Ken Hahn's blog on low kicks and conditioning
Here's an excerpt from Ken Hahn's blog. Hahn is one of Frank Mir's assistant coaches on the current run of The Ultimate Fighter. It's a good read:
A word on conditioning
In the Wesley Murch vs. John Polakowski lightweight preliminary fight, we saw a classic example of the importance of conditioning. When you throw a leg kick at an opponent and he shin-checks it, you better have spent plenty of time conditioning your bones and muscles to withstand that level of contact.
My training and fighting background is in Muay Thai and bare-knuckle Karate. In those arts, we would bang shins all the time. If you hurt your shin during a tournament fight, you may still have to fight 30 minutes later. So if you aren't properly conditioned, you aren't going to be able to walk -- let alone fight.
When you bang shins with your opponent, your lower leg muscles want to shut down because of the trauma. In my opinion, it takes approximately six to eight months of specific lower leg conditioning exercises to build up the muscles and bones to withstand shin-to-shin contact.
One thing that is missing in today's modern MMA world is the traditional Karate practice of blocking strikes by bumping forearms and shins with a training partner.
In Thailand, the most common way for the fighters to condition their legs involves kicking heavy bags. They begin their conditioning regimen by kicking soft-filled bags that progressively become harder until the bags are finally filled with sand -- and then rocks and sand. Once a fighter can kick a bag filled with that combination of rocks and sand, they can blast away at an opponent's leg with little risk of injury.
However, experienced Thai fighters do not always throw hard kicks. They set up their kicks with proper angles, and they maximize their timing skills so that their kicks land in ways that are both damaging to their opponent and safe for their own bodies.
Frank Mir and I will often spar with no shin pads. This practice forces us to respect each other's kicks. You can't always kick your opponent with full force; you have to maintain control, and you have to be precise. This skill requires lengthy kicking practice and should not be overlooked.
At Striking Unlimited, when we are conditioning for low kicks, the objective is to make the leg muscles more dense and resilient so that you can safely absorb low kicks.
As soon as one of my fighters suffers a bruise to his lower leg during training, that makes walking difficult. I make him do jump squats, no matter how painful it may be. At that point he needs to push the bad blood out of the injury site and the new blood in, and the best way to accomplish that is to contract the leg muscles surrounding the bruise.
Modernly, many MMA fighters claim to practice Muay Thai but end up injuring themselves in fights when they employ offensive or defensive kicking techniques. It's difficult for me to understand how someone with no Thai fighting experience willingly enters MMA competition and uses Thai boxing techniques. Fighters should develop their stand-up experience and conditioning through amateur competition prior to entering professional MMA.
Wesley appeared to suffer a deep bone contusion when his kick was shin-checked by John. Perhaps Wesley's leg was already injured prior to the show's preliminary fights and once John checked his kick he re-aggravated the same injury. If not, his injury was probably a consequence of not being in the proper condition to have one of his hard leg kick's checked.
