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22.08.11:
Today’s class was attended wholly by senior grades, so we focused on developing key parts of MMA using the 300 reps as a technique model for improving muscle memory. This was done after a warm-up led by two different students.
The movie “300”, a shot-for-shot adaptation of Frank Miller’s fanciful comic mini-series retelling of the famed 300 Spartan soldiers that fought literally to the last man at the Battle of Thermopyae, has had a definite impact on the world of functional fitness. Despite the fact that digital effects were extensively used to enhance the ripped physiques of the Spartans depicted in the movie, a lot of attention has been given to the training regimes of the actors in the film. The Gym Jones school of fitness thundered onto the sports scene and has been hungrily plundered by the MMA fraternity. Functional fitness has steadily grown in the combat sports arena for the past decade. It’s always been around and it is arguably the oldest form of training around, but recently it has met with sports science and we have seen an amazing upsurge in demand for everything from “caveman training” to ginastica natural.
However, it is not just this element from the film that has attracted interest. The whole mythology of the Spartans is like a biblical scripture to the warriors of the cage and also to the RBSD movement for that matter – see Dave Grossman’s reference to “Gates of Fire”, a novel about the Spartan 300, in his “Bulletproof Mind” lecture. There is just something about the religious way the Spartans made military life the entirety of their existence that speaks to the mind and body synthesis the martial artist finds so attractive. So, we find ourselves not only quoting the Spartans and drawing inspiration from their story of massive courage and sacrifice, a life dedicated to soldiering, but simply divising workouts around 300 repetitions. As a matter of interest Gym Jones devised a 300 reps workout as a type of graduation test. Now gyms all over the country that embrace the concept of training body and mind together for all round conditioned toughness have modelled their programmes around this idea.
In order to retain some basic techniques at all ranges I devised 300 reps of techniques. How much you were tested depended on the effort you put into these routines. All were done with partners and all the strikes performed to strike pads (focus mitts and Thai pads):
30 reps full power straight hand strikes
30 reps full power hooks
30 reps full power uppercuts
30 reps full power round kicks
30 reps full power push kicks
30 reps highline takedown entries
30 reps midline takedown entries
30 reps lowline takedown entries
30 reps triangle chokes from guard
30 reps armbars from guard
30 reps oma plata from guard
30 reps jump up/pass guard/knee-pin/armbar combination
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