Phase IV Science in the Championship

Phase IV MMA athlete Joe Warren (L) will fight for the Bantamweight World Title on Friday, May 2nd. Photo courtesy Bellator.

Next Friday in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Phase IV-trained fighter Joe Warren competes for the Bellatore Bantam Weight Mixed Martial Arts Title. This is the ultimate step in our foray into training athletes for combat sports. Although we have trained athletes to Olympic and professional championships in a variety of sports before, this is the first time we are poised to be at ground zero of a paradigm shift in sports training for any one sport.

Over ten years ago, when we first applied Phase IV sport science to local high school wrestling, we were met with great resistance. Detractors said that heart rate progression training was impossible in combat sports because the matches are so challenging that athletes have to go hard in training all the time to be prepared. The conventional wisdom held that over-training was the norm because it created the mental toughness needed to compete at the highest level. The fact that no other sport trains so hard all the time, for months on end without altering the training stress, didn't matter to the hardcore coaches and athletes in combat sports. Never mind that great athletes who could have gone on to win Olympic gold in wrestling or MMA titles too often get spit out the back of the pack from injury and burnout, this is the way they have always trained.

After proving that when an athlete's fitness is peaked for competition -- instead of over-trained -- great performances follow, we started to make some headway, winning a California State Championship. Taking that experience to the professional ranks of MMA, we found a like-minded coach in Marc Montoya at the Factory X gym outside Denver, Colorado. He understood that no athlete who trained like a combat athlete would ever set a world record in another sport, and that fitness needs to be a separate and sacred aspect of training that has to peak to complement technique and create great performances. Soon, all of his fighters began wearing heart rate monitors and following Phase IV heart rate progression science, holding back in training for up to 8 weeks to first develop a fitness base before progressing to the grueling workouts that forge champions.