Bujinkan Dojo

Whether you are a WEKAF fighter, or a Limited armor full contact stick fighter, the following tips will definite help you gain more skill and aid you in your upcoming matches!

Let’s start with a couple of fundamental pieces that are often overlooked, your grip strength and hitting power.

Grip Strength

Your grip is your connection to the stick, but too many students overlook this most basic and important aspect, so here are 5 basic exercises to add to your training regime!

• 1) Bar hangs – jump up on a chin up bar and hang until you cannot hold on any longer

  2) Finger hangs – Do the same exercise but only use your fingers to hang on.

  3) Tennis ball squeeze – Vary your grips and repetitions to make this work well for you.

  4) Heavy weight hold – Pick up and hold a heavy weight until failure.

  5) Tug of war – Grab a rope and a friend and pull away! !

(35 more drills are covered in the Grip Strength Training Manual! www.Bujinkandojo.net)

Hitting Power

With your basic grip strength being improved, how is your hitting power? Well if you hit like an old lady (no offense to old ladies!) then you better start adding some specialized training in power hitting. With that said, understand that there are several methods of hitting (follow trough, rap strike, wetik…) and each should be worked fully. The following drills will also give you an additional benefit, muscular endurance! So here are some more drills to start working on!

• Tire/Target hitting – Apply full power strikes to a target at each of the various angles are contained within your system. 500 hits with each strike should be your short-term goal here.
• Air swing – If you don’t have a target to hit, you can always practice swinging your weapon at full speed with power, through each of your striking patterns.
• Heavy Weapon – Let’s add a weighted stick or steel bar to the mix! Practice proper flow and do not lock the joints or try to prevent the weapon from it’s proper follow through path.
• Withering drill #1 – Take the Air Swing drill and complete one full round of all of your basic strikes, then immediately drop and do 25 full push ups, jump up and repeat the drill and then drop and do 20 push ups, and so on and so on!

So now you have a few extra drills/exercises to add to your training regimen. This is only a small sample of the drills and exercises to enhance your training. These two areas, grip strength and hitting power, are only a small portion of the fighting attributes that you should be incorporating. Future articles and training course manuals will also include agility and mobility, wrist flexibility, hand and eye coordination, hand speed, footwork, mental preparations, adrenal response drills etc. So keep coming back and I hope you enjoyed the article!

Train Hard it is the Way!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 26th, 2009 at 10:19 am and is filed under Filipino Martial Arts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.