I’m especially interested to hear from anyone who likes to kick a lot to the body and head during their fights (because I do and obviously it zaps my energy more than punching). What degree of fitness do you aim to achieve and what do you do to achieve it? I’m trying to devise a training program to achieve tournament fitness but it lacks structure and a goal. When I say goal, I mean how I know when I’ve reached a suitable level of fitness, i.e. I can run X miles in X minutes and that will get me through X rounds of X minutes (if you see what I mean). I appreciate that different people will respond differently to different trading programs.

Any / all advice gratefully received.

Loki.

In my opinion tournament fitness is really the same as general fitness! But, you could always try interval sprints instead of long distance running I hope this answer is not too generic.

No its good, thanks - I actually made a move towards interval training last week and quite enjoy it. Apparently it's good for sports with bursts of energy which hopefully I'll be able to muster up as and when necessary.

As fatcat said interval training does seem to be the in thing at the moment it even made yahoo news: news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100225/ap_on_he_me...med_intense_exercise

I've not tried it, but I think I'm going to be.

I can't really comment on high kicks, as silat as a rule doesn't kick above the waist, but I know even those can get exhausting if you do enough of them.

I say in this case just train with the kicks; it's going to be CV training anyway, and it will be training all the muscles you need rather than potentially just some of the muscles from if you were running.

I've noticed that my fitness for silat has increased incredibly, but my fitness for other sports has only increased a little. It stands to reason that the opposite would also be true.

There's a lot of sense in that, cheers. To be honest, I've given up on the idea of kicking my way through a tournment. Even if I could manage it physically (and I do intend to do many kick drills) I don't think it woud be very effective - not now I've tried to do it in practice. My punching was quite weak but I've been working on that quite a bit. I kind of like the idea of just popping in the odd head kick that my opponents not expecting. My next big problem is blocking!

Haha I think that's the same for everyone!

I agree with bauya on that. Just as a point of interest, what are the intervals you are using?

I have Instructor courses starting in April in the UK, The course is to teach martial arts instructors how to teach an intense group fitness class, aimed at the general public for fitness and weight-loss. However the workout itself is perfect for conditioning competition fighters. Please go to www.taerobics.co.uk

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