NEW! Articles
You may pay by credit card (Master Card, Visa, Discover Card, American Express), direct checking account transfer, or other methods implemented by PayPal.
Anaerobic vs. Aerobic Exercise
Proper Conditioning for the Martial Artist
by Si Hing A. J. Boyer
So, you want to become the ultimate martial arts warrior. Or, you’re already an experienced martial artist but for years you’ve neglected the fitness aspect of your training in favor of pure technique. There’s nothing whatsoever wrong with that, but too often in martial arts does a very critical element of becoming a well-rounded martial artists go over-looked—and that’s strength and conditioning.
Either way, let’s say that you’re looking to get in better shape as a martial artist to improve your overall skill and ability. Perhaps you’re not quite sure where to start. The basic nutritional aspect of this has been covered in another article and is equally important. Here, workout routines or exercise programs will not be covered. I’m only going to be discussing two types of exercise (aerobic and anaerobic). We’re going to learn the key differences between these two fundamental types of exercise, what kind of energy systems they activate in your body and which kind is better for you as a martial artist—and why.
You’re interested in building the type of strength, agility and endurance that’s going to benefit you in you’re training—not the kind that’ll slow you down, right? That can entail some gains in muscle mass as well, despite the fact that a lot of athletes are afraid that gaining too much muscle will slow them down. We’ll discuss that too. The key here is simple. It’s not to build big, dumb muscle or nonfunctional hypertrophy (which basically means big, dumb muscle) but a functional type of strength and fitness. Functional in the sense that it’ll work for you as a martial artist.
No, I am not a certified trainer. I’ll clear that up right now. If I was, I’d probably include some of my own personally designed weight training routines and whatnot. The following article is based on personal research of the last few months and I will cite appropriate sources to support the argument presented here, including well-known and well-established names in the fitness world, and authors of several books. That’s just a fancy way of saying, “I’m not a qualified professional, so I came up with plenty who would back me up.”
My goal here is to simplify the information and give it to you in its basic form to give you an understanding of what you need to do if you’re looking to improve your strength and conditioning for martial arts. There are plenty of books out about the subject. In fact, there are several titles I can recommend for you if you wish to delve further into the subject, including: Fit to Fight by Jason Ferruggia and Training for Warriors by Martin Rooney.
First off, I’m going to start by explaining just what the difference is between aerobic and anaerobic exercise. I think it’s important, if you don’t already know a little bit of the science behind how your body metabolizes energy for exercise. Most of you are undoubtedly already aware of what aerobic exercise is. Almost everyone has done some form of aerobics in their life, especially because popular understanding holds the idea that this is the best way to burn fat and improve cardiovascular health. Aerobics is any kind of low impact, low-to-moderate intensity exercise like a lot of what you see on FitTv, with instructors shouting encouraging words like, “keep it up!” or, “you’re looking great!”. Aerobics exercises include walking, jogging, cardio kickboxing, bicycling, dancing and swimming. Some sports like hockey or soccer rely mostly on your body’s aerobic system.
Aerobic and anaerobic exercise are so named because they describe two different ways in which your body produces energy. Aerobic literally means “with oxygen” and anaerobic means “without oxygen.”
The aerobic system, as mentioned above, powers long-term activity without a high level of intensity. Oxygen is used (hence the meaning “with oxygen”) to break down carbohydrate, fat and sometimes protein to generate energy. As long as there’s an internal balance between oxygen supply and oxygen demand, your body will rely on this system to power muscle contraction. We rely on our aerobic energy system the most during common daily activities, even when resting.
When it comes to short, intense bursts of energy, like sprinting or lifting weights, your body’s aerobic system cannot supply energy as quickly. Although it is much more efficient for generating energy, it is also much slower. The demand for energy is far too great for oxygen to supply. This is where your body turns to its anaerobic energy system to supply energy, which is done in two ways: through the breakdown of a chemical compound called creatine phosphate (CP) or through a process known as glycolysis in which muscle glycogen, the stored form of carbohydrate, is broken down. CP supplies enough energy to power up to ten seconds of intense activity. Glycolysis can power high energy activity for up to sixty seconds in most people and for up to two minutes in elite athletes like wrestlers, boxers and mixed martial artists.
Your body doesn’t rely on just one system of energy production at a time, but the type of exercise that you’re doing does determine which one predominates. Let’s look at an example given by Lou Schuler, author of The New Rules of Lifting:
Let’s say you’re walking to the bus stop, using your aerobic energy system, and suddenly realize you’ll miss the bus if you don’t run the final two blocks. Energy for those first few steps will come from your phosphagen (CP) system, buying time for your glycolytic system to kick in. But that doesn’t mean your aerobic system has shut down; it’s simply adjusting to the new demands and will be back in play after about twenty to thirty seconds of running.
