Does S&C Training Differ Between Striking & MMA Athletes? w/ Steve Pipe (SSOF Ep 72)

Steve Pipe1:06

And then the other one is just around sensory input pathways. So basically trying to create a greater ability for my athletes to have a higher awareness or higher level of self-awareness of where they are in space. So sensory input drives motor output. So basically, the greater ability we have at knowing where we are in space, the more force we can apply into any given situation. So yeah, that's been the two kind of main things that I would say I've been putting my time into.

James de Lacey3:42

Nice. Yeah, I like that. I guess that spatial awareness, sensory awareness, if anyone's interested in kind of going a little into that and a little more voodoo as well, check out the episodes with Dan Ficeto and Shea Sherman. They dive into some of that stuff.

But how are you implementing that then? Let's start there. How are you implementing that with your fighters in terms of the sensory work to improve physical output?

Steve Pipe4:12

Yeah, that's a really good question, man. So okay, so basically every lobe in our brain has a visual receptor doing it. So we're inherently very visual creatures. We're very visual in terms of how we learn, and yeah, so obviously that's heavily reflected in the fact that we have a visual receptor in every lobe of our brain.

So when we look to polish the other sensory input pathways, we have vestibular apparatus and we have the spinocerebellum. So these two pathways they can be polished. Well, you know, vestibular apparatus is like these tubes that feed into our brain and they're filled with fluid and there's like these hairs, and as that fluid swishes it makes these little crystals on the hairs and that's what tells our brain where we are in space.

So we have vestibular apparatus and then we've got the spinocerebellum, which is essentially like Smeagol from Lord of the Rings, like that suit that they wear to map out where it is in space. So it's like a whole lot of these kind of sensory sensors all over the body that kind of tell us where we are in space.

So when we're looking to kind of polish those pathways, we essentially need to remove the visual sensory feedback that we get from, for example, just being able to look at our feet or look at our legs or see ourself in a mirror, for example. So looking at ourself in a mirror, taking the mirror away, little things like that, we don't even realize how much of an impact it's actually having on us from a skill development perspective.

And you could even argue that it's not even like you're not actually developing the skill of the movement, you're developing the skill of correcting the movement by seeing yourself in the mirror and making the adjustments. You know, so it's like that age old saying, you don't truly know something until you can do it with your eyes closed. So I'm not saying shut your eyes and deadlift or something like that, but okay, something that I've been playing around with which has been quite fun is just as a warm-up to get things going.

It's like, okay, let's do walking lunges, but I'm going to give you a fixed target and you have to keep your head fixed, your vision fixed on that target, and you're going to lunge straight but your head is going to maintain on that target. So you'd be surprised, bro, the amount of top level athletes that I work with, I get them to do that, the first set they do, they're all discombobulated, everything's just falling all over the show. Just walking lunges, it's not even a complicated exercise.

And then when the second round that they do it, they kind of get their bearings. You know, those other sensory input pathways start to kick in, they start to give them that feedback about where they are in space, and then all of a sudden the movement starts to look really good again. So yeah, things like that has been really really interesting and really fun.

And yeah, just lots of different drills where I guess it's like a heightened awareness of these type of training tools. So knowing that, okay, if I have an athlete that's struggling with a certain movement, putting them in front of a mirror is going to be a regression from a sensory input perspective because they're going to be able to see so much. They're going to get so flooded with this visual feedback. And in order to progress it, it's like I take them away from the mirror and I get them to do the exercise freestanding.

Now, all of the stuff might sound quite straightforward, you know, and it is kind of to some degree, but I think it's just about being aware of these things and how they actually affect the athletes that we're working with. And then, for example, an overhead press, a single arm overhead press, if we can look at ourself in front of the mirror like a bottoms up press is a good one, because if you can see your wrist and your elbow in the mirror, then when you're pressing up you're able to keep that weight nice and stacked because you're visually able to see this.

But then all of a sudden you take that mirror away and you just start to see the technique go all weird. And it's like, well, they just can't see themselves doing the exercise. So just something as simple as that has been a really interesting thing for me to integrate, bro.

James de Lacey8:45

Yeah, I love this topic as well. We've talked about it a bit on the podcast, but it reminds me, I don't know if you've come across or heard or seen Infinity Walks, and then as a progression from Infinity Walks, I don't know if you've seen Cal Dietz's goat drill at all.

Steve Pipe8:45

No, bro, I haven't, man. I've seen a lot of Cal Dietz stuff, but I haven't seen the goat drill.

