How to Create a Martial Arts Workout

Video Transcript

"Hi everybody I'm John Graden from the Martial Arts Teacher's Association and johngraden.com. How do you create a martial arts workout? That's a great question. A couple variables are involved there. First how advanced are you? It is good to determine the intensity of the workout but here is a very good structure to follow. First we want to establish the goals of the workout. If I am practicing my sparring techniques that I am going to use warm-ups in techniques that are typically footwork and sparring oriented. If I'm going to do a traditional Kata workout I'm going to do warm-ups that will warm me up and prepare me but my mind's set in that kind of Kata traditional mode. So the workout typically starts one, establish the goal of the workout what are we trying to accomplish today? Two, a good warm-up, stretching is not part of the warm-up, stretching is part of the cool down or stretching is part of the workout. We want to make sure that our warm-up raises our heart rate, gets blood to our muscles and essentially as it says warms the body up, gets the juices flowing, then from our warm-up which is typically 10 to 15 minutes and then from our warm-ups we are going to move into the technical aspects of our classes which technical aspects of our workout so if we are sparring we will be doing possibly sparring drills, exchanges and we'll do that leading up to actual sparring so about a 20 to 30 minute section of class is devoted to skill building if we are doing our traditional Kata techniques we will be working them individually and we will be taking segments of each Kata and focusing on them and then we'll put it altogether in doing the entire form. And a Kata is a series of predetermined moves as many as 40 or 50 various moves that are designed as a mock flight. It is kind of like floor exercises in gymnastics, it is one of my favorite workouts so that could be a part of the workout is to do the traditional Kata techniques but again we have that goal established in the beginning. So we go warm-up, skill building and from skill building I like to move into drills and typically that would be pad drills, partner drills and then that leads into the final component of the main body of the class which is actual sparring and we will put the gear on and move around. If you are not advanced enough to spar you'll do sparring drills. The final part of class is the cool down and this is where we kind of start stretching. We are going to lower the heart rate, we are going to go into that quiet mind and we are going to really re-emphasize what we've accomplished in this class, review the goals, review our accomplishments, build motivation for the next class and that typically for me takes about an hour to do. I like class strong, one hour class works best. I'm John Graden. I hope that helps. Thanks."