Boxing workshop Sun 26th 2:00-3:30

 Free Boxing Workshop

On Sunday 26th at 2:00-3:30 at 3392 Adeline St. Berkeley, CA

All you need to bring is a large bottle of water, and wear some comfortable workout clothes.

We will be doing a warm up involving calisthenics, there will be footwork, and pad work on focus mitts, along with some shadow boxing.  

I will be providing the necessary gear; Hand wraps, gloves and focus mitts. 

All you need to do is show up ready to train. 

3 Good exercises for Martial Arts

When you are training in a combat sport like boxing or in Muay Thai your body needs to conditioned. To throw kick and punches you need to have strength in your muscles. Calisthenics are an easy to create that strength, since most of what you are working with is body weight. Which means that you can preform them nearly anywhere.

Push Ups are the one of the best known ways to develop upper body strength. Your chest will feel the burn form doing push ups but also your triceps, shoulder and your backs muscles are engaged too. One of the benefits of push ups is that if you do enough, you can increase your muscles too. If you ever get tired of the standard push ups then, there are many variations; move your hands closer or wider, raise your feet on a platform higher than your hands, etc.

Squats are the a really good way to develop lower body strength ( And I mean body squats) . The three large muscles in the lower body are actively engaged: glutes, quads and hamstrings. With martial arts like Muay Thai the legs are worked directly with kicks. However you still need to have strong legs for boxing too. Each punch will be deriving power from pressing your weight against the ground as you punch. This means that your whole body weight will travel in a punch. Squats can help with you being to realize that.

Chin ups are good for both the back and the arms as well. Your back muscles control how fast you can bring back a punch. So doing chin ups will help with speed and keep your arms from not getting tried after throwing punches. Also it will keep you back in balance with your other muscles. There are variation for chin ups and pull ups are good once you think chin ups are easy. The only down side is that you will need to find a bar somewhere to practice them on.

So the three areas of the body that you want conditioned for marital arts are the Legs, the Chest and the Back. Working these body parts will allow you to develop power in your strikes and keep your body fit too.

Hand Wrap Styles

Hands wraps are surprisingly complex, form what style to how to wrap your hands. I'm going to be covering the different styles of hand wraps.

Regular hand wraps are made of thick cotton and provide a little bit of cushioning as well as binding of your bones in your hand. You might be tempted to hit a heavy bay with just the wraps, but don't. Just put on your pair of boxing gloves before you hit the bag. The trouble with cotton wraps is that they tend to shirk in the dryer. Now, you could hang them up to dry, but that's assuming you have a warm sunny day or another cheap heat source.

Mexican wraps are a blend of cotton and elastic. This allows you to wrap around the  individual knuckles more easier. In my experience they will shrink less in the dryer.  They are thinner in material, but they are longer so it makes up for it.

I personally like Mexican wraps because I know that I can adequately wraps all parts of the hand: the knuckles, the wrist, and the thumb. Also the sterchy-ness of the wraps allows for more tighter compression and better dispersion across the hands.

Hand Wraps

Hand wraps are great for two reasons; they help protect your knuckles and they can keep your gloves clean.

First, While Hand Warps help protect your knuckles, you should never hit a heavy bag with just hand wraps, there is not enough protection for your hands. The reason is that hand wraps keep your knuckles form fracturing on impact. This is because the hands are bound and the impact becomes dispersed across the entire hand instead of being focused on a small point (namely your knuckles). It is important that when beginning training, you need to wrap your hand ups and then put on boxing gloves before hitting a heavy bag.

Second, Hand Wraps are a very absorbing, since they are made of cotton. While you are training your hands will being to sweat. If you are wearing hand wraps, then most of the sweat will get soaked up in the wraps. As a result your gloves will become less slimy and smelly on the inside. Which means that your gloves will stay fresh longer. Just be sure to wash your hand wraps after each use.

One more thing, when you wash your hand wraps be sure to stick the Velcro together, so that it will not ruin your clothes in the washer and dryer.  It is also a good idea to stuff them in a mesh bag so that they won't tangle with your other clothes.

 

Boxing intro workshop the deatils

On 10/27/13 at 1:00 I will be hosting a boxing intro workshop. I will be covering basics: stance, footwork, straight punches. There will be a warm up with calisthenics involved.

I will provide  the necessary gear; hand wraps. gloves and focus mitts. However, I only have space for six people.

There is very little that you will need to bring, you should bring water, wear clothes that you can move around in easily and some shoes that you normally use in a workout.

The location will be at  3392 Adeline Street, Berkeley CA. 

Boxing Gloves

A very important piece of gear is a pair of boxing gloves. They have a long history, but I won;t be talking about that, instead I will be talking about why you should wear boxing gloves when training. Your hands have very small bones in them that are somewhat fragile. Yet for most most humans attacking with punches feels natural. That's where boxing gloves come in, they allow you to train with little risk of damage to both your hands and wrists. The gloves should have enough padding to protect the fingers. about 2 to 3 inches of foam will do the trick. When you are punching with gloves there should always be the feeling of a barrier  between your knuckles and the surface that your punching. So if you have gloves on, and are completely feeling the punching bag, you need to throw those gloves away because there is no more barrier left to protect your hands.

When you start to look gloves, please stay away form sporting goods stores, the cheap gloves that they offer look like they are good, but they will break down after heavy training. I recommend buying online form brands like Ringside, Twins, and Title. They are a bit pricey but they will last through hard training sessions.
Boxing gloves and Muay Thai gloves only have minor differences, like the thumbs a positioned differently in Muay Thai gloves to allow for stand up grappling called the "Clench" (more on that in another post).

I personally like Muay Thai gloves because they are still hand made with cow grain leather and still smell fresh after years of use. They are pricy and often times have to be order from Thailand, but I'm willing to put up with that. For the average Joe just going to Ringside or Title and finding a pair of gloves on discount will cover you fine.

Which brings us to glove types. There are actually subcategories of boxing gloves: bag gloves, fitness gloves, training gloves, sparring gloves and competition gloves. I say just buy sparring gloves for training and your good.

The next thing to consider is the size because not everybody uses the same size gloves. If you happen to weigh around 120 pounds then you should wear 12oz gloves. If you weigh around 140 lbs then you should use 14oz and so on. However there is an easy way to picking a size, because 16oz is the size that will fit most and offer the best amount protection. The only Caveat to that is guys that weigh 180 lbs or heaver they
will need an 18oz glove to protect their hands and their sparring partners.

Weekend Workshop

 I Am going to be Holding a Weekend Workshop For people interested in learning boxing. It's going to be an introductory class so it will be more technical and low intensity. I will follow up a date next week.