Kick Overload! (diary entry)

I have taught private lessons for a while now, but this is the first official session I ran back at the zoo. This is the place where I have done most of my own solo training since I was 13 years of age. It is hardly ideal – a cramped old barn with miscellaneous equipment and the rest is outsie. However, there is an endless amount of potential for hardcore training development. The steep hills are perfect for forging strong lungs and legs, the base of any good fighter’s physical make-up. We have tyres, sledge hammers, free weights, improvised weights and various pieces of boxing and martial arts equipment.  

Today’s session was a mixture of a general introducetion the “Hiearchy of Training” with a focus on functional fitness and kicking. The session began with an explanation of the objective and principle-centred approach to selecting and improving exercises. Trainng then began in earnest with a demonstration of how to make a basic warm-up into something more productive and geared towards martial arts. Running included footwork, shadow boxing, target training, stand-up grappling, MMA combinations up and down the hills and intermittent sprinting.

Going to the pads, we began with some basic flash pad boxing. This sets the tempo for the kicking. We isolated the front and round kick, working on form and then speed. Next we combined punches with kicks. We looked at the same side punch/kick combination, first with the front and then with the round kick. A Thai style round kick is typically easier to teach from the rear leg, but in order to get the coordination principle right I taught the lead leg first. Next we looked at putting to kicks together and the more Thai style opposite hand/leg combination. By having the hands lead you encourage a faster kick delivery, working to minimize the delay between the two techniques. This part of the lesson finished with developing power in the kicks.

We then went to solo exercises, using items of equipment to strengthen the delivery of the kicks. Exercises included a type of amended zercher squat, using the tricep bar to keep the guard up, with a front kick. The sprawl is a fantastic motion for most fighters to adopt. From the initial hip shifting motion to any of the variations of the actual sprawl, the exercise trains a lot of useful combative applications. The purpose of the sprawl, of course, is to counter low line takedowns, but having it in your muscle memory forms a solid base for anti-grappling. It develops fast twitch muscle fibres in the legs and when combined with kicking, overloads the motion to create more explosiveness.