Fight Prep 2012-05-01

My next fight will take place in Villach, on May 19th 2012. This time, it’ll be full-contact again. Today, I worked out with Felipe, one of my students. The session was very specific to the reality of a kickboxing bout.

What we did was 10 rounds of shadow-sparring, each round being dedicated to some technical or tactical espect (at least, I did it this way). After those 30 minutes, we tossed in three rounds of boxing. Since boxing is an integral part of kickboxing and becomes even more important under full-contact rules, I believe doing some isolated boxing sparring makes perfect sense – as opposed to a pure kicking sparring, say, under olympic Taekwon-Do rules.

As a means of active recovery, we followed the sparring up with another 5 rounds of shadow sparring. Then, 18 rounds or 44 minutes into the workout, we did another three rounds of sparring, this time under kickboxing rules.

Finally, as a cool-down, another 5 rounds of shadow sparring. I feel that this type of training is extremely efficient in that

• there’s a whopping 26 rounds net training time – that corresponds to 52 minutes. Compare that to padwork with a partner where you spend about 50% of the time holding the pads and another 5%-10% just switiching from striking to coaching.
• the aerobic system gets properly trained by the vast amount of time spent on shadow-sparring. Typically, this will put you into the aerobic zone, hence improving capillarization and the ability to recover quickly.
• due to the above mentioned low-intensity nature of shadow-sparring, you’ll have plenty of opportunity to correct and improve your technique. The same does not apply if you go all-out.
• 6 rounds of fast-paced sparring will take care of your anaerobic system and further get your mind combat ready.

Basically, this type of training, along with my Complete Conditioning classes, would improve

• technique / tactics / speed
• max strength / explosive strength
• lean body mass
• strength endurance
• anaerobic endurance
• aerobic endurance

Sounds like quite a complete system to me.

Anyhow, Felipe filmed the session, so the material is still with him. Obviously, soon as I get a copy, I’ll put it up here.

So long,

take care