The traditional Muay Thai warm-up that many fighters comfortably default to leaves a lot of stones unturned when it comes to getting the most out of your Muay Thai training. Here is a 3-phase comprehensive Muay Thai warm-up to ensure you’re performing at your best each session.

Plyometric movements involve a pre-stretch of the muscle-tendon unit in order to create a higher rate of force development. It is crucial to develop this ability in the sport of Muay Thai and Kickboxing as many blocking, kicking and kneeing techniques are plyometric in nature.

In part 2 of this article series, we’ll discuss principles and training methodologies that can be used to optimize combat sports training within-session and within the week.

In this article, we’ll discuss several strategies and philosophies I use when preparing combat sport athletes, which layers they can be utilized in and how a better understanding of programming can help us more effectively coach high-performance combat sport athletes.

This week’s topics discuss the differences between squats and trapbar deadlifts in a training program, the use of a “hypertrophy phase” for combat athletes as well as how to introduce plyometrics in a fighter’s training.

This week’s questions and answers session covers topics such as training session structure, single leg training for power and explosiveness as well as high/low training categorization.

Olympic weightlifting movements in the S&C environment is a controversial topic because some coaches are quite dogmatic about it’s use in power development. There are pros and cons to using them, depending on the context. Coach Jason lays out reasons to use alternatives and in what situations they would be best utilized.

The warm-up is also a component I’ve never stopped trying to refine over the years of coaching. I continuously ask myself: how do I help my athletes reach physiological and psychological readiness in the fastest, most efficient way possible?

A few principles I utilise follows the “RAMP” acronym.

My latest guest post on Fight Camp Conditioning covers the complexities of developing conditioning in the world of combat sports.

The main goal of exercise sequencing when training athletic qualities concurrently (plyometric ability, rate of force development, maximum force output, muscular endurance, etc ) is to optimize the training adaptations from each single modality and reduce the detrimental effects of neuromuscular fatigue.

Optimizing exercise order is driven by two interrelated principles: fatigability and priority.