6 Workouts that will help your Judo Fitness

It is very important that the workouts you are completing as part of your fitness and conditioning are catered towards Judo. Judo fights are 5 minutes in length and you need to be fit enough to be able to fight hard for five minutes, have 5 minutes off and then fight again. Therefore your training should be something very similar to this. Here are 6 circuits designed specifically for Judo. These circuits will dramatically increase your cardiovascular fitness quickly.

Metabolic Circuits

Metabolic circuits are designed to simply wreck you metabolically. This simply means we get a particular muscle group and one minute of work on it. When the muscle is on the verge of failure we change to a different part of the body and repeat. I chose to do 7-10 minute metabolic workouts.

Metabolic circuit 1:

1 minute bodyweight squats - 1 minute push ups - 1 minute skipping - 1 minute chin-ups - 1 minute shuttle runs - 1 minute scooping push ups (Hindu push ups) - 1 minute sprawling - Have a five minute rest and repeat another 2 rounds.

Metabolic circuit 2:

1 minute chin-ups - 1 minute squat-jumps - 1 minute skipping - 1 minute farmers walk (walking holding dumbbells) - Have a five-minute rest and repeat another 2 rounds.

Metabolic circuit day 3:

15 dead-lifts - 15 push-ups, And then Repeat 14, 13, 12, etc., all the way down to 1 repetition.

Circuit 4: Tabata Intervals

A Japanese sports scientist Izumi Tabata studied and came up with the Tabata interval training system. It is a pretty simple training session:

- 5 minutes warm-up

- 20 seconds of a particular exercise at 100% effort (as hard as you can)

- 10 seconds rest

- Repeat 8 times

- 2-5 minutes cool down

You may do Tabata intervals with:

Burpees, Sprints, Sumo Deadlift high pulls or Skipping (if you are a good skipper).

Running Circuits

There are times when you cannot get to the gym or only have a skipping rope and a pair of shoes. If this is the case these next two workouts are fantastic.

Running Circuit 1

- Skipping 200 times

- Sprint 200 meters

- Repeat for 20 minutes

Running Circuit 2

This workout is great if all you have is a pair of running shoes and nothing else. 

- Run 1500 meters (or if you don't know how far you are running, run for 6 minutes) and then have a 5 minute rest.

- Repeat for 2 more rounds

- Run 1000 meters (4 mins 30)

- Run 500 (2 minutes)

- Repeat 2 more rounds

If you add these workouts as part of your cardiovascular training, you will feel the benefits on the Judo mat.