How NOT to get KO'ed by Lockdown!

LOCKDOWN IS NO EXCUSE TO SLEEP ON YOUR FITNESS

By Evan Lee

Odds are that right now, you’re quarantined at home and probably don’t have any training partners to work with. You’re forced to train alone and you, like most people, probably don’t have any type of home gym setup.

This does not mean you cannot improve. In fact, I believe you can come out of lockdown an even better fighter or more skilled martial artist than you ever when you entered it. 

Imagine an example with me. Let’s say you’re trying to drive from LA to Vegas. You’ll need to drive and you’ll certainly need to have a route.

Now, most of us, when we approach training, have a vague idea of the route we’re following. We show up; we put in work; we go home. Beyond that, there's no much more though that goes into it.

But just think how foolish it would be if you were trying to drive to Vegas and thought, “Let’s just drive east for now and figure it out along the way.”

It is extremely unlikely that you’d get to your location and, if you did, it would have taken forever. Many of us are taking the exact same approach with our training. 

You need a roadmap for driving - you need a game plan for training.

Think of any skill and literally anything in the universe as a vast equation. We know that water is a combination of one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms, sprinting is stride length times stride frequency, and a knockout is the brain being shaken. This equation is the roadmap we need for training: what plus what equals progress? In order to figure out this equation for ourselves, we must analyze fights of others first. 

 Sean Fagan vs. Saranchai Muay Thai Fight at Chaweng Stadium

WHY WATCHING FIGHTS MATTERS

To understand a fight, it’s particularly helpful to start with the finish. If you know how it ends, when you’re watching it from the beginning again, you can begin to piece together how the fight ended the way it did. This is knowledge that will provide great insight into how you can end any fight. 

In this fight, Sean knocks his opponent, Saranchai, out with a lead hook to the temple. This sequence of events was caused specifically by Sean’s damage to the legs of Saranchai. At 7:48, Sean drops Saranchai with a leg kick that Saranchai expects to be a body kick, hence his reaction to try and defend his body with his right arm and scoop Sean’s leg with his left. 

This gives us quite a bit of knowledge. We learned the importance of tricking your opponent into thinking that one strike is another. We learned that we should try to have as many of our strikes look as similar to one another as possible. 

Those are all tools that we can take and factor into how we want to build our game. And that was just from one little moment in one fight. There are tens of thousands of fights and sparring sessions on YouTube alone and a wealth of information you can use. 

Where will your roadmap take you? What does your game plan dictate you do next?