Monday, November 10, 2008

Intensity Skipping Instead of Sprints

In the last month or so, I started doing hard interval running and sprints as conditioning for a potential upcoming fight. Unfortunately, I started to develop some minor pain in my left achilles tendon so, upon advice from my trusty doctor Jenny, I switched over to intensity and interval skipping to replace the running.

To simulate an MMA fight, I always do three 5-minute rounds with a 1-minute rest in between. When doing intensity skipping, I do three 30-second rounds of double skipping within each 5-minute round. This gives me a solid anaerobic work-out that very much simulates the way a fight goes. Jenny told me however that I should only do this type of work-out once a week as it is hard on the body. On other days, I simply do three 5- minute rounds of regular skipping, practicing various technical patterns, with a single 30-second round of double skipping at the end of each 5-minute round. Check out my post, Increasing Your Cardio When Skipping for a video demo of double skipping.

The skipping work-outs seem to put less stress on my joints. And with skipping, I get to work out my upper body more than I do with running, particularly when I'm doing the double skipping portion of the workout. Skipping is almost always the way I warm up as well.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I must say, skipping is something that I recommend to anyone wanting to boost there fitness. I like to incorporate skipping rounds with bodyweight excerises as a circuit. A find it works great for shoulder conditioning which helps with your boxing.