Building a New Foundation (diary entry)

10.05.15 My second lesson of the day also focused on Western Boxing concepts for martial arts cross-training, but this time with quite a different client in many ways. My first client was an experienced martial artist who wished to change his defensive strategy into an aggressive one. My second client was new to martial arts training – only having completed three small group training session – and was naturally an aggressive fighter. Training for this session was focused on developing coordination for Boxing and overall conditioning. We began with agility work, which is a great place bring in coordination exercises. As previously mentioned in a diary entry, coordination exercises are best done at the beginning of training sessions due to the brain being a better cognitive state when it is fresh and they are also great for getting the heartrate up. The drills are performed progressively, beginning with simple obstacle running forwards and backwards, then lateral and explosive movements, then coordinating punching with running, before moving onto ever more complex hand combination and footwork. We then moved onto the focus mitts, where I addressed the importance of distancing. My client was good at advancing, but they needed to improve on their guard and also to allow room to manoeuvre within their attack. This work was done using my circular overlapping methodology. We worked it on the focus mitts, on the head-guard and belly-guard and then back onto the focus mitts. The second half of the session looked at strength conditioning for hand strikes. We focused on hooks first, using top-heavy barbell standing torso twists, 45 degree 1,2,3 medicine ball slams and resistance band hooks. Then we covered straight punching with inclined single arm dumbbell bench press, inclined static arm and single arm dumbbell bench press and resistance band crosses. Photograph by Charlotte Von Bulow-Quirk of Amanda Wilding and Steve Nicholson for my books "Mordred's Victory and Other Martial Mutterings" and my upcoming work on martial arts scepticism.