How to Become Proficient in Martial Arts Through Strength Techniques

Video Transcript

"Hi everybody I'm John Graden from the Martial Arts Teacher's Association and johngraden.com. How do you improve your martial arts through strength training? This is a great question because there are two parts, there are exercises you definitely want to do as a martial artist and there are exercises you probably want to stay away from. Let's talk first about the exercises you want to probably be a little cautious on. I'm not a big, as a fighter, I'm not a big fan of bench press or working my pectorals too much for size. Why? One of your goals as a fighter should be to always get your forearms together, so that I can protect this side of my body and protect this side of my body. The bigger my chest gets the harder it is and in fact when I used to compete in tournaments I would always seek out the guy with the biggest chest because I knew he would have a hard time defending against my side kicks and punches to his body. It always worked like a charm so we want to try to avoid getting bulky in the chest. The areas of our body that we definitely want to work squatting actions, anything that is going to work your quadriceps and your hamstrings and your calves and build strong powerful legs is going to help you punch harder, help you kick harder so we want to work those legs and we certainly want to work those abs. We want to encase ourselves in our abdominal armor of muscle, an abdominal armor of muscle so that we are able to take body punches and body kicks. We want to work our back and build the back into that V with lat pulls and various exercises to build the back the shoulders and the triceps. The biceps you want to be a little careful with again because we don't want to have tension here that is going to make it difficult for us to extend your arms, that doesn't mean you don't work your biceps but you are just aware that when you look at top rated boxers, professional boxers, kickboxers and mixed martial artists you typically see a big back, big shoulders, big triceps, toned biceps and a toned chest. You don't typically see champion fighters with real big biceps and a real big chest. A lot of these fighters don't even do weight training they build their muscle by punching the bag and punching the targets and when you are building muscle that way you are going to see the back develop, you're going to see the shoulders, the triceps develop and then of course we're always working our legs as well. I'm John Graden. I hope that helps you learn how to improve your martial arts through strength training. Thanks."