While practising martial arts with us, where children learn skills like strength, agility, focus, coordination and balance, there is another skill that is considered of extreme importance: Speed. It affects most of the performance when in a combat situation. To get speed trained, basic conditional requirements, including flexibility, agility and strength, should be met. On completion of basic conditioning, allows us as a team to train a child further for more intensive exercises that develop explosive power. In this way, muscles start to develop, which supports skill refinement. We keep an eye on children’s skills and try to eliminate unnecessary movement, which ultimately increases biomechanical efficiency and hence the speed.
Speed training is not only a physical exercise but also a mental one, where muscles are trained to become stronger, thereby releasing more power, and, at the same time, speed should be focused as a major goal when training for it. For instance, keeping we train to keep muscles relaxed while training and programming in a way to tense just the right ones that are involved in a specific movement will offer maximum efficiency for the muscles involved and minimal energy dissipation in unnecessary movements.
Factors conditioning speed:
- The number of rapid contractions that one has
- Anaerobic work capabilities
- Amount of body fat
- Relative strength
- Flexibility and freedom of movement
- Techniques
- Improving any one of these factors will make it faster.
Factors that condition agility:
- Reaction time
- Hand-eye coordination
- Central nervous system (CNS)
- Balance
- Flexibility
- Speed
- Strength
Exercises for speed without weights:
Acceleration sprints: We allow kids to do sprints less than 50 meters by sorting distance, which may start from any position. We often play a flash of light to work on their reaction time too.
Long Sprints: 100 to 200 meters to reach maximum speed and work on kids’ anaerobic capacity. Again, it’s a good idea to start with a whistling, clapping, or visual stimulus to work on their reaction time.
Fartlek: In this, we combine sprinting and long sprinting with a continuous run and other exercises to work on both the aerobic and anaerobic systems.
Reaction exercises: designed to improve your reaction time by using a visual or auditory stimulus.
Agility exercises are designed to get the athlete to change direction quickly and accurately. The goal is to improve coordination, balance, speed and power.
One more important thing to improve, other than speed and agility, is the ability to relax. Therefore, we also provide children with a comfortable environment where we allow them to do different mental exercises, games, meditation, and breathing exercises, which help them to heal and rejuvenate. The more they can relax, the more kinetic energy they can store in tendons, and the faster they will be able to move from eccentric muscle contraction to concentric muscle contraction, displaying a greater reaction force.