How To Walk With Your Punches With Trevor Wittman
In martial arts, footwork is a vast subject covering more areas than all other aspects of fighting. Moving our feet can be a defensive ability to maintain the proper distance, but it is also an offensive ability to position us in the right place to throw our strikes.
Although being an essential part of fighting, many practitioners let time pass by without deliberately putting the effort to learn the proper way of moving your feet. Some fighters get it; they can move naturally without ever learning as they get more experienced.
But still, this is a big problem, and as you probably ask yourself, how does such an important aspect gets forgotten? The answer will probably be that most people will settle for average footwork and focus on the upper body movements and strikes as it looks more practical.
To break through this wall, we need to shift our minds and understand that our feet are essential if we want to strike effectively. The first battle that we look to win in a fight is the battle of the feet and not the hands, and if you settle for average footwork, any fighter with a decent understanding of movement will confuse us and lead us to play his game.
So as we can see, by giving enough attention to our footwork as much as we give to our strikes, we will be able to push through the boundaries early on and continue our development as fighters.
In this video, Trevor Wittman will show us how he teaches his fighters to move their feet and hands together so they can get the hang of it early on.
Who Is Trevor Wittman?
Trevor Wittman Is a Boxing coach for MMA fighters. Wittman has trained many great and famous fighters in the MMA world like - GSP, Rose Namajunas, Stipe Miocic, and Justin Gaethje. Wittman was a Wrestler at high school, but he soon transitioned to boxing, where he retired early due to a hyperinflated lung, but this made him become the great boxing coach we know today.
Walking With Our Punches
To start the video, Trevor shares with us that one of the most challenging skills he has to develop in his athletes is connecting their lower body with the upper body to move fluidly.
As all fighters walk all their life naturally, walking in a fighting stance and throw punches at the same time is not a natural thing for them, because when we walk, we switch our legs to move forward, opposite to how we walk when we fight where we keep our stance the same while were moving.
We can use a good drill to develop the connection between our hands and feet to shuffle forward with standard fighting steps. We want to add a movement with our hips and shoulders on the same side as we are stepping, so the whole body s working together, and we do it continuously for several repetitions.
This drill will look very robotic and first, and it is good as this will teach us how to walk fluidly forward while moving our arms simultaneously. As we get better at the drill, we can add punches instead of just rotating our shoulders as we walk.
Remember that we can have a wide stance or a narrow stance, giving us different benefits. A wide stance will keep us stable but will put us out of position every time we throw a punch, and a narrow stance will always put us in a position to strike but will leave us unstable if we get hit.
So as fighters, we want to get the benefits from both worlds, and we do it by bending our knees in our normal stance and keeping our head in the middle so we can choose which stance is the better choice for the situation. Never have your head over your front or back leg as it will keep you in your normal stance and you won’t be able change stances,
Learn More From Trevor Wittman
If you like this video breakdown of the great Trevor Wittman, you would love his whole series on fundamental footwork for fighters at our website - “The Footwork Blueprint - By Trevor Wittman And Justin Gaethje” available exclusively; on Dynamic Striking!