Lower Body Conditioning (diary entry)

15.09.14 Tonight, the third lesson in my Triple C (Chimera Combat Conditioning) course, we focused on involving lower body techniques. If you are short on time and you want to maintain good overall conditioning, I always advise hitting the legs with big compound movements. If you involve the legs you tend to use the rest of your body. Squats and dead-lifts are excellent for developing strength whilst my choice exercises for lungs and heart is skipping, sprint intervals and burpees. Legs are your foundation. They bring balance sharply into play, which means many stabilizing muscles are also recruited. Of course, our training was more sport-specific (to use a term that, along with functional fitness, is really wearing thing on professional coaches due to mindless over-use). We warmed up with some work on the focus mitts. We looked mainly at jabs and crossed, but some bobbing and weaving as well as hooking. This was then taken onto the heavy bag and then within a triangle of markers. I increased the circuit of exercises, changed combinations and varied times to keep it mentally stimulating. It is also important to me for a fighter to visualize their opponent. My client might have been mainly concerned with improving his general fitness, but if you are going to work techniques you might as well do them correctly and that means understanding the reason for throwing a type of punch. I then introduced low round kicks. These were then combined with punches. We then moved onto sprawls and knees before putting everything together into freestyle pad-work. Photography by Charlotte Von Bulow-Quirk from the upcoming book "Mordred's Victory and Other Martial Mutterings" Useful Resources for Today's Lesson

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