Online MMA Training

Heres another article you might like, this time about flexibility training: Stretching For Martial Arts

Take a look at this article entitled ‘how to punch‘ published on hubpages. It focusses on the basic principles that are true for pretty much any techniques, and also has a couple of videos and links to other resouurces for punching techniques.

This is a great one for fitness as it is quite an intense exericise, paritularly if you are good at it. Basically you start with a one on one with each person aiming to get a takedown or throw on the other guy. it’s up to you whether you allow strikes, but to win you have to put the other guy on the mat. Then it’s just winner stays on with new fighters coming in as quickly as possible after each round so you don’t have time to recover. A variation on this is to play loser stays on instead, so that if you have people in the class who are weak on throws and takedowns they will get plenty of chance to practice them!

In addition to running this blog I do also write short articles for various other online publications. Recently I have written quite a lot of stuff for a site called hubpages, and I though rather than re-writing stuff for here I would just add a couple of links to articles which visitors to this site may be interested in, so here they are: Martial Arts Speed and Agility Training and Strength Training for Martial Arts

Obviously physical fitness and conditioning are a major part of what makes a great fighter, so take a look at Bas Rutten’s MMA workout video:

Learn how to perform the omoplata submission with this video tutorial:

Another great sparring exercise, similar to the first one I wrote about, is to have one person who can only kick, and the other person who can only use throws and takedowns. This is one of the most commonly used training exercises in San Shou (a kind of Chinese kickboxing which includes throws and takedowns). One of the best defenses against a kick is to try to catch hold of it, or to sweep or throw your opponont when they are standing on one leg. Using this kind of sparring exercise in your training can be a really good way to get some realistic practice of doing this, and on the other side you learn how to throw effective kicks without leaving yourself too open to the most common counter attack techniques that might be used against you.

Here is a different mount escape that you can use if the regular one’s don’t work. Even if it doesn’t work (its not as reble as others), it can be a good way to shift your opponent around enough to create opportunities:

The scarf hold is often amongst of the first ground fighting holds learned in an MMA class. It is a relatively easy hold to get into and to get right, it is an effective way to control an opponent on the ground, and can be a good set up for a submission hold. Here are two video demonstrating how to perform the scarf hold and how to escape from it:

I really do think that sparring is the single most important part of mixed martial arts training, but just straight sparring as a semi-contact fight using normal MMA rules is only one part of what should be your overall training programme. There are various specialized training exercises based on sparring that can be used to develop specific parts of your game and to work on specific techniques. over the next few weeks and months I will be adding a series of exercises like this.
The first one is simply to have 2-5 minutes of striking vs. grappling. One person can only use punches and kicks, whilst the other person cannot use any strikes at all, and must try to take their opponent down to the ground, at which point the fight is stopped whilst both fighters get back to their feet. This is great training for your takedowns, and for takedown defense - much more so than just practicing your takedowns in isolation.