Want to know how to get more out of your athletes in their conditioning sessions and maybe more time in the gym, too? Of course—it’s a no brainer!

First, what does TUF stand for? Well, I’m afraid it isn’t ‘The Ultimate Fighter’ as I’m sure some of you may have thought. TUF stands for ‘technique under fatigue.’ It basically is training your techniques and skills in a fatigued state with the goal of building a higher level of skill that can be demonstrated in field/court/mat performance.

Rather than have your athletes display perfect skills in practice and then start their conditioning afterward, why not combine the two and kill two birds with one stone? After all, isn’t that the goal of strength and conditioning programs—to improve performance in the chosen sport?

A Case for TUF

TUF-style conditioning has been used extensively with professional rugby and to a certain degree with football (soccer) in the United Kingdom for some time now. It isn’t any coincidence that most of the goals scored in the English football premiership are in the last five minutes of the first half and the last 15 minutes of the second half. It’s a very similar pattern in rugby, too. Although I don’t have the statistics on hand, I would put money on there being more MMA fights ended in the last 90 seconds of the round than the first 3.5 minutes. It sounds pretty straight forward, but it gets interesting when you consider why this might be the case.

The end result of conceding points in a match—dropping the ball, bad passes, or whatever it may be—is a consequence of fatigue. But where does this fatigue actually occur in the kinetic chain? Is it in the cardiovascular system? This is the focus of most conditioning programs. Or is it the muscles themselves that tire? Again, this is the focus of most general conditioning programs. While I’m sure there is a strong element of both of these areas involved, I would argue that at the higher levels of sports performance, amidst all the pressure and chaos, the neuromuscular system is greatly affected. It’s this along with the cardiovascular system and general muscular fatigue that explains the breakdown of technique causing the mistakes to happen.

At the elite level, the ability to effectively execute skill-based movements at key times is what wins matches/fights. But how do we prepare our athletes for these situations? Still interested? Keep reading then.

Down to the specifics

In my experience, TUF conditioning has worked very well and has a place in an elite conditioning program without question. Over the years, I’ve used this with elite rugby players, MMA fighters, and tennis players. In fact, I’ve used it with all the skill-based sports that I’ve worked with and have seen great results. So what does this mean exactly? Well, let me give you a couple of specific examples for the main sports I work with, though I use this type of training for most, if not all, of the sports I work with.

Example 1: Rugby

First, imagine three stations set up on the rugby field.

Station 1: I run this station and deliver a shuttle sprint session consisting of 25 meters x six repetitions x six sets for a total of six minutes with a total covered distance of 900 meters.

Station 2: The defensive coach runs this station by working a wrestling skill drill involving two versus one tackling. The skill is introduced and then drilled at high intensity for six minutes.

Station 3: The athletes play a game of three versus four in a small grid. They have heart rate monitors that are checked to ensure they’re working at 85 percent of their maximum throughout. If a player drops below 85 percent, he has to perform burpees to bring it back up. The drill is started with all players performing 10 burpees, 10 jump squats, and 10 split squat jumps to get the heart rate where it needs to be.

There are around eight guys per group. There are quick transitions between each rotation without any rest periods. The athletes run through the stations three times and cover about 5 km, which is somewhere close to game distance for certain positions. The total session lasts one hour with a couple of minutes in between each rotation.

Example 2: MMA

6 minutes of 30 seconds of exercise and 30 seconds of technical sparring

Specifics:

This session works well for groups. It basically involves integrating movement-based exercises with drilling. Each person finds a space on the mats and performs burpees for 30 seconds. On my call, the group splits up into pairs and performs stand-up jab only sparring. After 30 seconds, they go into alternating split squat jumps and then back into sparring. However, this time jab and cross can be used, and each person must pair up with a different partner.

The drill continues for five to six minutes. There is one minute of rest and then we move into the next round. I tend to do one boxing/kickboxing round, one clinching round, and one ground round. For the different rounds, I use different exercises to condition the relevant body parts that will be stressed in the following drill. For example, clinching requires a lot of upper body strength endurance, so push-ups and medicine ball slams are excellent for this.

With the MMA athletes, I ask the coach what he has them working on and create some scenarios around this, or I'll just go through a stand-up clinch and ground-based round. If there are athletes a few weeks out from a fight, I gear the session around their game plan. For example, if an athlete is a grappler, I might do more takedowns with some isolated sparring. The key is to keep it a conditioning session, not a sparring session, so you need to use isolated drills only, not open sparring. The goal is to improve skills!

