Strength and Conditioning Assessments

All throughout our childhoods, we’ve been administered tests to measure such things as our math skills (I killed these – thank you Chinese genetics!), reading ability, knowledge of history, geography, and more.

CB029645 Pretty much every topic that we learned about, we were tested on.

Although some may argue that these tests don’t say much about our intelligence, they are definitely better than nothing.

After all, how do we know we’ve improved, if we don’t have a base level to compare against?

In terms of strength and conditioning for mixed-martial arts, it seems that testing yourself is not very common.

Instead, most guys are content to simply push themselves as hard as they can every workout and trust in blind faith that they’re improving their fitness for MMA.

Unfortunately, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

If you take MMA seriously, then you must keep an eye on your progress, to make sure your workouts are in fact working and that you’re getting stronger, more powerful, and improving your endurance.

Here are some basic tests that you can do right now to give yourself a baseline level of fitness that you can retest again a couple months down the road to see if you are in fact improving your fitness:

Upper Body

1) Maximum strength – Bench press (3RM)

Come on, can you really call yourself a guy if you don’t know, "How much ya bench?" I prefer to use a 3-4 RM just because for those fighters with less than stellar technique, going for a 1RM can put your shoulders at risk.

Just do a good warmup, then see how much weight you can push for 3 clean reps.

2) Endurance – Maximum # of Pushups

Easy – do as many as you can in good form. And whatever your form is, make sure you use the same form each time you test.

3) Recovery – Maximum # of Pushups, 1 minute rest, Maximum # of Pushups

This test shows you how quickly your upper body push muscles recover after complete exhaustion. Make sure you stick to EXACTLY 1 minute between sets to get an accurate gauge of your recovery ability.

Now you can do all of these same tests for your pulling muscles. The best way to do this would be either to use chinups or lat pulldowns. Rows are tough because form gets messy and range of motion shortens and it can be tough to judge when this happens and when the test should end – with chinups, if you can’t get your chin over the bar, the test is done. Also make sure you use a full range of motion, no choppy chinups!

These 3 tests are easy to do – you can even do the pushup tests right now after reading this article.

In fact – I want to hear what your results are like. Do the pushup test right when you’re done here (after a couple of warmup sets), then write your results in the comments below.

It’ll take you 4 minutes to do, and if we get enough participation, I’ll post 4 more tests for you to measure your strength, power, power endurance, and recovery for your lower body.

Let’s see what you’re made of – post your results to tests #2 and #3 below (and #1 if you know it). Toss your age in too if you want.