Zyaga Writing about whatever the hell I want, cuz it's the Interwebz!

Mixed Martial Arts – Days Six and Seven

I’ve been pretty busy with work and some other personal things so I have had time to practice but not enough to post often. Anyways, here is a post that’s combined about last Tuesday(last Thursday was wet so we canceled), and Today(Tuesday).

Both weeks we worked on distancing and power. For distancing, we went with the focus pads. The focus pads are great for working on distancing with both the legs and the hands. There is that obvious sweet spot, for both the hands and the legs, right in between where you’ll be jammed because you’re too close or too far back and not able to apply enough power. We worked quite a lot on finding that spot, as well as going over routines that we can utilize at home to train our bodies in distancing even on the days we don’t have practice. For the legs, we do various kicks where we:

1. Bring the knee up and hold for a second.
2. Slowly extend our leg and perform the kick.
3. Attempt to stop the kick right against whatever we are kicking at(punching bag, etc).
4. Bring the knee back to it’s original position and hold for a second.
5. Bring the leg back down to the ground.

This method allows us to be able to train our balance, strengthen our muscles, and enhance our distance judgment. The foot should always simply tap the object you’re kicking at, not rest against it. It highly helps your distancing ability because you can tell whether you’re too far back or not. Again, if you’re too close your leg will be too bent and you’ll be jammed or if you are too far back then if it was a real kick, there would be no power behind it. Make sure to work each leg, while switching up the type of kicks, so that you get the full experience.

To help us develop both our power and stamina, we worked on going all out against a heavy bag that another person can hold. The bag is quite big and sturdy so we don’t need to really hold back on it at all. We usually tend to do this after we’ve been going for quite some time so we are already warmed up, etc, considering our usual “class time” is roughly two hours. It’s a very simple concept though, we simply go all out for roughly 30 seconds or so, then it’s the next person. It goes back and forth from person to person(only usually two or three of us out there to rotate between), until eventually we’re so drained that standing is a task in itself. Even though this work out always kicks my ass, I love it because of how effective it is. Don’t mistake this for a misuse of energy, because this isn’t how we’d really fight. The exercise simply has one purpose, and that’s to raise one’s energy level cap. In a real fight, a lot less energy would be used and the idea would be to let the other person drain down their energy before you do, which doesn’t usually take long if they decided to try to go all out on you, as long as you can avoid the blows well enough.