You Don't Need Better Cardio

And you shouldn't sit out rounds

If it’s one thing that beginners — and even some intermediates, lord help me — say again and again it’s “Man, I need to work on my cardio”.¹

Let’s say friend Ricky joined you for basketball and spent 3 minutes chasing the ball all over the court — no coordination or plan, just constantly folling the ball, running to it as fast as he could — before sitting out. Then he said to you after “man, this was fun but I think I gotta work on my cardio before I do this again”. What would you tell him? If he went and did 6 months of absolutely world class Iron Man training with David Goggins and played no basketball, how would he do when he came back? He might last a few minutes longer, sure. He’d still get absolutely nothing done and the court. And in my experience, odds are he wouldn’t even last longer. He’d just be able to sprint faster for those 3 minutes, which still doesn’t help because he can’t outrun the ball. He’s just getting nowhere fast.

You don’t need to work on cardio, you need to get better at the game. And funnily enough, if you keep showing up to practice your cardio will tend to improve too, at least for the first few years.

For the uninitiated: a blue belt corresponds to 1-3 years of practice for most people, a brown belt 5-10 years.

You don’t need to sit out rounds. It’s actually the opposite. The more tired you are the more you need to be doing the next round. On the one hand, that’s how you improve your cardio. By pushing even harder when you reach the point when you feel you need a break. On the other hand it’s good that you’re tired

“But I want to be fresh!” why so you have more energy to waste uneconomically? Doing rounds while absolutely knackered will make you at least try something else than exploding with all your might out of a deadlocked position, or throw a flurry of punches and make huge dodges all over to avoid being hit. And usually it slows your partner down too. Believe it or not, we’re not trying to rip your head off as fast as possible. If you reduce the energy, we’ll usually match. No fun in beating up someone who is barely fighting back.

1. The worst version of this is “I’m gonna go and work on my cardio for a while, and then I’ll be back to train”. It means they are unlikely to come back, and if they do, they are absolutely not going to do better than they did before, because cardio was not the issue.