Loren Christensen's Training Tip - Double Tapping

Loren Christensen is an ex law enforcement agent with many years of martial arts experience. If you’re not familiar with him, just search the web and many pages about him shall appear. Through his experiences he has been able to produce a vast amount of useful books with lots of ideas and training methods for martial artists to enhance there abilities.

Solo Training, is one of his books, full of tips and techniques designed for martial artists who train mostly on there own. In it, he talks about Double Tapping.

Double tapping is a method of training where you perform a technique twice. Take the front kick for example on the heavy bag. You perform the first front kick hitting the bag as fast and powerful as you can. As soon as your foot touches the floor at the end of the kick, you immediately raise it to perform another front kick trying to match the same speed and power as the first one.

The tendency sometimes is to perform the second technique slightly slower and less powerful than the first. Try to avoid this and always keep in your mind that the second must be performed faster and more powerful than the first.

Double tapping can be used with any striking technique of the leg or arm. Through double tapping you develop speed in your strikes, speed in retracted back to your fighting stance after the strike and power in your strikes. Loren Christensen warns that because double tapping is fairly strenuous on your joints and muscles it is a good idea to warm up thoroughly before performing them.

A good way to gain maximum benefits from double tapping is to devote one workout a week to it for a month. During that workout, every technique that you perform must be done twice. So if you would perform a jab, cross, hook combination for example, you would perform two fast jabs, then two fast cross’s followed by two fast hooks. It’s great for building stamina. After the month, you should start to notice a difference (hopefully good) in your speed when shadow striking, and when hitting the bag.

Marks

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Need for Speed, Movement Speed

Every martial artist has a need for speed. When two people are fighting or sparring, physical speed plays a great role in deciding the outcome of the event. Explosive speed is crucial to a fighter as are power, timing and stamina.

One of the best ways of creating this type of physical speed is by carrying out quick dashes. These quick dashes can be performed in many ways. The most common way is doing short sprints. Weather it be 100 meter sprints or any other distance, the aim is to complete the sprint as fast as you can, which means moving your arms and legs as fast as you can. This type of training is great for building up the fast twitch muscle fibres in the body. For martial artists, more specific types of quick dashes can include,

Shooting in on an opponent as fast as possible.
From a fighting stance, bobbing and weaving as fast as possible.
Standing 2 meters away from a heavy bag, gliding in, and hitting with a jab as fast as possible.
Performing a high kick on a heavy bag as fast as possible.
From a grappling position, scrambling around to your opponents back as fast as possible.

The list is endless. If you notice with each example given above, they are ended with “as fast as possible”. Doing these techniques fast is different from doing it as fast as humanly possible. Normally when we train, we perform our techniques fast, but not as fast as we could be performing them. As a test, stand up and jab as fast as you can. Then do it again. Then do it another 5 times one after the other, trying to do it faster each time. You probably noticed that you did it faster the last time than you did the first time right? By concentrating on doing it faster each time, you shall eventually enhance your movement speed. Be it a jab, throw, kick or anything else.

A great way to improve this movement speed is, at the start of your training session once you are warmed up and fresh, pick one technique from whatever fighting style you train, and concentrate on performing it as fast as you can. Carry on doing the technique for about 1 minute. After the minute is up you should notice that you are performing quite fast. After a few weeks of this, you will notice your speed developing. Although this is very simple to do, it is amazing that not many people actually do it.

Marks

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