Can you make a martial art into a workout

Remember all the fighting movies you’ve seen till date, where the protagonist is either a newbie or a trained martial arts fighter, and single-handedly beats all the goons to a pulp? Well, there’s more to a martial arts practise than just beating people up – the upside of it is that it can be used as a way to accomplish your workout goals. Paired with a good diet and supplementation of quality products like those from the 120kgs product line, you can make a wonderful workout regime out of a martial art.

So, after going through the content we’ve observed over the years, the one martial art that comes across on the top as the most feasible, easiest to practice, most easily accessible is MMA – Mixed Martial Arts. You’ll find that more gyms these days deal in this, than many other martial arts. It involves a fair degree of punching, grappling, kicking, and locks. Moreover, having gained fame as a competitive sport, there’s not only a scope to get fit following this – there’s also the very fair possibility of this saving your life one day in dangerous encounters, and you taking it up as a sport.

So, let’s jump into the preparation that you should be doing for this so that your body has all that’s required when you’re going in. The actual fighting, we recommend, should be learnt with a professional instructor.

1. Warm-up: There’s no workout that happens without a proper warm-up in place. First, you begin with the basics –
   1. Skipping rope: a great exercise for legs, and the overall eye-limb coordination
   2. Lunges: this one directly targets and tones your quads, hamstring, and your glutes
   3. Jumping jacks

Notice how all the above exercises relate directly to your leg muscle cluster? It’s no co-incidence. The folly of many a people and their workout regimes is their negligence towards a proper leg workout.

2. Now that your warm-up is done, we get into the first phase of working you out: Shadowboxing/practise. As much fancy as it looks in the videos, this is important because it’s the first and the only way you see your own technique – how you land punches and kicks, how do you position your hands, et cetera. This, in turn, helps you adjust your technique in the longer run, making it all the more important.
3. Next up is training with a heavy bag, which gives you the first feel of landing your aggression and blows on something. It’s also going to be your most frequent enemy, for lack of human partners to practise with. Use it all you can.
4. Now, we’ll walk you through with some of our personal favourites in body-weight and weight training that makes you a runner of the longer race.
   1. Push-ups
   2. Russian twists
   3. Burpees
   4. Weighted crunches
   5. Deadlifts
   6. Barbell row

Now, what the above does is impart a fair degree of strength to your core as well as the associated muscle. Also, doing these in a rapid circuit fashion makes it all the more effective, since these directly hit your core, which is going to be a major part of your puzzle.

With these, we hope we’ve educated you to a certain degree about one of the finest Martial arts, and have put the bug to adopt a new sport. All the best!