(p. 87, parentheses added)
Martial arts in general are primarily anaerobic in nature. Especially the fighting. Punching, kicking, shooting in for the takedown, grappling, throwing, pushing, pulling—all those moves that require explosive knock-out power and speed use your anaerobic energy system. To be a good martial artist you need to have explosive power and speed at the same time without sacrificing too much power. You won’t develop that kind of skill through aerobic exercise like jogging. Your main source of fuel for training and fighting is glycogen (carbohydrates). Recall that glycogen is the primary source of fuel for any anaerobic activity.
So what about endurance? You can jog five miles a day for months or years but it won’t do anything to improve your fighting stamina. You’ll be in great aerobic shape, that’s true, but since fighting is mainly an anaerobic activity, that aerobic stamina will not translate much to your training. Obviously, you don’t want to completely neglect your aerobic energy system as useless because, as mentioned above, no one energy system is used at a time. However, aerobics will do nothing to improve your anaerobic capacity, but the converse is true.
Anaerobic exercise can increase your aerobic capacity. By now you can probably see that anaerobic exercise is definitely preferred to aerobic when it comes to martial arts. Don’t spend your time and energy on the treadmill or at the track running three miles a day to try and get in better fighting shape. Remember, as a martial artist you need to think shorter, more intense exercises like sprints. Jogging the stadium stairs is also an excellent idea. Another excellent way to condition yourself for fighting is through High-intensity interval training, or HIIT, which will be discussed later as well.
at.
So by now you might be wondering, “what about fat-burning?” A martial artist is more than just someone who screams, “KIYAH!!!” every time they throw a punch, or judo-chops their opponents into unconsciousness. A good martial artist is also an athlete, in a lot of ways. Martial artists who are concerned about their fitness levels are obviously interested in burning fat just as much as building explosive strength. So let us now compare the fat burning effects of both aerobic and anaerobic exercise.
Although anaerobic exercise is the best form of exercise to get in fighting shape—does it burn fat? And if it does, is it as effective as doing aerobics? Certainly, for the past several decades the popular notion has been that aerobic exercise is certainly the best mode for burning fat. This is a very logical idea, after all, the primary source of fuel for aerobic work is fat and fat cannot be burned (metabolized) except in the presence of oxygen. According to Susan Kleiner, PhD, RD, and author of Power Eating, “In the initial stages of exercise, oxygen is not yet available. It can take 20 to 40 minutes of exercise before fat is maximally available to the muscles as fuel.” This is why aerobic workouts usually have a relatively low level of intensity and last very long. This is also why a lot of strength trainers include aerobic exercise in their training to become leaner.
Makes sense enough. All of what’s said above is true, of course. Anaerobic exercise uses primarily carbohydrates for energy where aerobic exercise uses fat. So it makes sense that most people wouldn’t think that weightlifting or sprinting could effectively burn fat. Well let’s just hold it right there.
For a little back-up here, I turn to Michael Mejia, C.S.C.S, a certified strength and conditioning specialist since 1993 and contributor to Men’s Health magazine:
"When getting lean is the goal, there’s a lot to be said for short-burst, anaerobic forms of exercise like sprinting and strength training, as well as interval work where your level of intensity varies throughout the workout. Besides the greater fat-burning potential, these anaerobic activities also present your cardiovascular system with a more potent training stimulus."
(Better Body Blueprint, p. 262)
Mejia also makes a great point in commenting that even though athletes like sprinters and gymnasts include little-to-no aerobic exercise in their training regimen, “they typically display some of the lowest body fat levels of any athletes.” He also says, regarding the importance many people place on aerobic exercise to get lean and mean:
"I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard misguided trainers and nutritionists advise their clients to work at lower intensities so they can 'burn fat, not sugar.' Unfortunately, besides being erroneous, this mind-set has also blinded many people to numerous cardiovascular and fat-fighting benefits that anaerobic exercise has to offer."
(p. 263)
So how exactly is it that we get the fat-burning benefits that we typically associate with aerobic exercise out of anaerobic exercise? Allow me to introduce what exercise scientists call EPOC—or Excess post-exercise oxygen consumption. I recently discovered this thanks to the work of both Lou Schuler and Michael Mejia.
Basically what this means is that after exercise, especially intense exercise, your metabolism actually stays elevated—even for up to hours after your workout. A metabolism that’s working harder uses more energy and you can bet that fat is a source for that energy. According to Mejia, a 1992 study showed that the more carbohydrates you burn during your workout, the more fat you burn after the workout, as even your resting metabolic rate stays elevated. Intense anaerobic exercise obviously burns more carbohydrates than anything else. I believe this is known as metabolic overload. That basically means repeating a kick-your-ass effort at a consistent pace “enough times to create an overload on your metabolism" (Mejia).
