Self Defence Made Easy.Com

This article was written by Eric Wong One of the worlds top strength and conditioning coaches in the field of Mixed Martial Arts.  To see and hear more of this amazing coach just follow the link.

Click Here<<<<<……

This article was written by one of the worlds top experts in strength and conditioning for MMA fighters Eric Wong. To learn more about Eric and his methods just follow this link and it will take you to our store there you can get your Free Crazy 8 MMA workout Plus Russell Stutelys Free DVD on Pressure Point Fighting.

Click Here <<<<<…..

When you picture most strength training exercises, you may notice that everything seems to be in straight lines. Contrast that with any mixed-martial arts technique and you may realize that there is one missing ingredient to most strength programs – rotational power. Well how exactly do you develop the ability to rotate your body explosively for knockout punches, kicks, and throws?

The key is to use tools that allow you to train the transverse plane of motion. There are planes of motion: sagittal, frontal, and transverse.

The sagittal plane is the plane that is most dominant with respect to strength training programs. Exercises like the bench press, bicep curls, squats, deadlifts, and chin-ups are all sagittal plane dominant. If you move your arms back and forth like a marching soldier, this is the sagittal plane. Unfortunately, most MMA techniques require more than just movement in the sagittal plane, which means that most strength training programs are seriously deficient, if your goal is to develop sport-specific strength and power.

The frontal plane is sometimes found in strength training routines. Exercises like side crunches and dumbbell side raises are a couple of examples. However, this plane is also highly under-trained in most athletes, and most would benefit from adding some exercises into their routine that targeted the frontal plane. Adding some suitcase deadlifts and single-leg squats would improve hip and core stability tremendously.

Now the transverse plane is where the real payoff is. But a note of caution – make sure you’ve developed a strong and stable core before aggressively training in the transverse plane. Like most things in life, high returns are generally high risk.

If you’re not stable in the core, it’s likely that you’ll blow a disc or strain a muscle in your lumbar spine when trying some of the exercises that I’ll describe below. So if you’re not stable or not sure, start off with exercises like prone bridges, side bridges, stiff-leg deadlifts, woodchops, and other exercises that promote stability in a neutral spine, then work on training powerfully in the transverse plane.

First of all, you’re going to need the proper tools. The best tools that I’ve used when training pro MMA fighters include rope balls and medicine balls. These tools allow you to develop explosive power in all planes of motion, and they allow you to release them so that you don’t slow down your movement.

Think of a bench press – if you want to train explosively, you probably aren’t going to throw the bar, so you have to slow the movement down at the top so you don’t let it go. Medicine balls don’t make you do that, so you can put all of your effort into the exercise and maximally develop your explosiveness.

Let’s focus on medicine ball exercises. Here are my top 3 medicine ball exercises for helping my athletes develop knockout power:

1) Side toss – start in an athletic stance holding the ball at your stomach. Quickly rotate to one side then explosively throw the ball sideways, keeping your body and spine tall and as neutral as possible.

2) Chop toss – start in an athletic stance holding the ball at your stomach. Lift the ball up so that it’s close to your ear and then violently throw it down on a diagonal into the ground, keeping your body and spine tall and as neutral as possible.

3) Seated side toss – start sitting tall with your legs straight out in front of you holding the ball at your stomach. Perform the same motion as the side toss.

Perform 2-3 sets of 8 repetitions of each exercise, with 1-2 minutes of rest in between. When you’re developing your power, you don’t want to train to exhaustion, instead, you want to be fresh and make each rep as fast and explosive as possible.

For more information on this amazing coach just click below.

