Improving Stomach Muscles for Martial Arts - No. 3 Using a Medicine Ball

Stomach muscles are probably one of the most important muscles we have for supporting our martial art training:

1. They are an important part of our body-core maneuverability

2. A main component as our core stabilizer

3. Important for protecting our internal organs against body blows.

There are many ways to improve and train our stomach muscles, in the upcoming articles we will go over some of them.

Drill:

While lying down, our partner drops the medicine ball on our stomach. Just before the ball hits we tense ourselves so we can endure the hit.

Tips:

1. The length of the drop should be decided upon according to our abilities and endurance level both (mental and physical), sometimes even 10 cm (3 in) is sufficient. As our abilities improve we drop the ball from a higher point. Eventually we can actually force it down.

2. This exercise can simulate reacting to a hit – so the extraction of the muscles should be as short and precise as possible, immediately relaxing afterwards.

In that sense after we have reached a height level in which we can endure the drop, we should shorten the fall so that we push forward our reaction development (forces us to react faster).

However to maintain the endurance level built we compensate by throwing the ball stronger.

Enjoy the Sweat

The Warriors Project