How do you train martial arts alone? In fact, how do you train martial arts at home?
Well, let’s not be misleading with title of this video. I don’t believe that you can learn a martial art on your own. You do need instruction. You need coaching, you need supervision. But you can train on your own. And you can train to improve your martial art. So, if you’re going to train alone, here’s my three top tips to improve your martial art ability when training on your own. Don’t forget to subscribe. And if you like these topics and you want to support what we’re doing, leave a comment, #fightboss
First Thing to Do: SHADOW SPARRING
My first tip is shadow sparring. Shadow sparring is the ultimate way to train on your own. It has so many benefits, visualizations, hand eye coordination, movement, and training your brain to see exactly what you’re doing before you do. Providing you’ve got an idea of what you’re actually training, you can work on striking, punching, footwork moving, coordinating all of it together. Remember, you need to be able to move without thinking. You need a degree of intuition in your movement and the only way to do that is where your movements, your ideas or your fighting techniques become second nature. Shadow sparring will give you that ability. In fact, you’ll learn more training alone, on your own in any martial art, providing you can actually get to a point where you can shadow spar.
SECOND TOP TIP
My second top tip is footwork training. Not necessarily hand leg coordination, but most importantly just learning how to move your feet. After all, your feet are a long way away from your brain. And I always say to people that they look like they got two left feet and they can’t dance and that could be because their feet are so far from their brain that they can’t keep up with anything else. But most importantly, footwork is key, regardless, whether you’re a boxer, kick boxer, even in Brazilian jiu jitsu, your ability to move and move quickly on your feet is essential, so practice your footwork. Use drills. Put obstacles in the way, step around them. Have something where you’re actually moving and improving. have an object that you can actually target and visualize. It will improve your movement but most importantly, it’ll give you something to focus on.
Skipping. Skipping is ideal to improve footwork training. I can’t recommend it enough. Providing you’re moving lightly on your feet, you’ll get the benefits when you’re trying to improve your footwork.
AND FINALLY…
My third and last tip, which is also important but combines the earlier two stages is heavy bag training. Heavy bags people, even wall bag training, but the main thing is, what you’re allowing yourself to do is put the earlier two skills together.
You can look at the heavy bag as just a target to hit, but then you can think of it as the body of angles, so you can move around, cut angles, put combinations of strikes together. Link that with your visualization and you’re countering punches and swinging back and hitting hard against the bag. This is an important skill but if you take it a stage further and you think about your footwork, you can add now the ability to move in and out, hit hard, drive power from your base from the ground. In this sense, you condition your body to actually throw punches.