Mixed Martial Arts Training Routines

Body weight exercises are a great tool to get in shape. You can do them everywhere and can perform them with little to no equipment, which makes them, at least cost wise, the number one health exercises. Combine this with some sort of cardio training such as running, riding the bike or swimming and you have a workout, that touches every aspect of getting in shape. First of all, before you start any type of physical training, you should consult your doctor first. He knows what you can do, should do and should avoid. Listen to his advice and don't ruin your body.

Push up are the most obvious exercise, as it seems that they will work on your punich power, even if they don't do it that much. Most of the Punchin Power derives from your legs and core muscles, as Punches are a fluid whole body movement. Nevertheless, the push up is a great exercise to get in shape.

There are plenty of push up variations. Those target the the muscles in your chest, trizeps, abdomen and the back. First of all need good body tension to keep a straight line. When you are a beginner and can't do more than 3-5 Push ups you should start doing them on your knees. Once you are able to complete those you can move on to regular push ups. It's important to keep your back straight the whole time and do them in a constant motion.

For more inspirations on push ups check out all variations of Push ups, from Easy to Impossible.

This exercise is the top dog of the body weight exercises for a pulling movement. The heavier you are the harder this exercise is. To get an idea how hard this exercise is for most people, the perfect score on the marine physical test are 20 full range of motion Pull Ups.

There are basically two ways to improve your push up if you fail to do them. The first one are negative repetitions. You start in the upper position of a pull up through using a chair, or jumping up and slowly lower yourself. You should aim for roughly 20 seconds on the way down, which is fairly slow. Or you can try the isometric training routines listed below. After a while you muslces will be able to move your weight. For ideas on how you can spice up your training once you hit the magic number of 10, check out the video on the right side. There is some crazy stuff you can do with a pull up bar.

Those holds are used to develop muscular endurance and are especially useful for core strength exercises. They are a bit different to isometric contractions, as you are usually not using all of your muscle strength to get the contraction. Core strength is important for fighters, as you have to absorb punches and kicks and be able to connect your muscle fibers well, which happens through the rotation of your core and leg muscles. That's the reason why big arms don't necessarily lead to a hard punch.

It is actually pretty hard to find good information on this type of exercises in our time. This kind of exercises have almost been forgotten and there is a good reason for this, as there is almost no money to be made from these. If you want to increase muscular strength you have probably heard that low repetitions and heavy weights are the way to go. This is totally right, but there is another way to make significant gains without the need of a gym. You can simply perform static pull and presses at your maximum strength and hold those from 7-50 seconds. There are only two important rules: First of all you have to breathe. Second you have to breathe. Those execises are so useful as they activate all the fibers and force your muscle to work at it's maximum capacity. That's right, there is not too heavy, neither to light, you can create the perfect workload to stimulate muscle growth.

My favorite exercises for this are:

The doorframe push: You stand in a dooframe and push up as hard as you can. This is a good exercise to increase your shoulder and trizeps strength.
The chest front push: You press both of your hands in front of your chest, depending on how far your arms are stretched you work different muscles. If you hands are close to your chest you work the chest and triceps. If your hands are further away from the chest you work more of your shoulders and bizeps.
The hand pushdown: You try to push your on hand down, while the other hand trys to pull it down. Switch hands afterwards. Works on pretty much every muscle in your arm.
The towel pulldown: You put a towel above a door and get into a position where you almost lift your body, the video on the right side explains this very well. If you struggle with Pull Ups, this exercise will help you.
The wall pull or push: You hold onto the corner of a wall, or find yourself a place where you can pull as hard as you can without moving the object. Same goes with pushing. It is similar to the doorframe push and towel pulldown but includes more legwork.

In short, every time you can pull or push something with full force, without moving it, you can get an isometric hold. A powerrack can be used for great exercises such as deadlifts or squads where you can not move the bar. I recommend you check out a few older books on this topic, as it is badly covered in modern day litrature.

Crunches are a good exercise to train your core strength. They put less stress on your back than a sit up and work your abdomen. If you want to be successful, your stability will determine how successful you can be.

Being flexible is, unless you want to be a boxer, usually as useful as being strong. Working on your fexibilty a little bit each and every day will help you improve a lot of aspects of your overall game, just have a look at a few exercises that Eddie Bravo recommend for increasing your flexibilty.