By Mark Mian of the AlterCenter

Boxers and martial artists have always been warned about developing heavy, slow and inefficient muscles by lifting weights. Beyond pushups, pullups, and situps Thai fighters themselves rarely engage in other forms of resistance training to supplement their conditioning. There is merit to this: weight lifting alone will not produce perfect muscle for martial arts. Why? Weightlifting is slow and sustained while Muaythai is fast and explosive.

Former Lumpini champion Neungsiam Samphusri practicing Depth Pushups.

But, there’s no doubt that lifting weights can tremendously increase your muscular strength and ability to hit harder. The only problem with traditional weightlifting is that while it conditions muscles to contract harder, it doesn’t condition the nervous system to contract muscles faster and more efficiently.

To leverage the benefits of resistance training for Muaythai, you’ll need another type of exercise to adapt your stronger muscles into explosive Muaythai muscles: plyometrics. “Plyos” train your nervous system to ignite your muscles to react fast and explosively. When plyos are combined with resistance training exercises, it’s called complex training - and it’s the fastest way to build raw Muaythai muscle power.

Complex Training with the Bench Press
Everyone is familiar with bench presses - used mainly for building muscle and strength in your chest, shoulders and arms. Since bench pressing is similar to punching, it can potentially improve your punching power. I’m going share three plyometric exercises we use in combination with bench presses to increase the explosiveness of our fighters’ punches.

Plyos are freaking nose bleeding high impact. They’re not about rhythmic bouncing, but harshly changing directions as explosively as possible. The goal of plyos is maximum speed and distance from impact. If you go too fast, you won’t get good distance from your strike. If you push too long to get more distance, you’ll lose speed. Plyos are about working the perfect balance of speed and force.

Complex Training Instructions

Do this workout 2 times per week, but never when sore. You are going to do a set of benches followed immediately by a set of one of the plyo exercises, then rest. Do up to 3 sets of these pairs, gently increasing weight as you go along. Stick to the same plyo for the whole workout, trying to improve with it for 4 weeks (more distance, more speed, heavier resistance)

1] Warm-up with 10 minutes of rope jumping or running.

2] Do two warm-up bench press sets. First set is with the bar for 20-30 reps. Rest and stretch for 60secs. Second set is with a weight where 15 reps gets challenging.

3] Load up a weight you can only bench press 3-5 times. Get a spotter to help if you can. The goal is not total fatigue, but really cranking your muscles to maximum contraction. After you finish, you only have 4-6 seconds to start your plyo exercise!

4] Do 10-15 reps of one of the 3 plyo exercises: all-out, no holding back, every rep your absolute hardest. Rest for 2 minutes. Do two more sets of bench presses with the same plyo exercise.

The Exercises

The plyos shown by IMTO and former Lumpini champ Neungsiam “the Rock” Samphusri in the videos below are in increasing difficulty. Work with one for 4 weeks before progressing. Don’t jump ahead.

1) Medicine Ball Thrust

This plyo will make your chest and arms more responsive and whip-like. Use an 8-15lb medicine ball, working your way up. The goal is to get the ball back up as fast and high as you can. Imagine the ball is super-hot and you don’t want to touch it. The higher impact you can achieve, the better. You can get a partner to catch the ball and throw it back down at you. Ouch.

2) Heavy Bag Thrust

Now you have to explode with your whole body, using your abs and back leg to ground your power. Try to hit the bag as brutally loud and hard as you can, without pushing on it. You can get a partner to swing the bag back at you to make your muscles react harder. Oomph.

3) Depth Pushups

You can also use a medicine ball as the prop. Your goal is to hop lightly off the blocks and then slam the ground as hard as you can to blast yourself right back up to the blocks. The hardest part is keeping your body perfectly straight by keeping your abs tight on impact. Use higher blocks to make it harder. Warning: This is a high impact exercise that is very hard on the joints. Doing the other exercises for a couple months will prepare you best for this.

I hope this info is helpful in your training. Got questions or feedback about the article? Feel free to leave them as comments. I’ll be offering new training knowledge each week, and want it to be useful to the community. Please vote on one of the topics below, or suggest your own.