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Oh all right! So he’s not that much resistance.
When you injure any part of your hand or arm:hold it behind your back and work your drills and sparring as usual.train more on your kicks.concentrate on increasing the strength and speed of your “good” arm.focus on building strength and power in your legs with resistance training.practice sprints to develop explosive speed.When you injure any part of your foot or leg:practice kicking and punching reps to understand how the injury affects your balance.if you can’t stand on your injured leg or foot, practice your kicks while sitting in a chair (check out Solo Training DVD published by YMAA Publication Center for chair kicking exercises). You might be able to practice kicks, even slow ones, with your injured limb.practice all your techniques - kicks, hand, elbow, whatever – while sitting and lying on the floor.if you can support your weight on your injured limb, work your drills and sparring as you usually do.double your training time with your good leg. Some fighters say they don’t want one leg better than the other. Why the heck not? If you don’t train your good leg while the injured one heals, you come out of your injury with two legs in bad shape. Train so you have a powerful kicking leg should you have to defend yourself during your recuperation period. Then when the other leg heals, work to bring it up to par with your much improved good one.emphasize arm techniques with a goal of increasing their speed, accuracy, power, and explosiveness. When you injure your back or neck.Each back and neck injury is different, so you have to experiment to see what hurts it and what might cause further injury. Whatever you can do, work that. I’ve had back injuries that were so severe that all I could do were a few dumbbell curls with one arm while lying on the floor in a strange-looking posture. By the time I recovered from the back injury and could train again that one arm was pretty darn strong.
I could go on listing every possible injury but you get the idea. When you get hurt go ahead, and cry, “Why me? Why me? Why me?” and then go about figuring out what you can do and how you can progress in some way.
No handicap for this guy
One of the many characters I ran across walking a beat on skid row as a cop in Portland, Oregon was a grizzled old timer named Lefty. He told me once that he didn’t know if he was given the nickname because he was missing his left leg all the way to his hip or because he only had a right one. Either way, Lefty took both his name and his handicap in stride. He had long since adapted to his prosthetic leg (the vintage pink-colored wood type) and except for a slight limp, he still had a lot of giddy-up in his get-a-long.
One night, a couple of officers came around a corner to find Lefty engaged in a serious fight with a man. Just prior to the officers showing up, both combatants had crashed to the sidewalk. At one point, Lefty had removed his prosthetic limb and was beating the other guy all over his head and body with it, sort of like Sampson did to the army of Philistines with that jawbone.
And like Sampson, he was winning.
So if Lefty can adapt to being physically challenged, you can, too.
Develop a mindset to fight injured
You’ve got an injury and you have figured out what you can and can’t do. You’re ready to keep yourself in a training mode and even grow stronger in another area. To make it even more beneficial, you want to work on a mindset that you’re able to defend yourself given your incapacitation. One that knows that you can fight and you can fight well. A mindset that is a synergism of accepting your injury, determining a course of action, turning your plan into action, and training with a powerful sense of combat.
Let’s make your injury a wrist hyperextension. Since it has swollen to the size of a Volkswagen and the slightest movement with that arm makes your brain hurt, you’re forced to give into the reality that you have to let it rest and heal. You’ve wrapped it or maybe it’s even in a sling. But you’re going to train anyway. If you can, put your arm behind your back and hook your thumb in your belt. If that hurts too much, move it off to your side as far as you can. You’re now good to go.
Bag work
You can certainly practice punching the air with your good arm, and you should for a set of 10 reps to check your body alignment and balance now that you’re functioning mostly on only one side. However, only by hitting a heavy bag or a mannequin-style bag will you get a true sense of what it feels like to hit someone with your arm held protectively behind your back.
You don’t have to do anything special as far as your bag routine is concerned. In fact, one could argue that it’s best to do your regular workout because it’s already in your mind. Your purpose now, however, is to execute your jabs, crosses, hooks and backfists with only your good arm, while determining how it feels to you physically. As you discovered when punching and kicking the air, it’s surprising how much both arms are involved in your balance, speed, and power. With one arm out of commission, you have to adjust and compensate when hammering the bag.
Your style
Can you keep your same style of fighting or do you have to change it a little?
Will you hold your injured arm side forward or your good arm?
If you normally punch the bag with one arm and hold your other fist near the side of your head (which you should), what are you going to do now that you don’t have that arm available to you?
Use the arm you just hit with?
Bob and weave out of range?
Hit and then push through the bag as if to run past the threat?
These are all good options but you won’t know which is best for you until you train with them. You might just find that they are all good and that it just depends on the situation you conjure in your mind.
Defense tactics
How are you going to block? Yes, you can block with your good hand and arm, but what if a kick or punch suddenly comes in on the side of the injured arm?
Can you deflect a punch with your shoulder?
Can you block a kick with your leg?
Grappling
I can’t begin to count the number of times I had to grapple with resisting suspects when I had but one healthy arm. There were periods I had so many martial arts injuries that I was afraid the PD would try to stifle my training. So I’d drag by crumpled toes, broken fingers and sprained wrists to work, and hide them from my bosses. When I got into a scuffle out in the street, I’d hold my bad arm behind me and get real creative when it came to grappling.
Armbar takedown
The
