How to Improve Your Defense in Fights

If you want to excel in any kind of fighting sport you would need to learn defense techniques which will help you to protect yourself from being hit. Although the fighting schools mainly focus on teaching offense, it is very important to hone the defense skills. In a fight the person who tries to win needs to have a two-fold objective, to hit and to not get hit.

When you start the match, you know that you are going to get hit no matter how well you defend, but it is possible to minimize the number of hits to a large possible extent. A lot depends on how many times you have avoided being hit and how you took the ones that could not be prevented. The beginners tend to concentrate on the fancy kicks and punches and they often conveniently forget that a bad defense is going to get them nowhere. A few well-coordinated moves are not sufficient to win you a match and you will land into deep trouble if your footwork is not adept and if your reflexes are slow.

If a boxer or a martial artist follows the following points they will be able to perform better at competitive levels.

1. More Practice

If you want to hone your skills you have to spar more often. You need to find out the correct partner to spar with you and you must not make the mistake of starting to spar when you are not ready. Take some time to locate the right school for you and the right coach and instructor too. There is no point in engaging yourself in a fight if you do not get professionalism.

When you spar, you must make sure that you are getting a certain degree of respect from your partner. Also, keep in mind that sparring helps both the people to hone up their skills and it is not a place to show off who knows fancier punches. Before you start, talk to your coach or training partner about the intensity at which you are going to spar.

You must also make sure that you are sparring with opponents of different types. Each person will provide you his own set of challenges and that will help to develop your own techniques to respond to each set.

2. Acquire Speed

A person blessed with good speed will be able to avoid getting hit maximum number of times. But there is a big difference in applying speed to your benefit in boxing and in other running sports. A sprinter will need to be fast all the time and there is very minimum requirement of variation. But a fighter has to use speed to their own effect and having a good rhythm as well as speed is very important. It will not be sufficient if you run a few miles at top speed and use a skipping rope to pick up speed, you need to have good control over your speed to be successful in fights.

A few key points to keep in mind are:

• When you run, choose an undulating place to get acquainted to the erratic rhythm of speed
• Jump ropes at 30 seconds slow and 30 seconds sprint to get more control
• Practise the high step with different speed
• Move backward; it is very important to be skillful and fast in backward moves.

3. Head Movement

In fighting sports, head movement is far more important than footwork. If you have lousy head movement you can be most certain that you will get hit. However, nowadays people do not put enough attention to head movement and that can have damaging consequences. People usually try to block a hit but a much better thing to do is to miss it entirely.

You can pick up the alphabets and try to toggle your head along their lines. Stand in front of a mirror, pick up a letter and try to do the move before you try it out in a fight.

Some of the important letters are:

T- It represents a side to side move and a quick duck.

C- It is the very common swerving motion to avoid a punch.

V-It is a sharp duck.

Be careful when you duck because you have the risk of getting hit by the knee too.

4. Prepare yourself for hits

No matter how good your defense techniques are you will not be able to avoid getting hit altogether. You need to train holding pads properly to get yourself ready for real hits. People who think they are invincible from getting hit will find out the hard way that they aren't.

Another important thing to keep in mind is that you must protect your head at all costs. Getting hit will sap the energy right out of you so keep your hands alert all the time. The problem is that in a long fight, your hands tend to get tired and eventually they droop. It is advisable that you train with weights in your hand in order to be able to fight off this fatigue.