Click Here <<<<<……

In mixed-martial arts, rotational power of the core is crucial to the execution of explosive techniques, whether they be throws, punches, kicks, knees, or escapes. Failing to improve the strength and power of your core in rotational patterns will limit your ability to knockout, slam, or surprise your opponents. The medicine ball is an extremely effective tool for developing your rotational power. First, throwing a medicine ball allows you to put your full effort into the exercise, without slowing it down. Just think of doing a lying medicine ball chest pass and a speed bench press – because you can’t let go of the bar during the bench press, your body has to slow the bar down at the top, limiting your power production. But with the ball, you release it and you use full power through the entire range of motion. So exercises like the side toss and chop toss using a medicine ball will go a long way to developing the knockout power you’ve always wished you had. Side Toss 1. Take a wider than shoulder-width stance with slightly bent knees, holding the ball in front of your navel. 2. Do a quick wind-up and throw the ball straight to the side, keeping your spine as tall and straight as you can. 3. Avoid throwing the ball with your arms, instead, power the movement with your core. Chop Toss 1. Same setup as side toss. 2. Do a quick wind-up up and to one side, bringing the ball over one shoulder and shifting your weight to the same side. 3. Slam the ball into the ground on a diagonal while shifting your weight to the other side. 4. Keep tall and continue to look forward instead of at the ball. Now integrating these two exercises into a circuit will help you develop your power endurance. We’ll add 3 body-weight exercises to the mix to simultaneously develop your power and conditioning, using exercises that will specifically benefit a MMA fighter. 1. 10 Lunge jumps – start in a lunge position, jump as high as possible and switch your feet landing and jumping as quickly as you can. 2. 5 Side tosses each side 3. 10 Squat jumps – start in an athletic stance, jump as high as you can and repeat as fast as you can. 4. 5 Chop tosses each side. 5. 10 Clap push-ups – do the push-ups as explosively as possible and focus on clapping your hands as loud as you can. Rest one minute and repeat for a total of 4 – 8 circuits. For the jumps and pushups, think of the ground as hot coals and your goal is to not burn your feet while always being as explosive as possible. This type of circuit is what a mixed-martial artist needs to excel in the cage or ring. Of course, proper exercise technique will prevent injuries, so if your form gets sloppy, do less reps or take more rest between circuits. For more information   Click Here!

Tweet

If you’re a mixed-martial artist and you’ve been in a fight that’s gone the distance, then maybe you know the terrible feeling of having nothing left to give with 2 minutes left in a round. If you haven’t gone the distance or haven’t had a pro fight yet, then use the 5 tips in this article to make sure you’re the one maintaining the pressure and imposing will – not your opponent.

1) Do sprints and intervals instead of long, slow runs.

MMA is a sport that requires explosive, quick moves and strength at various times through a 5 minute round. You never know if you’ll be in a clinch, defending a shot, escaping the mount, or sinking in a triangle. One thing you do know is that you WON’T be jogging around the ring at a slow pace for half an hour. Training in this fashion will help you get your time down for your local charity run, but won’t do anything to help you knock your opponent out.

Instead, stick to sprints and intervals if you’re going to be doing running workouts. An example of a good sprint workout would be to warm-up for 5 minutes doing a dynamic warm-up routine, then doing 5 short 40 yard sprints where you gradually increase your pace from about 60% to 90%. Rest a minute, then do a 100 metre sprint, walk back to the start, and repeat for a total of 10 sprints. This workout will beat distance running hands down for its ability to improve your performance in the cage.

2) Take 2 recovery weeks off for every 4 weeks of conditioning.

This tip is huge, and has helped skyrocket the conditioning of the athletes I train, guys like Jeff Joslin and Rory McDonell. Most fighters have a thing about working themselves to death – this mindset is what makes them tough, but also what keeps them injured and often overtrained, limiting performance in both training and competition.

You can avoid these problems by taking 2 weeks off of your conditioning workouts. You still do your MMA training and strength/power workouts, but let the conditioning go for 2 weeks. When you get back to it, you’ll be fresher and ready to take your conditioning up another notch.

3) Do more specific workouts in the 4 weeks leading up to the fight.

Sprints and intervals are great, but they’re not specific to mixed-martial arts. The workouts that I have my athletes perform include jumps, sprawls, quick feet drills, core stabilization exercises, explosive push-ups – all movements that are used in a fight, performed as quick and explosively as possible. I call these workouts NRG System Complexes, because they tap into every energy system of the body and are made up of a lot of different exercises.

