Conditioning for Martial Arts

Today, we are looking at conditioning for martial arts. The what, why and how...

What?

It is improving the muscles, tendons, bones and organs to a high degree of performance, resistance, resilience to help accomplish the aim of the mind and body being a weapon in martial arts.

Why?

To train the body to withstand the effects of being hit and improve performance in the sport...

Strengthening, hardening, increasing the resistance and flexibility of the entire body, to enable it to meet and deal with the dynamism of martial arts.

Reps

 

How?

Simply by training regularly...

But isolate the areas that need conditioning and work. 

The types of exercises that condition the body are all the exercises you would do as a matter of course anyway. Only for conditioning, you do more. Focus on an area till you literally transform the muscle through what I call blitzing.

As an example, to condition the quadriceps – you can do squats. 

Squats with weights, step ups to a low height, step ups to a medium height. Then box jumps, then increase the intensity by adding weights into the mix... Where you do the step ups with ankle weights or dumbbells.

The other aspect of conditioning is in preparation for impact.

So, you’ve built your muscles for explosive power – for endurance - for speed.

Squats to condition those legs

Now... You need to look out for what happens when you get hit, and worse than that – when hit repeatedly in the same area.

How will my muscles/body deal with that?

This is where what I like to call the ‘impact conditioning’ comes in.

Put simply, give your body a taste of what it’s in for, by starting slowly and building intensity as you go... So,  for your legs, you can start with a light stick (bamboo is good) wrapped in foam and hit your legs gently all over.

As you become immune to this, take the foam off. When you get accustomed to the strikes with the naked bamboo. You can transition to something harder.

The other way you can do this is to have one of your training partners or fellow martial artist kick you repeatedly and build up the intensity in speed, power and also vary the target area to encompass the whole leg...

This is conditioning and can be done for the whole body, step by step.

Now, depending on your level and where you want to take your martial arts... There are some martial artists who have never done impact conditioning... why?

Because just by taking part in martial arts. Your entire body becomes conditioned to take a degree of punishment anyway.

Impact conditioning is taking it a few steps further or for more intense competition use.

That wraps up our look at conditioning for martial arts

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Thank you for your time.