RingoI have a theory. My theory; your fitness, your ability to lift weights, your ability to run fast, your endurance, are all at best, 50% of your ability to perform in armor. Perhaps less. Your VO2 max is important. Your 40 yard dash time and your deadlift numbers are clearly relevant. But at the end of the day, no matter how athletic, your ability to use your armor will restrict your potential more than anything else.
I first came to this theory with the help of Knights Hall trainers, Cat and Jaye Brooks. The details elude me, but we were talking about how endurance in our workouts had a much less than 1:1 correlation with the ability to keep fighting on the field. I forget who first said it, I think Jaye, but we came up with the term Fit is not Armor Fit, and to this day, that has been one of the hall’s many mantra’s.
I am in very good shape for an average human. I’m honestly in good shape for most athletes, up there with a lot of semi-pro or mid-level college athletes, I’d guess. And yet I’ve watched people in far worse shape keep up with me through matches and tournaments. And similarly, I’ve seen athletes who can shame me in workouts unable to keep pace with me, match strength with me, to perform as I perform.
It’s possible that’s due to experience and skill, that I just know fighting better or worse. But when soft kits come on, that result does not hold up. Athleticism starts to trump more and more. So while I am no exercise scientist or even a certified personal trainer, I think there is some passingly solid evidence for my theory, or at least enough for me to continue to espouse it.
I truly believe that getting to be fit in armor is simply a different beast than fitness in general. It is not just about managing weight, either. I’ve seen people train with weight vests, and while I’m sure that increases strength and conditioning, it seems to have limited success translating to armor. It’s not just fit either. I perform better in a poorly fitted kit than most people I’ve seen in highly custom armor. It’s a combination of managing adrenaline and energy output, of learning to breathe in a helmet, of how to rest while fighting, how to work with instead of against your armor, and probably a number of other things I haven’t put together. Armor Fitness is a combination; much like regular fitness is no one physical trait.
How to get Armor Fit is also a tricky question. As I said, I’m not an expert on exercise; I fall far short of this bar of certified personal trainer, let alone a doctor in a fitness field. I have some opinions, but they are based on very small sets of anecdotal data, without rigor, in even testing those scenarios. I want to make this clear because while I think my advice is good, I think we need people continuing to research and experiment to find the best solutions. If you find gassing out in kit is a problem, do not stop here, but use this a launching point to go read and watch and learn about fitness.
The biggest problem with getting to Armor Fit, in my experience, is there needs to be significant time in kit, under pressure. This is an issue with the limited amount of fights most people have access to. Beyond that, though, too much hat-time is a bad thing, which is the case with most things, but with armor, it comes much quicker. Training every day under the load of armor is awful on your joints. Fighting every day kills your gear, drastically ups your chance of injury, both major and minor, either of which will set you back, and of course, there’s the worry of CTE, from repeated sub-concussive impacts. Because of this, I don’t recommend full armored practice more than twice a month, and I advise those practices are highly regimented. I’ve been to far too many practices where there is no discipline in timing; everyone puts on gear at their own rate. This is a waste of both valuable training time and energy but is not nearly the problem that a lack of structure in the sparring/drilling. If the fights are not done with the intensity and speed of a real match, you aren’t building the right systems. You aren’t learning how to regulate adrenaline, how to breath when being crushed, when, and how to swing, how to handle arm pumps from over gripping. This is why I much prefer my armored practice to be actual matches, and one of many reasons I love the chapter match system.
There are other ways to get kit time that aren’t as bad. Doing a foam or rattan practice once a week in full hard kit isn’t the worst. I find that it does not stress the system correctly, though. Assuming you have training partners, I would stick to once every two weeks at most, with either a duels tournament, a chapter match, or a practice run on a schedule with people maintaining the intensity of a match. In between the fights, the best workouts I’ve found are Tabata style(20 seconds on,10 off) with a mix of low weight full-body movements, sprints, and jumping movements. Burpees, clean and press, kettle swings, etc. The Knight Fit work-out is a great example of this. I also recommend bag/pell work intervals that are short enough that you can keep striking for the full time. At the Hall, we do Schifino style, 1 minute on striking, 1-minute planking, or other lower impact work. The key is that you are able to be striking almost the whole time on, to get used to the muscle fatigue and that you never fully rest on the rest. This helps simulate the drain being in full kit has on your system.
That alone will not be enough. And you may not have training partners you can meet up with regularly. To get the last bits or if you are training alone, I find partial kit work, dedicated to specific skills to be the most bang for your buck, outside of a short HIIT done at 100%(again see Knight Fit). My favorite partial kit exercises are agility ladders in legs and helm. I also love doing them on tires; two to three minutes of work just getting through focusing on learning how to move. Also, striking on the pell wearing only arms works very very well. It’s important this movement is done similar to match movement, cause just doing things like battle ropes or push-ups in kit will build strength but not the type of muscular endurance you are looking for. These are great training exercises to build on once you have learned how to handle moving in kit. Lastly, Put on full kit every once in a while and get weird with it. Do bear crawls. Attempt a somersault. Dance. Limbo. Bob and weave under a rope. Run and pivot. Just learn all the weird facets of how your kit moves. Then, try again with a point loose or a buckle undone. The better you can get in communion with your kit early on, the better you will do later.
Sparring outside of full kit is also an absolute must as well. Get as much Soft kit and grappling as you can. But really strive to get at least one real fight a month for your first year, at least. That is the work that will build out your armor fitness more than any type of training. Obviously that will be hard this year, so try to save up some travel money so when things get better, you can hit the ground running.