Martial arts basics, Part 2

In the first part of Martial arts basics, I talked a bit about how I like to teach my students the importance of basic techniques by making them do loads of repetitions. The key is, once they have a good enough grasp of the techniques, making those reps challenging and fun by adding slight variations and tweaks.  In this video, I’ll show you how I personally like to train and what my students have to do too.

A couple of things:

• I’m not focusing on speed or power. Those two aren’t my goal at all. My focus is on working those basics and feeling the differences between each variation.
• I picked the four basic punches because that’s what we were working on in class. It could have been other techniques, so don’t get hung up on that part.
• The bag was hanging a bit too low and as a result, moved around too much. Instead of stopping it with a technique (which requires a different type of timing from what I was working on), you’ll see me slow down or even grab the bag. Which is something I don’t often do. Usually, I time a technique to to stop it in it’s tracks. Ideally, you have a partner holding the bag for you.
• Obviously, you need to do the same drill with a partner for the best results.
• This is by no means the only, or even the best, way to train your basics. I’m only showing a possible example of how you can go about it so it’s fun as well as productive. I could have done it in a hundred different ways than this or chosen tons of other variations.
• The main thing isn’t how I do the techniques of what particular sequence of variations I chose. It’s the fact that there is such a progression instead of just hitting the bag with whatever you can think off. There’s a place for free style heavy bag training but also for more structured training like in this clip.

Next time I’ take my camera to class, I’ll see if I can show some more partner work instead of always beating up the heavy bag.

For more info on making these kind of progressions:

Related Posts:

• Confidence
• How to learn techniques from video, Part 3
• How to learn techniques from video, Part 2
• How to learn techniques from video
• Erik Paulson’s new DVD and the quest for knowledge.