Harder Isn't Better: Why Khamzat Chimaev's Conditioning Training Raises Serious Questions
By Adam Lusby | S&C Coach to UFC Fighters & World Champions
A video I posted recently went viral. Over 500,000 views. Thousands of comments. UFC fighters follows and likes. And sitting in my inbox were messages from some of the most respected coaches in combat sports, all saying the same thing.
So let me say publicly what I said in the video that sparked the conversation: this is not what elite MMA conditioning looks like. And it matters, because when training footage from a fighter of Chimaev's profile goes viral, it shapes what fighters, coaches and gyms around the world think good preparation looks like.
What Was Actually in the Video
Let's be specific, because vague criticism isn't useful. The session included:
Banded punches and kicks
Squatting on a BOSU ball
Resistance bands added to Assault Bike work
A collection of random high-effort exercises designed, as far as I can tell, to make the athlete look exhausted
Each of these is a problem. Let me explain why.
Banded Striking: Why It's a No
Banded punches and kicks are one of the most persistent myths in combat sports conditioning. The logic sounds reasonable, add resistance to the movement, get stronger at the movement. But this is not how neuromuscular adaptation works.
Here's why it's wrong:
1. It alters your biomechanics. Under band resistance, your body compensates. You punch and kick differently. And your nervous system is learning exactly what you practise. If you train the movement under resistance, you are grooving a modified pattern, not the one you need in a fight.
2. Striking power is about Rate of Force Development, not strength against resistance. A punch doesn't require you to push hard against something pulling back at you. It requires you to accelerate mass explosively from zero. Bands develop the wrong quality entirely.
3. The deceleration phase changes. In a real strike, your muscles decelerate the limb at the end of range, protecting your joints. Bands alter this. Over time, that's a concern for joint health.
4. Better tools exist. If you want to develop explosive striking power, you use medicine ball throws, plyometric work, contrast training, and speed-specific drills. These develop Rate of Force Development without compromising your mechanics. There is no credible performance science case for banded striking.
BOSU Ball Squats: For Rehab, Not Performance
Squatting on a BOSU ball has one legitimate application: rehabilitation and proprioception work following ankle or knee injury.
For a healthy, high-performance athlete? The research is clear. Unstable surface training significantly reduces force output — by some estimates up to 70% compared to stable ground. You simply cannot load the movement effectively. And sport performance is built on the ability to produce force from stable ground, because that is what fighting demands.
This is not controversial in sports science. The idea that making a simple movement harder by removing stability transfers to improved athletic performance has been studied extensively. It does not hold up. For a fighter at Chimaev's level, BOSU squats are a waste of time at best.
Banded Assault Bike Work: You've Just Ruined a Precision Tool
The Assault Bike is one of the best conditioning tools available to a combat sports athlete, because it is measurable. Watts. Calories. Speed. You can track output, set targets, and monitor improvement over time.
The moment you add bands to the Assault Bike, you destroy that. The resistance becomes variable and unmeasurable. You cannot track whether your athlete is improving. You cannot compare sessions. You cannot manage load intelligently.
All you have done is made it harder. And harder is not the same as better.
The Real Problem: There Is No Structure Here
The individual exercises are issues. But the bigger problem is what the session represents: conditioning without a framework.
Every session in a properly periodised MMA camp should answer these questions before a single rep is performed:
What adaptation are we targeting?
Aerobic base development? That belongs out of camp or in early camp, at controlled intensities.
Anaerobic capacity? That has a specific phase, a specific structure, specific work-to-rest ratios.
Peripheral adaptation — muscular endurance and local fatigue resistance? That's different programming again.
Central adaptation — cardiac output and oxygen delivery? Different again.
You cannot develop all of these simultaneously by running someone through a hard circuit. What you actually do is accumulate enormous fatigue while driving minimal specific adaptation. You are paying a very high cost for a very poor return.
How are you measuring output? Heart rate zones. Watts on the bike. Speed. These are not optional extras — they are how you know if the session did what it was supposed to do. They are how you track improvement across a camp. Without measurable data, you are not coaching. You are guessing.
How are you monitoring the athlete? Objective markers, Resting Heart Rate and HRV, tell you whether your athlete is recovering or accumulating fatigue. Subjective communication , actually talking to your athlete, tells you what they can't measure themselves. Both matter. Both are non-negotiable at the elite level.
And critically: S&C should always work around the skills sessions, not the other way around. A fighter's primary training is technical. striking, wrestling, grappling, tactics. Conditioning work exists to support that, not compete with it. If your S&C session is so fatiguing that it compromises the quality of the skills work, you have your priorities wrong.
The Weight Cut Connection Nobody Is Talking About
A lot of people are attributing Chimaev's recent struggles to a difficult weight cut. And yes, the cut was hard. But here is what most of those people are missing: the training approach and the weight cut problems are not separate issues. They are the same problem.
