident during his 76-second win over previously-unbeaten Dmitriy Salita last week.

It was revealed that the gruelling, high-intensity training that Kahn was enduring for up to 6 days per week was only possible due to the 6000kcal per day plan that he had been given.

You may also remember the Olympic record-smashing swimmer Michael Phelps from the Beijing games last year. He trained for 6 hours per day to get those medals. His required calorie intake was 12,000 calories per day!

This goes to show that you shouldn’t be afraid of high calories diets, as long as those calories are coming from healthy food sources. Your calorie intake needs to meet the demands of your training intensity, duration and frequency (times per week).



However, I often hear trainees claim that they are worried that they will gain fat if they eat over 2000kcals per day. But if you are training as you should for MMA / combat – at high-intensities for not much longer than an hour per session – then you need not worry about fat gain. High-intensity training forces your body to send most calories to muscle cells, rather than deposit them as fat, so eating more in these cases will usually make you leaner and stronger.



If you do have a fair amount of fat to lose in order to reach your desired weight, I’d recommend focusing on a strict fat-loss regime before getting overly concerned with strength and MMA performance.

In fact, just dropping any excess pounds of fat alone will increase your speed and endurance since you’ll be lighter and will have less fat holding you down.



I’d like to urge you all to have a look at your calorie intakes. Are you training to meet the demands of your sport? But more importantly, are you eating to meet the demands of your training?

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