Why is strength and conditioning important for Muay Thai?
So, you’ve been hitting the Muay Thai ring hard. Training for hours at a time. Practicing your jabs, kicks, and techniques, but somehow you just can’t seem to deliver your blows with enough force.
The truth is, your skill and performance alone won’t make you an excellent Muay Thai athlete. You may be lacking a major ingredient - strength. Maybe it’s time to look into some strength and conditioning workouts.
What is strength and conditioning?
The term refers to exercise that focuses on building strength, size and endurance of the skeletal muscles. It requires resistance training and engaging equipment that counter opposing muscular contractions.
Strength training has many benefits including enhancing your overall health and improving the strength and toughness of bones, tendons, muscles and ligaments. This level of training helps to decrease the chances of injury, due to increased bone and muscle density.
How does strength and conditioning improve Muay Thai?
Strength and conditioning exercises, is able to:
- Balance posture and correct imbalances to reduce injury
- Build strength and power potential, so you can physically overpower your opponent
- Build your stamina and energy for fights
- Helps to improve and encourage focused movement
Muay Thai strength and conditioning tips
Before you start your strength and conditioning training for Muay Thai, here are some tips that could be of benefit to you.
- Don’t skip your warm-ups and cooldowns - Warming up is critical for any workout regimen, but particularly for strength training. Since these exercises require you to engage your muscles and ligaments with resistance, you must prepare them for the workout. Stretching to elongate the muscles before and after the workout will help to prevent injury and unnecessary soreness.
- Build endurance and strength simultaneously - What you don’t want is to be running out of energy in the middle of your workout. Building your stamina with endurance exercises by running, skipping and other cardio exercises will help. Running is also great for building strength and bone density.
- Engage your entire body - There are some strength and conditioning exercises that engage the entire body during the movement. Some of these include burpees, lunges, deadlifts, push-ups and pull-ups.
- Burpees are an excellent endurance building exercise and tackles the entire body with each explosive power move. Burpees work the chest, arms, abs, legs, glutes, quads and hamstrings.
- Lunges work to improve your balance and coordination. They target your glutes, quads, calves, hamstrings and core.
- Deadlifts are also great endurance builders and will help you to maximize your workouts. They are a great strength building workout and can help to improve balance and posture.
- Push-ups are among the most dreaded exercises in most workout routines, but there’s a reason most people push through with them anyway. They are great for strengthening your arms, chest and shoulders, and will help to stabilize the muscles that surround your rotator cuff. This will lead to conditioning your upper body for dynamic movements.
- Building upper body strength is essential for Muay Thai, and pull-ups will do just that. Pull-ups target your back muscles and improve your grip strength, which in turn will also give you a stronger, tighter clinch.
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Prioritize rest - Contrary to popular belief, in order to build your muscles, they require downtime. Getting sufficient rest is crucial for recovery, which will help to prevent injuries caused by over training.
So, stay hydrated, maintain a balanced diet, train hard but get sufficient rest in between.
Now that you have been educated on some key steps to improve your overall Muay Thai performance, it’s time to incorporate these tips into your training routine! Check out our website for quality equipment and gear for all your Muay Thai needs.