This type of training — excessive, unstructured, high-fatigue circuits done repeatedly through a camp — directly makes weight cuts harder. Here is the physiology:
Chronically elevated cortisol. Overtraining drives cortisol through the roof. Cortisol, your primary stress hormone, promotes fat retention — particularly visceral fat — and causes your body to hold onto water. When you are already trying to get down to weight and your cortisol is permanently elevated from grinding through punishing sessions day after day, your body is actively working against you. You are fighting the cut and the training at the same time.
Reduced daily movement. When you are beaten down from back-to-back hard circuits, you stop moving. You sit more. You rest more. You are so depleted that your Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis — the calories you burn just moving through your day — drops significantly. This is a massive contributor to total calorie expenditure, and it is completely overlooked when all the focus is on how brutal the sessions look. A fatigued athlete lying on a sofa burns far fewer calories than a well-managed athlete going about their day normally.
Systemic inflammation and water retention. Poorly structured, high-volume training causes significant muscle damage and systemic inflammation. Your body responds by retaining water. So in the final weeks of camp, when the athlete is trying to shed weight, they are carrying excess water caused directly by the training they are doing. You cannot train your way to a good weight cut. You have to manage your way to one.
Muscle breakdown. Chronically elevated cortisol is catabolic — it breaks down muscle tissue. Less muscle means a lower resting metabolic rate, which makes managing weight even harder over time. You are literally destroying the athlete's ability to manage their body composition by overtraining them.
Disrupted sleep. Overtraining degrades sleep quality. Poor sleep elevates cortisol further, disrupts the hormones that regulate hunger (ghrelin and leptin) and leaves the athlete harder to manage calorically because their appetite and recovery signalling is completely dysregulated.
The compounding stress problem. A weight cut is already one of the most physiologically and psychologically stressful things an athlete goes through. Caloric restriction, dehydration, mood disruption, performance anxiety. Stacking the constant physiological stress of brutal unstructured training on top of that is not building a fighter — it is breaking one down. The combined stress load is far greater than either alone, and the body cannot distinguish between them.
A well-managed camp means arriving at fight week already close to weight, with a body that is not inflamed, not cortisol-flooded, not sleep-deprived. When S&C is structured intelligently — with appropriate load, proper recovery windows, and sessions designed around measurable adaptation rather than maximum fatigue — the weight cut becomes manageable. When it is not, you get exactly the situation people are describing with Chimaev.
The training caused the weight cut problem. They are not two separate things to explain away.
This Is Not a New Conversation
UFC veteran Cub Swanson publicly called out this type of training approach , the "just get them tired" mentality. He was told he was "not tough enough." Are we seriously questioning 26 fight UFC Veteran Cub Swansons toughness!? That’s just laughable.
But this framing, that questioning the methodology means you can't handle hard work, is the oldest deflection in sport. Toughness and intelligence are not opposites. The best-conditioned fighters in the world train hard and train smart. The data guides when to push and when to pull back.
Since posting my video, I have received direct messages from coaches working at the highest levels of the sport. The same story keeps coming up: athletes who trained at The Treigning Lab came away run into the ground, not built up, not peaking, but beaten down at precisely the wrong time.
That is a conditioning failure, regardless of how hard the sessions looked.
What Elite Conditioning Actually Looks Like
I’ve coached IBF World Welterweight Champion Lewis Crocker, UFC Fighters Paul Craig, Chris Duncan, Stevie Ray, Mick Parkin, Commonwealth Gold Medalist Sam Hickey amongst countless others. The approach is not complicated, but it requires discipline.
Every session has a target adaptation. We know before the session starts what we are trying to develop.
Output is measured. Heart rate. Watts. Speed. We track it every time.
Athlete monitoring is constant. HRV and resting HR are checked daily. Communication is open.
The programme is flexible. If the data says pull back, we pull back. That is not weakness — that is how you peak an athlete rather than destroy them.
S&C serves the camp. Skills training is primary. Conditioning is built around it.
Hard sessions exist. Camp is hard. Fighting is hard. But hard sessions mean nothing if they are not driving the right adaptations at the right time. The goal is to have your athlete performing at their absolute peak on fight night — not exhausted from a preparation camp that looked impressive on Instagram.
Final Thought
Khamzat Chimaev is one of the most physically gifted fighters in the sport. That is not in question. The question is whether the training he is doing is maximising that potential — or simply burning through it.
From what I saw, it is the latter. And given the profile that footage now has, I think it's important that someone with a coaching background says so clearly.
Harder isn't better. Smarter is better.
Adam Lusby is a Strength & Conditioning Coach based in Dundee, Scotland. He works with elite combat sports athletes including IBF World Welterweight Champion Lewis Crocker and UFC Light Heavyweight Paul Craig. To enquire about coaching, visit adamlusbycoaching.co.uk