Online MMA Training

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

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:

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.

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.

Take a look at this page I created on squidoo for Sparring Gear Bargains, which also contains links to other pages I created on the same site featuring my pick of the best sparring videos from various martial arts (I made a page for each one) such as ninjutsu, karate, taekwondo and others.

This is a great exercise for building core strength in the obliques and inter-costals. It sounds easy, and for the first few reps it really is, but it does get hard fast – much more so that you would expect. You do need some kind of bar to do this. I use a ‘bo’ staff, which is a weapon used in oriental martial arts, but you can use a weight lifting bar instead, or even a broom handle. Basically all you do is to rest the bar on the back of your shoulders, running behind your neck, and then rest your hands on either end so that your arms are nearly straight. You then turn around to the left until you really feel the stretch (your working flexibility as well as strength here), then turn back to the front and stop when you are facing forwards again, then turn all the way back to the left but this time come back past the forwards facing position without stopping and turn all the way around to the right and do the same on that side. It is the stopping and starting again that really works the muscles, particularly if you do it with quite fast movements.

The Kimura Drill is a great way to combine strength and conditioning training for your abs and other core muscles with practicing some of your basic ground fighting skills. The drill is actually based on repeating the same movment, which is a set up to a submission hold, over and over again so that it becomes automatic and you can perform it faster. This video demonstrates the drill and the submission hold that it is based on:

Speed, both of actual physical movements and perhaps more importantly of reactions, is easily as important as strength in an MMA fight; probably even more so because weight categories ensure at least a degree of parity between the strength of two fighters, but don’t necessarily effect speed as much.

Despite this fact speed training often doesn’t have a high priority in many people’s training programme, maybe because its not so obvious how to train it, and some fighters (and trainers!) just lack the imagination to come up with effective exercises.

With this in mind here is a nice little video demonstrating some speed training exercises, all based around a similar method, that are specifically designed for mixed martial arts fighters.