These are just a couple of examples for two sports. The options are really endless. However, the key points for TUF conditioning are this:

  1. Integrate conditioning with technical/skill work
  2. Be specific with the conditioning to suit the skills being trained. This requires collaboration with the coaches.
  3. The conditioning needs to be progressive just like general conditioning. The goal is to build technique in a fatigued state, not obliterate the athletes.

Pros and Cons of TUF

Now before you jump the gun and tell me that conditioning should be general and not within a sports-specific scenario, let me outline a few of the pros and cons of using this method versus traditional methods. I’ll also give you some potential methods for programming this.

Pros

1. Athlete engagement: Athletes love to play their sport. Small sided games and drills will always get a greater buy in from the athletes than traditional conditioning sessions such as sprints.

2. Greater recovery time: This is a big one for me. If you can take away some of the volume from the program, the athletes get more time to recover. Even better, you might get more time in the gym with them.

3. Forces you to develop sports-specific knowledge: Thinking up drills and integrating them with sports-specific coaches is great for improving yourself and making yourself a part of the program. If you want to go to the top in a certain sport, you had better be able to speak their language and have a passion for that particular sport!

4. Athletes develop highly specific physical qualities which carryover to their sport: Is this not the role of the strength and conditioning coach? I’ll leave this point for you to reflect on.

Cons

1. Difficult to measure progress: Yes, I accept that it’s difficult in comparison to traditional conditioning unless you have equipment that allows you to do so such as heart rate monitors or GPS systems. Without this stuff, you can only really monitor your particular sections of the session as opposed to the other sections coached by the technical staff. So if you need your athletes to cover a set distance, it might not be the best option. From a monitoring point of view, it isn’t any different than a traditional conditioning session. You can get RPE back from the athletes and use the duration to work out volumes for the week (e.g. RPE 7/10, duration 0.5 hours = 3.5 units). This can then fit into your overall program for volume load.

TUF requires a slightly different mindset to traditional conditioning. Your measuring has to come from the performance itself. How about measuring the number of fumbles seen in a match, the percentage of takedowns successfully prevented in a fight, the percentage of backhands successfully made down the line? This is true sport-specific feedback and will come from the athletes themselves or through the coaches.

 

2. Need an open mind and a willingness to learn: OK, somehow this made it on to the cons list! Personally, I would put it on the pros list, but I know that there are people out there who don't have the inclination to develop. For these people, the TUF approach won’t work. If you’re going to implement this kind of conditioning, you need to have a good understanding of the sport in question so that you can set up specific scenarios that will improve the participants. This means you need to get into the sport and understand it.

3. Not suited for novice/ intermediate athletes: This is true from both a physiological standpoint and a skill standpoint! What is the goal? Technique under fatigue. Well, if you don't have any of this when you’re fresh it defeats the point, right? It isn’t for everyone, and some athletes aren’t ready for it. This is going to be maturity dependent. You’re the coaches—work this out!

 

Programming TUF: Where does it fit in?

This will completely depend on the logistics of the environment you work in. If you work in a gym packed full of equipment and very little space, you might struggle. If you work with a sports team or fight team and you can get to the practice sessions, you should be fine.

From a periodization point of view, the general preparation work will obviously still be in there. This is clearly the focus in the pre-season. The TUF work will start once the technical coaches start to need time with the athletes, which for me tends to be the middle/end of pre-season. At this point, I switch to both TUF and general work. From there, the balance changes and the conditioning will be pretty much TUF-based throughout the season unless there are weeks off. If I want to test the players to gauge fitness, I can revert back to more traditional work for this without any problem.

For fighters, it’s much easier. They don’t have a season. Therefore, the TUF work is part of their overall program from the outset in combination with general work. The TUF work tends to be delivered either at squad training sessions or specific fight preparation in line with the technical game plan.

I hope you can see some of the benefits of this type of work with your athletes. When training, get serious! It’s time to ‘tuffen’ up!

Brendan Chaplin is the CEO and founder of Strength and Conditioning Education, the UK's largest S&C coaching and training company. You can reach Brendan on all social platforms @brendanchaplin where he will be happy to answer your questions and take your feedback.