Push Ups For Muay Thai With John Wayne Parr
Conditioning is becoming a bigger and bigger part of training for combat sports. While technique should always be the main focus of your training, as having better technique will improve your conditioning by making your technique more efficient. While that is true and has been the prevailing mindset in combat sports for the vast majority of its history, in recent years a new mindset has started to take prominence.
That mindset can be summed up in one phrase. “If two fighters have the same levels of skill, the stronger and more conditioned athlete will win.” This mindset has led to many fighters, both amatuer and pro, placing more and more emphasis on strength and conditioning. There are even some fighters that focus more on strength and condition than actual skill training when preparing for a fight.
While that is an extreme mindset and not generally held by most fighters and coaches there is a lot of truth in that original statement. Not only is the fighter that is more conditioned more likely to win an even fight, but strong enough conditioning can even help a fighter who is less skilled win a fight through relentless pressure and cardio.
Most fighters know that they should train their cardiovascular endurance. This is why the vast majority of fighters do long, fairly slow paced runs. While this is important, it is equally important to train your muscular endurance and one of the easiest and best ways to do this is with the good old push up.
In this video, John Wayne Parr goes over push ups for Muay Thai to help build strength and endurance in the triceps. John Wayne Parr is a Muay Thai legend from Australia, being a 10 time world champion and one of, if not the biggest non-Thai Muay Thai fighters in the world.
The push ups that John Wayne Parr shows in this video are probably ones that you have seen before. These Diamond push ups are a more advanced variation of push ups that basically take the chest muscles completely out of the equation. These push ups target the triceps and can be used to build a ton of endurance in them. To do these push ups, simply make a diamond or triangle with both your hands and place it on the floor in front of the center of your chest. Then your just going to go down until your chest touches your hands and then push back up.
It’s really important to have a solid amount of endurance in combat sports for a ton of reasons. The most straightforward reason is that having more endurance in the triceps means that you can punch with power for longer, as the triceps are one group of muscles that push your arms out.
It’s also important to have strong triceps for when you want to frame off your opponent. This might be just to keep them at distance when they try to come in. In Muay Thai or MMA, this can be to defend against the clinch or takedowns. For whatever reason you can think of, having well developed and endurance heavy triceps is important for any fighter.
These push ups are great but make sure to play with the different distances between your hands and type to make sure that you build up endurance in all your muscles, not just your triceps.
If you like this exercise and want to learn more from the legendary John Wayne Parr, then check out his complete video series “The Aussie Formula: Kickboxing Fundamentals By John Wayne Parr” available exclusively on Dynamic Striking!