The title of this article states a lofty goal so allow me right up front to say that what I am referring to here are the broad general categories that I see as necessary for both the combat sport competitor and the real-world survival trainee. These elements may exist in different proportion for these two combat domains but they do exist as complete and interlocking wholes nevertheless. 

By this I mean that failure to include any single element (or elements) can lead to failure in combat response as we all know violence is prone to chaos and assuming predictable physical demand is a mistake in and of itself.

ONE-Strength. A fight is conflict. A fight is resistance. Failure to include some form of strength/catabolic/resistance training in your preparedness regimen is being blind to the nature of the realities of conflict.

With that said, strength training does not necessarily mean dedicated heavy-lifting (although it can mean that) but at the very least it must entail serious bodyweight training to provide the bare minimum of required strength.

TWO--Anaerobic Capacity. Most fights are anaerobic in nature, meaning that red-lined endurance is more common than steady-state, long-form endurance. Failure to address the boundary pushing red-line nature of anaerobic training is a prescription to fail fast once the serious pressure is on. Anaerobic capability can not be flex-posed in a mirror, either you got it or you ain't.

THREE--Aerobic Capacity. Anaerobic/red-line endurance is a must, but this does not mean that we kill the idea of being able to go to the well for repeated anaerobic bursts with periods of lesser sustained activity in between. The aerobic component needed for a fight is less the kind needed for a better 10K  time and more the ability to red-line and yet still perform at a high-level in the relative energy expenditure valleys between the peaking red-line thresholds.

FOUR-Graduated/Variability. The first three components are sometimes meant to be addressed individually to give each aspect of conditioning full effort with no hedging or "holding back" in anticipation of the next physical demand. This sort of exertion governance is common and wise in both a fight and circuit training which allows us to combine the aforementioned three, but, more often than not a healthy mixture of the first three components is advisable to mimic as closely as we can the demands of a fight. And even this replication will be sub-par at best as circuit training, no matter how well designed, still is sequential task management, meaning "First I sprint, now I'm doing pull-ups, now I'm hitting 10 power cleans." Yes, a tough workload but fights seldom allow such linear or predictable sequences or physical demand separation.

Circuit training is never the ideal but it is the best thing we've got.

FIVE--Skills & Drills. This is where the rubber meets the road as far as cultivating your sport (fight game/street preparedness) goes. This is pure technical, tactical, and strategic cultivation. This is where we groove our "neural nets" and "grease the response gears" to do what we want them to do when the poop hits the fan.

When it comes to skills and drills there is often a tendency in some to treat the training of the sport itself as the physical preparation--this is a mistake. Yes, skills & drills can be grueling and it is conditioning specific but...skills and drills are seldom (if ever) conducted at full-on fight conditions. Yeah, I know you can drill and bang hard to build skills (as you wisely should) but it will still have elements of hedge involved as you restrict domains, or adhere to a drill form. It is physically impossible to fight all out 100% in all training sessions, these brittle mortal bodies of ours simply won't hold up to the trauma.

That's where the prior five components come into play. They allow us to red-line and inflict controllable trauma that can be managed in recoverable doses.

SIX--Mobility. I think we are getting closer to a world that realizes that the benefits of "stretching" are over-rated and without scientific justification and moving closer to a wiser corollary of pre-hab and re-hab mobility work. Whether you term this aspect myofascial-trigger point release, joint work, or still want to call it stretching it is an area that should not be ignored. Combat sportsmen/women and street survivalists have too many encounters with repeated trauma not to see the benefit of trying to keep those hips, knees, shoulders, and the like as primed as we can.

Mobility, although it will manifest in all your movement in all five elements of conditioning is best worked in patient isolation so that you don't lose the red-line threshold that we must cultivate to keep the fighting human good to go.

We engage all six elements in our inTENS material used by our affiliate members to keep us red-lined in as many domains as we can, and if any folks are curious about the weekly templates we send out to the crew they can head-on over to our site and have a look at inTENS. Failing that, any regimen that includes and addresses all six aspects on a regular basis should fit the bill. If you take a good look at what you're doing now and see where you might come up short of one or more of the six elements you might want to do a little addition.