I can also include my own testimony here, from personal experience. At the Hsin Lu Academy, for the last two or three months perhaps, we’ve been engaging in intense anaerobic workouts lasting, on average, no more than twenty minutes. It’s basically circuit training, a form of anaerobic exercise in which you usually alternate between upper and lower body exercises grouped together for high repetitions and low weight (or body weight) with little-to-no rest in between. A typical workout includes sprinting, pull ups, plyometric (explosive) push ups, squat jumps, burpees, bear crawls, etc. We use only bodyweight exercises because we simply don’t have the equipment (everybody’s exercising at the same time) to include weights.
Although I weight train a little on the side as well, I’ve definitely noticed a decrease in body fat in the last couple months. At the same time, these types of workouts require a certain degree of “mental toughness,” or shall I say “psychological fortitude” if that sounds better, which is excellent for the martial artist. Believe me, twenty minutes seems like an awful long time when training like this.
If anaerobic exercise had no fat burning effect then athletes like gymnasts and sprinters wouldn’t look like they do. As Jason Ferruggia asks in his book, Fit To Fight, “which would you rather look like?”—the sprinter, who’s lean and muscular (many sprinters strength train as well), or the skinny long-distance runner? As a martial artist, I hope you chose the former.
Forget all that stuff about how more muscle slows you down. It does if you’re not training properly. But if your regimen includes a healthy diet of dynamic, total-body and power-developing exercises like pull-ups, sprints or plyometrics, you’re basically going to teach your muscles to be quick and powerful, no matter what size they’re at. I’ve seen a fair share of “bulky” fighters who display levels of speed you wouldn’t expect from someone at their size. In the UFC, Rashad Evans is certainly among those. George St. Pierre’s (welterweight champion) coach even commented on the television show UFC: Primetime that Evans, a current light heavyweight champion, was about as fast as a lightweight. The secret? Good training.
Now, I want to briefly move on to the subject of High-intensity interval training, just like I said I would earlier in the article. HIIT involves exercises like sprinting, cycling, jumping rope or even swimming. Interval training basically involves taking a certain exercise like one of these, turning up the intensity very high for a short period of time (anywhere between 10 and 120 seconds), then bringing the intensity down for a longer period of time, for recovery, before kicking it back up into high gear. You may repeat this pattern for about ten to fifteen minutes. Interval training is an excellent fat burning routine, according to Schuler, Mejia and Cosgrove (co-author of The New Rules of Lifting). It’s also a great method of conditioning for fighting. In Training for Warriors, Martin Rooney has a form of high intensity interval training he calls “Hurricane Training”, illustrating the intense nature of HIIT. His workouts are short as well, for a good reason! A professional trainer, he uses these routines to condition professional mixed martial arts fighters. That means they work.
HIIT sends your metabolism into “overdrive”, meaning it places a lot of stress on it. And due to EPOC, your RMR stays ELV (just kidding, ELV doesn’t mean anything). Just thought I’d annoy you with more acronyms (I think there are a lot of them in the fitness world). Anyway, because of EPOC your resting metabolic rate stays elevated for a while and you “burn some calories during exercise and a lot afterward” (Schuler). With this type of exercise, you also don’t need to worry about keeping your heart rate in that “fat burning zone” that people who participate in aerobic exercise are so concerned about.
I don’t want to give the wrong impression here. If aerobic exercise is your thing and you enjoy it, then there’s obviously no reason why you shouldn’t do it. Some people jog or bike ride because it relaxes them or because it’s an easier way to burn fat, especially for people over forty. Not everyone will want to train in intense, extremely demanding bouts of exercise. Nowhere in this article or in any other material I’ve researched so far has anyone tried to disprove the fat-burning/cardiovascular benefits of aerobics. Aerobic exercise works, of course. Don’t get the idea that it doesn’t. However, the fact remains that if you want to properly condition yourself as a martial artist, anaerobic exercise is certainly the way to go. So although aerobic exercise works, it doesn’t work in the way you need it to for what you practice.
Again, if you simply love to jog or do any other form of aerobic exercise, I’m the last person to discourage you from it. You should always do what you enjoy. Bruce Lee was a phenomenal martial artist in excellent shape who loved to go on 4-mile jogs in the morning. You can always find a safe way to incorporate aerobic training into your schedule if you wish. Sticking to what you enjoy is the best way to guarantee that you’ll stay on a workout plan without becoming discouraged, so never reject what you like.