Jul

Thoughts on the Shane Carwin fight against Brock Lesnar

Warning there are spoilers.

As you might know I am a fan of Mixed Martial Arts both because I was a martial artist with a love of Judo in particular and because I am a strength and conditioning coach/personal trainer. Now this past weekend was a big fight between Shane Carwin who came in with an astonishing record of 12 wins and zero losses with nobody even making it out of the first round and Brock Lesnar a freakish athlete who held the legitimate Ufc heavy weight belt. Here let me just show the promo video so you can get a little bit of an understanding of what the fight was like in case you went unaware of it.

Now here come the spoilers.

The entire first round was very one sided in favor of Carwin. Carwin has monstrous power and was giving an incredible beatdown on Lesnar. If you ever wondered what a frightened look on Lesnar’s face would be like it was after he felt the power of Carwin. I was amazed that they didn’t stop the fight thats how much of a beat down it was.

The thing is it didn’t last. Going into the second round Carwin basically locked up and had lost all of his strength/power and was unable to stuff Lesnar’s takedown. A friend of mine who could actually be a fight analyst had a little debate with me via facebook comments where he said it was probably attributed to “adrenaline dump”. I figured he was unable to buffer his lactic acid.

According to an article on MMAfighting.com Carwin claimed to be feeling the effects of lactic acidosis. Supposedly it happens with the build up of lactic acid in your body which causes the effects of fatigue and is a biproduct of the body using it’s ATP stores (adenosine tri phosphate).

Now I’m not going to pretend to be smarter then Greg Jackson (Carwin’s trainer) because I have no champions or number 1 contenders to my credit while he’s put out the likes of Carwin, Georges St. Pierre, Rashad Evans as well as a host of other bad asses. I can only comment as a coach on the outside looking in.

Carwin has serious power but it appears he doesn’t have power endurance. It could be because he hasn’t trained to produce, buffer and tolerate high levels of lactic acid which would be required for power endurance. The only thing I can really recommend is to program that into his training sessions with specific work rest ratios with the intention of doing that. The only way I really know how is with the lactic acid tolerance protocol and lactic acid boost protocol from Viking Warrior Conditioning.

Since power is a function of strength and speed I would probably focus a little bit more on speed via over speed snatches done to the rules of that book. I really believe that if he could have maintained the kind of power he had in the first round of that fight it would have been him walking out with that 4x hand raised in the air of victory.

I am currently doing the V02 Max protocol from that book and it is actually a little scary how effective it is.