Each complex lasts about 5 minutes, and your goal should be to do 4 complexes in a row with 1 minute of rest where you feel fresh and powerful in the last round. So the closer you get to the fight, the more specific you want to get with your conditioning routine.

Use the tips in this article and you’ll improve your conditioning and your opponents will wish they didn’t waste so much time training doing slow, hour long runs.

To get more information and a free report on MMA fitness training just follow the link.

http://286d6hlptewg-seazmq9qhcyfp.hop.clickbank.net/

Tweet

Tweet

Tweet

The following article was written by Eric Wong one of the worlds top MMA strength and conditioning coaches who has been kind enough to allow us to publish for you. To receive your Free copy of Erics celebrated Crazy 8 MMA workout book just follow the link it will take you to our shop where it is available for immediate download.

http://www.russellstutely.com/ashop/catalogue.php?shop=2

If you got a chance to catch UFC 90 and saw Patrick Cote’s knee injury when he was fighting the Anderson “Spider” Silva, you were probably disappointed that the 2 warriors didn’t get a chance to properly finish what they started.

I sure was. I love getting a chance to watch Silva at work, and I thought Cote showed that he definitely has a chin.

But what I want to talk about is the knee injury that Cote suffered. You could see the shin bone kind of move forward and out laterally when he hurt himself. In some interviews he said that it’s an old meniscus, but from the way it looked, I believe that he hurt his ACL. Often with a buckling type injury, it’s a ligament that gets damaged.

The ACL functions to stop the shin (tibia/fibula) from sliding forward under the thigh bone (femur), but only when the muscles aren’t there to do their job.

Cote also mentioned in interviews that he hurt his knee when he was kicking Silva. This would correspond perfectly with the common mechanism of ACL injury – when a person kicks, their lower leg is being whipped out, and the shin bone will slide forward on the thigh bone if the muscles/ligaments don’t oppose the force.

PICTURE it this way: put your right fist up like at the top of a bicep curl, then put your left fist on top of your right fist. When you slide your right fist forward towards the computer screen, that’s the movement that the ACL prevents, and that’s what happened to Cote’s knee.

So the ACL will come into play in a really quick pivot type move, like a running back who cuts hard, or during something unexpected, like getting pushed right before you land from a jump, missing a kick completely or partially.

The ACL will also work to stabilize the joint if the muscles aren’t strong enough to do the job, so even if you’re expecting the movement or it’s a planned movement, like a hard cut in football, if you don’t have strong muscles, you can still tear your ACL.

To prevent ACL injuries, you need to make sure your hamstrings and calves (gastroc) are strong and powerful. So exercises like Stiff-leg deadlifts and Swiss ball leg curls are crucial to knee injury prevention. The muscles worked in these exercises do exactly what the ACL does, prevent anterior slide of the lower leg on the upper leg.

You must focus on 2 specific portions of each exercise: the Eccentric phase, and the transition from the Eccentric to Concentric motion.

So for the Stiff-leg deadlift, it would mean controlling the motion to the end range, then quickly changing from lowering to lifting the weight. These exercises are all a part of my MMA Strength and Conditioning program.

You must keep the muscles strong, but even more importantly, powerful. The muscles need to be able to react quickly, so doing exercises such as repetitive, explosive jumps like Lunge jumps and others found in my NRG system complexes will train this quality.

Preventing ACL injuries in MMA requires numerous specific exercises to ensure that the muscles surrounding the knee joint are strong and powerful.

Integrate these exercises into your strength and conditioning program and you can prevent buckling your knee in the middle of a fight.

If you’re interested in a complete strength and conditioning program for mixed-martial artists that will prevent injuries and improve your power and conditioning, check out the Ultimate MMA Workout Program.

http://www.ultimatemmastrength.com/

Tweet

The following article was written by Eric Wong one of the worlds top MMA strength and conditioning coaches who has been kind enough to allow us to publish for you.

Isometrics are not often used in sports specific strength and conditioning. Because most sports are dynamic in nature, isometrics aren’t obvious to they eye and thus aren’t trained.

