Due to the high amount of contact that combat athletes make during training and sparring, it is essential that we take special care to ensure that we do not injure our fellow teammates. Your partner is your coach and you are your partner’s coach while training. Competitiveness is in our nature, but we cannot allow it to come before our teammates’ safety and well-being. In order to make the best of training and sparring we need to meet all the safety precautions required in a contact sport.

Before you begin a martial art or contact sport, you must 1st ensure that you are physically healthy enough to participate. Protective equipment coupled with a protective training environment is a must. The type of protective equipment will vary from sport to sport or art to art. Bottom line is this – if you do not have the proper equipment, you should not participate. If you have been training long enough to be able to spar, you should have the proper equipment. Make sure that the mats (or flooring) are dry, and that the designated sparring area is free from any clutter.

While training, obey the 3 C’s rule Manong Inosanto:

1. Cooperative

2. Contested

3. Competition

Protecting your training partner is essential. If you injure or hurt your partner you will not have anyone to train with. In addition, chances are that observation by other peers will cause them to not want to train with you out of fear of injury.

Three things that you must utilize while training:

1. Proactive communication with your partner; let your partner know if they need to tone it down or if they can pick up the pace.

2. EGO-LESS training: everyone has an ego, however while training or sparring it needs to be left at the door.

3. Use only your skeleton: try to avoid muscling anything and use only your skeleton.

Sparring is necessary to evaluate ourselves and our training. Sparring is designed to super charge our:

A. Technical ability

B. Conditioning

C. Timing

Sparring is not meant to see who is the toughest person in the academy! This is not to say spar lightly all the time or not at all. There is a time and place when you need to go 60% and a time when you need 80%. Controlled sparring or light sparring can be an excellent way to spike your learning curve. Light sparring allows you to work on the moves that you have not yet perfected. If every time you tried something new and it got shut down immediately, you would always go back to the things you are good at. This would severely stunt your learning progression.

If you find yourself training or sparring with someone who is not as skilled as you, one way to improve your skills is to take the position or area that you need the most improvement on and you have your partner attack you from that position. Therefore, you can both benefit from the sparring, since you have focused purely on an area of improvement. This will also prevent the self-esteem of your less-experienced or less-skilled partner from being diminished due to domination on the mat.

There are two things that you have complete control over and those two things are your attitude and your effort; when you put your best attitude and effort forward you and those around you will be rewarded with a fun filled, learning atmosphere.

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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 superset them, depending on your current fitness level and what you want to get out of the training.