If you watch a lot of MMA or go to an MMA oriented martial arts school, then you have probably been exposed to the training methods of a lot of MMA conditioning coaches. You’ll see them doing a lot of high intensity training, such as sprints, lots hard rolling (Bjj), sparing intensely with multiple training partners. Some have even adopted CrossFit or CrossFit inspired training regimens. Lots of high intensity and long slow runs are shunned. Even though it is important to incorporate high intensity training into a workout, if you do not incorporate long slow cardio into the workout then, chances are you will never achieve your full cardiovascular potential, especially when it comes to your combat sport. And here is why.
Longer distance slow running increase the amount of blood pumped out of the heart with each beat. This has also been referred to as the cardiac output method. The reason why the amount of blood is increased with each beat is that the heart chambers become filled with large amounts of blood forcing the heart to adapt and stretch, making it bigger. This leads to more efficiency in moving blood with each heart beat. This leads to improved (lower) resting heart rate. This is, in essence, aerobic conditioning. This will support cardiovascular capacity in combat sports.
Along with aerobic conditioning, you also need anaerobic lactic and anaerobic alactic focused training. Anaerobic lactic system produces ATP for a minute or so, while the anaerobic alactic system only produces ATP for about 10 seconds. Accordingly, people should be building MMA workouts around these parameters. However, you see people running, jumping, punching and kicking until they run out of gas and then catch their breath and do it all over again.
The reality is that what most people are doing for cardio in their MMA training doesn’t work. If it did, nobody would ever gas.
Fast Functional Strength 
While running and other aerobic activities definitely have their importance, there’s a reason that such emphasis is put into high intensity interval training. Competitive martial arts like boxing, Muay Thai and MMA have been estimated to be about 20-30% aerobic and 70-80% anaerobic.
We wrote about a similar topic here:
https://fightquality.com/2015/12/12/why-running-isnt-getting-you-fight-ready/
Too much cardio work also builds slow-twitch muscle fibres, while many people want to focus on building up explosiveness and maximising fast-twitch muscle fibres.
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It is true that too much slow-long distance cardio does build slow twitch fibers (sometimes at the expense of explosiveness/fast-twitch) however, the aerobic system should work to support the anaerobic systems. In my personal opinion, I believe that strength and explosiveness should be developed year round, with incremental increases. Whereas, aerobic conditioning should be focused on leading up to an event or competition. Thanks for the input.
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