In MMA, isometrics can add another element to your game that can help you submit your opponent, escape a submission, or achieve a dominant position whether standing or on the ground.

For example, if you get caught in an armbar and your opponent doesn’t immediately lock you in, you’ve got some time to escape. How long you have depends on your ability to keep your arm flexed using your biceps while trying to move your body around so that your arm is in a safe position.

Another example is when you’ve got a triangle locked in. Submitting an opponent with a triangle is no easy task, so you’ve got to have the ability to keep your knees squeezed tightly together for an extended period to tire your opponent out to make him tap.

A final example is in the clinch. When you’re pummeling back and forth with an opponent or you have a single-leg, you’ve got to hold your arms in a certain position against his bodyweight – this is isometrics in action.

So how do you train isometrics in the gym?

My favorite way to do it is to throw isometrics into the middle of a set. That would mean if you’re doing 12 reps of an exercise, after rep 6, you do an isometric hold at the middle of the range of motion, then finish the set off.

Or, you can break it up into thirds, so you can do an isometric hold of 5 seconds after the 4th rep, 8th rep, and at the end of the set.

But let me warn you – this method is difficult and burns, making it a great method for training mental toughness at the same time.

Here are 3 of my favorite exercises to use isometrics with:

1) Inverted Row

* Hang under a barbell with your feet on a swiss ball so your body is parallel with the floor
* Hold when your elbows are at 90 degrees

2) Push-up

* Do your standard push-up, or put your feet on a ball for an added challenge
* Hold at 90 degrees of elbow flexion

3) Leg curl on Swiss ball with knee squeeze

* For this one, you need a squishy child’s ball
* Put it between your knees and for the entire set of leg curls, squeeze the ball together as hard as you can

So now you have 3 exercises and a new method for developing your MMA strength and conditioning. Put these into your workout routine and you’ll be tapping people out when you would’ve given up before, and you’ll take your MMA game to the next level.

Isometrics are a component of a good strength and conditioning program. But there are a few things that many MMA fighters do wrong in their MMA workouts. Don’t make the same mistakes, have a look here now.

http://www.ultimatemmastrength.com/

Tweet

When you think of a core exercise, most people think of doing situps, crunches, and the hundreds of variations of these exercises. These exercises are good for when you’re on your back in MMA, but aren’t as applicable to developing your core for striking power.

To develop your core so that your punches and kicks get harder and faster, you need to train your core in a standing position.

The medicine ball is the perfect tool to use to develop explosive hands because it develops your rotational power. But using the medicine ball requires you to be able to throw it – something not possible for many people who train in the gym (or have to train in the gym in winter, like here in Canada).

To get the same benefits as using a medicine ball, you can use a heavy bag.

You’re going to learn 2 exercises that will really develop explosive striking and you can do them at your MMA club.

Here’s the first one:

Heavy Bag Chest Throw

1. Stand in front of a heavy bag and push it up until it’s at a 45 degree angle and you’re holding your body at an angle
2. Take a wide stance and bend your knees to get in a quarter squat position
3. Throw the bag up and forward and catch it and repeat immediately

This exercise gives you the sagittal plane stability that you need to keep a solid base when you lean into a punch and connect.

The next exercise gives you the transverse plane stability for generating explosiveness in your strikes:

Heavy Bag Hand-to-Hand Pass

1. Stand in front of a heavy bag with a wide stance and bent knees
2. Keep good posture throughout
3. Throw the ball with one hand to the other as hard and fast as you can without losing your posture
4. Keep your abs tight (braced)

Now for each of these exercises, you want to do them quickly and explosively, but never lose your posture. Maintaining your posture is how you train the core muscles, once you lose it, the muscles you want to be working stop.

Instead of doing these exercises for reps, do them for time. Do as many as you can in 10-15 seconds, rest a minute between sets, then repeat for 3-5 sets each. You can also super set them, depending on your current fitness level and what you want to get out of the training.

For more just click Here: http://www.ultimatemmastrength.com/

Tweet