A Warrior's Thougts on the Martial Arts

Both Chris and I plan to qualify for and compete in the WKF kickboxing world championships in Croatia this year. Hence, we don't cross-train a lot but rather stick to basic kickboxing training. Besides shadow sparring, padwork and actual sparring, drills are a great way to develop reflexes and grind in some sport-specific reactions. After analyzing some old kickboxing bouts and some more recent boxing matches, we came up with a simple defensive drill. One partner assumes a low kickboxing guard, while the other keeps throwing 1-2-3 combinations (jab, cross, lead hook). The first partner goes through the 6 step drill, working on each step for one 2 minute round. On each individual step, two factors are exchanged to give a variety of possibilities: type of defensive action (block / dodge) timing of the counter (none / indirect / direct) I think the first factor is pretty obvious. You either block or dodge. Getting hit is not a valid option for rather obvious reasons. As for the second...

Today, Chris and I did our first "Push" session in our reloaded 5x5 program. All those little tweaks probably make the program even more awesome than it was before. As usual, after warming up, we worked the pads for 5 rounds each. Today, we didn't freestyle a lot but rather worked on specific drills, some of which are inspired by Anderson Silva's instructional videos. (I've compressed the video to just a few seconds per drill so as not to bore you.) Then, we hit the gym and lifted some heavy stuff. Well, ok, nothing all too heavy today, but then it was only our first session. Basically, there's been two changes (improvements?) over the original program: Front squats became Overhead squats At the end of the session, we'd do 25 bottom-up presses on each arm , following Chad Waterbury's recommendations in his article, the 25 Method . Hence, the new "push" session is structured as follows: (Snatch to) Overhead squat, 5x5 Clean & Press, 5x5 ...