As promised, here’s a drill that I use with my fighters to work on footwork, agility, balance and co-ordination.
The term ‘quickness kills‘ definitely applies to MMA and any other combat sport.
The athlete featured in this video is a heavyweight professional monster boxer I’m training for the #1 contender spot in Canada.
A win in this upcoming fight (Nov 19) gets us a title shot. Can’t wait!
Here’s the drill:
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Work on the technique, become smooth, then increase your speed and increase the # of reps or time you do the drill so you can maintain your quickness.
This drill is AWESOME, but here’s the thing…
It doesn’t address each and every component that’s required to be extremely quick.
To truly develop quickness…
Machida-like or Edgar-esque, where you can close the gap, hit, then get out of the way before your opponent even registers what happened, you need to address each and every component of quickness, or you risk wasting your time and energy.
It’s as if you trained for years on perfecting your rear naked choke, so that when you get the back it’s a 100% guarantee you’re going to get it, but not being able to take a guy down.
With that being said, I’m going to show you the components you need to address to develop killer quickness. Watch your inbox for the next installment.
UPDATE: read the 6 Components of Quickness for MMA here.
Let me know what you think of the drill below and if you liked it and want to see more, hit the ‘Like’ button below.
Hey Eric, I just purchased your training program and plan to start this upcoming week. I ma trying to access the quick foot drill with the link on the page “flv:http://ericwongmma.com/videos/x-drill-2-foot-180.flv 640 360” but its coming up not found. Is there another link you could send me that might work?
Aaron-
And we are LIVE.
Just fixed it up. Was an old piece of video software that I just upgraded. Enjoy. 🙂
Unbelievable how well-written and ifnrmoaitve this was.
i think van damme is more dancer than fighter/martial artist
think about it when the last time he didnt do a split in a flim
Hey Eric, love the Quickness Kills program. Just had a thought tonight after a sparring session – are there any specific drills/exercise you could recommend for working on developing quick reflexes? Thanks!
A few:
– Get really good at Ping Pong
– Slap hands game
– Drills where you’ve got to do things on command (like in the Quickness Kills program
Not being naturally coordinated, this was harder for me than it looks! I didn’t get it down until I counted out a 3 beat rhythm; I counted a rep every time I got to the center dot. This was a good combo with somersaults and various med ball slams.
great stuff eric, how many times a week would you work this and should it be part of weekly training or added in the 12,8 week fight prep?
regards
Rocci
You could do them daily once the legs get used to them if you’re not doing other footwork specific drills.
nice one, but would it interfere with other workouts or would it have to be seperated?
Don’t do it before MMA sparring or where you’ll need lots of footwork, but before/after BJJ would be great.
The `spider` and `dragon` Machida both have a background in TMA. Taekwondo and karate. These competition formats need you to hit/touch the other guy FIRST and not getting countered. As everybody figured out descent strikes, takedowns, takedown defences and grappling the next thing on the list is footwork, angle striking and positioning. For footwork they will be looking at these traditional arts as their footwork is all about getting in and out.
Onces they get down, they will start at the angles and positioning (like bjj but on your feet). But that is for the future. Most are not generally there yet.
Thats all folks for now.
I realy like your approach to training.keep changing it up to keep it interesting I use all the things I have seen on your site it makes training fun and my training partners don’t know what to expect each week .good one ERIC
Pretty good. What sort of intervals would you do with this? I do the same thing with punches of course the dots are on the wall or BAS is also not bad for this.
how long or how many reps do you do per set?
You could either do it for time or do it for # of reps… 5-10 reps is good, 20-60 sec…
I like this, but what other patterns can I try with the five dots that would still be beneficial?
Are you at Bloor St. Boxing? I used to train there and have a buddy that still does, I swear that looks just like it. Do they still have the ring there it was in pretty rough shape when I was there. can’t wait to try the drill, as matter of fact i’m gonna try it right now.
Hey Ben – yeah that’s Bloor St. Boxing! The ring is not bad now.
Great drill. Footwork really is the foundation all the combat sports are built on. Boxing, MMA, the traditional martilal arts like TKD etc. Anybody laughing at you for doing drills like this will be laughing out the other side of their face when you knock them the F out.
Me and my basketball team were all taught this drill along with various other dots drills during high school and i have done it routinely since while training for mma. Once i got it down and could due it for a good amount of time(along with other drills as well) i noticed my quickness on my feet greatly improve. your articles have done wonders to increase my knowledge of different exercises to improve my workouts at the gym. keep it up!(still working on getting the kettle bell ones down though)
Eric,
We used to do this on off days when I was in High School weight training. We called it the dot dril and the were other hop combinations besides the one shown in the video. We had to do five different hops all back to back for time. My best time backe then was like 45 seconds or something, but we had one of our star basket ball players actually set the record woth like 32 seconds. This drill, plus a lot of other plyometric drills helped us to be able to reach up and grab the rim of the basketball net at the height of 5’7″. It’s definitely something that shoud be incorperated in footwork drills for comnat sports. Thanks for the article. Kepp’em coming.
Very good. I will try it out.
Thanks
I definitely need this and will try it out at the gym tomorrow (at 5:30am when nobody else is there to see me).
this look good, i’ll try it from now. excuse for my english. Eric, thank you for all your work. every day i learn with you. 🙂
We use this drill a lot…I mean a lot in Taekwondo training. It’s so good for fast feet. We also use some two footed methods like making x’s going up and coming back down with the dots. Thanks for sharing Coach Eric!
Yup, that’s definitely a good pattern… Single-leg variations as well.
Hey Eric
Looks like your guy is playing “hop Scotch”, I think I would get funny looks if I did this drill in the gym or a public park. As sissy as it looks, it makes sense; allegedly Bruce Lee credited his impressive footwork to his cha-cha-cha dancing. There’s a famous Irish Dancer (Michael Flately), who was a golden glove boxing champion as well. I think Lean Claude Van Damme was a ballet dancer in his past (maybe that’s a bad example though)
Better get my dancing shoes on…
Might have to learn the cha-cha-cha myself!