As fighters our exercising training time is very limited. We should spend as much time as possible practising technical and tactical Muay Thai. Time spent exercising must provide a benefit that can’t be obtained during Muay Thai training or it’s wasting time. Each exercise in your strength and conditioning programme must provide the biggest bang-for-your-buck. Achieve maximum training effect, then get out — allowing your body to recover (and improve) and provide more time to practice Muay Thai, or even have a life!
Efficient training employs effective multi-purpose exercises, developing multiple qualities concurrently. This abbreviates your workout while still training all the required elements. Recently, my sports physiotherapist recommended that I use a Bottom Up Turkish Get Up exercise to rehabilitate my chronic wrist injury. This is a good example of an effective multi-purpose exercise.
Exercise Example – Bottom-up Turkish Get Up
The Turkish Get Up is one of the best full body movements you can do. It trains shoulder flexibility, stability and mobility and is great for shoulder rehab. It also places demand on core stability and unilateral leg strength. It’s both a good warm up activation exercise if done with a light weight and a great diagnostic — you’ll know if something doesn’t feel right. Performed using the ‘bottom-up’ kettlebell position, the Turkish Get Up is also a great wrist and grip strengthening movement. Loaded heavily, the regular Turkish Get Up is a real total body strength builder.
Don Heatrick
Founder of Heatrick Strength and Conditioning
Don Heatrick is a family man from the UK, former mechanical design engineer, European Muay Thai silver medallist, former pro Thai boxer (ranked 4th in UK while aged 40-years), a Muay Thai coach, podcast host, and the go-to expert on Muay Thai performance training with over 25 years of coaching experience.
Don helps ambitious fighters and coaches take their game to the next level by bridging the gap between Strength & Conditioning, Performance Science, and Muay Thai.
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I suffer from a recurring rotator cuff problem and have also suffered a broken wrist on the same arm. Because of this I often have to leave a lot of exercises out of my weights routine.
Would this be something you’d recommend I replaced some of the exercises with when I’m suffering from shoulder pain? Would a 16k kettle bell be ok for this?
Yes, the turkish getup (TGU) is great for shoulder rehab, and trains the rotator cuff muscles extensively. The ‘bottom up’ kettlebell position will place more demand on wrist strength and stability (16kg will probably be too heavy for this mehod).
The regular TGU can be done much heavier and will demand much more shoulder stability. So pick which version you need depending on your objective.
Thanks for the advice Don. I’ll give it a try with a lighter kb and see how it goes from there.
Another similar idea for wrist stability is pushups/plank varieties using gymnastic rings or playground rings standing on their edge on the floor, not suspended from something, so you’re balanced on the edge of them and need to use shoulder and wrist stability to control the wobble so they don’t tip over. Hand goes on top of the outside of the ring standing vertically, bottom edge of the ring on the floor, easiest version with wrists in neutral rotation (like knuckle pushups).
I can try to find a video to post if it’s hard to imagine.