Ideas to work on stamina

[SevenStar]

last night I had a discussion with my student, Pan.(Pan trains Muay Chaya and Muay Boran in Thailand, and won his first MMA event there). He brought up a very intersting point.
He said that running is not productive cardio for a fighter. Better to do sports specific such as bagwork.
It makes sense to me,
what are your thoughts?
-although I enjoy my runs. I do a mile warm-up and then six-eight sprints, and then a cool-down.
tabatas look awesome. I will work those into my training.

fighting is about 80% anaerobic, which is very likely why he said that. In order to maximize fighting efficiency, you are better served doing anaerobic training. running is important for the 20%, but it doesn't have to be running. Take frank shamrock, for example. he doesn't run anymore, I hear; he uses an eliptical machine.

[SevenStar]

That's actually not entirely correct. If you go back through the threda, bakxierboxer posted a quote explaining that aerobic endurance contributes to anaerobic endurance as well.

As iron stated, it's not specific. biking increases endurance, but marathoners don't train by biking. Why not?

[SevenStar]

The best way to achieve physical stamina is to work on mental endurance I think.

In traditional gong fu, there are lot's of ways we work on improving our mental endurance. The most common is standing postures, and repative training of techniques. These methods naturally build mental endurance, particularly if your intention is to do so.

When you run, if your doing standing post, you should feel like even though your body is giving out, you have this invisible mental strength that allows you, even encourages you to carry on as long as you will.

I know that I could run long enough to really hurt myself, and keep running. When I have a hard labor day of work, I really have to watch myself. I would definately attribute this quality to standing post.

dude... really? ummm.... no.

Don't get me wrong, visualization is a powerful tool, so is mental training. I think it is a necessity in conjunction with physical training, however by itself, it is not sufficient for endurance gains, especially from the perspective of an athlete.

We can easily test that though... keep doing your standing post every day. keep doing kung fu for an hour per day. enter a marathon and see how many of those 26 miles you last. Anyone can run past the point of pain - I don't really attribute that to any special mental training, it's called heart. plenty of people have that with no training at all. But that only goes so far.

[JGTevo]

Take frank shamrock, for example. he doesn't run anymore, I hear; he uses an eliptical machine.

Look at Frank Shamrock's last fight, against Cung Le. Thats why he doesn't run anymore. The guy has a bad knee, or maybe bad knees. He's no doubt suffered knee injuries in the past. I'm in a similar boat. After my first knee injury I couldn't run for an entire year.

As iron stated, it's not specific. biking increases endurance, but marathoners don't train by biking. Why not?

Because they're already doing an intensive aerobic exercise(running). Biking won't increase it any more than running. It's not like biking gives them some kind of seperate endurance gain that they can only gain from that.

On the other hand, anaerobic endurance is supplemented by aerobic endurance. Aerobic endurance is also very useful when moving, feinting, slipping/weaving, blocking/deflecting(in some cases its anaerobic), and in training when you are drilling these things thousands of times.