James de Lacey8:45

Yeah, so maybe I'll send them to you after this. But it's basically what you're doing with the walking lunge but keeping a fixed spot on the wall. So the Infinity Walk is like a figure eight, but you have a fixed spot on the wall the entire time, so your head has to move around as you walk. And they use that kind of stuff for, I guess you could say, as part like as you are with the warm-up to prime everything. And then the goat drill is like the Infinity Walk on steroids where there's...

Like three circles you're running figure eights round with, while passing a ball around your back while keeping your eyes on a target or having someone in the circles that are trying to tag you, things like that. It's pretty interesting stuff. It sounds super voodoo, but there's so many people using stuff like that now, including yourself, and seeing results doing it. There's definitely something to it and it's a really interesting topic.

Steve Pipe10:04

I think when you look a bit deeper into the brain itself and the different lobes of the brain and you see how that feedback is transferred through to the brain, and you see how that sensory feedback—okay, for example, we go into a machine weight, right? A machine weight, we have an overwhelming amount of sensory feedback when we're sitting on that. On, let's say for example, we're sitting on I don't know, a machine chest press, okay? So I've got the seat underneath my feet, I've got these handles I can visually see, so many things, so many components, right?

I've got so much componentry that I can see. I've got this feeling of this chair under my butt. I'm upright, my feet are on the ground. I can just see so much. I've got so much external support and sensory input flooding into me, right? But then if I go and do a dip, for example, now my legs are dangling in the air. I've got basically no feedback whatsoever. I'm just looking at this weight, and even then I could just look up, right? And then all of a sudden, there's just so much for my brain to calibrate just off of that one exercise.

It's just understanding, okay, well that's a high-challenge exercise from a sensory perspective, and this is a high-challenge exercise from an output perspective, right? So where we're able to run, if we're talking about the machine weight, we're able to run a [expletive] ton of output here. Over here we're going to get a massive challenge to our sensory input pathways in terms of calibrating where we are in space, and then still obviously having to overcome that and lift a [expletive] ton of weight there too.

It's just an interesting topic, man, honestly. And then I look at some of the fighters that I train, and I feel like the ones that get it—you look at them and how the way they fight, even sparring with this one guy, for example, Nik Kingi. I started talking to him about this and straight away he goes, "Ah yeah, I call that the sixth sense." You'll be sparring with him and he'll just go like, if you cut an angle off to the side, you just feel his back fist come to your face, and you're like, "Oh, what the hell was that, bro?"

He's placing you here, you pivot off that way, and he just goes, "Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom." It's like, hey, there's something to it, bro. Being able to be hyper-aware of where you are in space at any given point in time is one of the main core tenets of being a high-level athlete, isn't it? And so obviously with combat sports strength and conditioning, we're essentially trying to create high-level athletes. We're wanting to create athletes that have a high degree of competency on multiple fronts, right?

So using tools like this is definitely something fun to play around with and to integrate into your training. But then just seeing how that type of training transfers over into other exercises where we're looking to run more output, if we're going into a deadlift, a bilateral deadlift or something like that, and just seeing how those two work together.

James de Lacey13:07

I love that. That's awesome stuff. And you talked about at the beginning as well how you've gone through some skill acquisition stuff too. I'm assuming, I mean, some of this plays a little role in that too, but is the skill acquisition stuff more applying to the actual technical, say Muay Thai, MMA training, or are you also using some of those principles within strength and conditioning?

Steve Pipe13:36

Bro, to be honest with you, man, my brain's always in both worlds, so I always think about it from a skill development perspective and I also think about it from a strength and conditioning perspective—strength training more specifically. Because with a lot of the conditioning stuff from a general perspective, it's not that complicated, right? It's like get on your bike and just [expletive], do your thing, right? There's not that high of a skill level there required to do that.

But if we're talking about weight training and strength-oriented skills or power skills or plyometrics, all that sort of stuff, there's definitely a huge amount of merit to that there. And then obviously with the skill side of things as well, massive, massive application, bro. When I went through these courses and I was doing all these studies, man, I was thinking to myself, like, "[expletive], if I could go back in time and retrain myself, how would I do it?" And then it just makes a lot of things make sense.

So something as simple as Bruce Lee's statement, right? "I don't fear the man that knows 1,000 different kicks. I fear the man that's practiced one kick a thousand times." So it's instilling these really good technical foundational habits from the very beginning and not really allowing ourselves to have, quote unquote, "bad reps." Every single rep is a good rep, and it's like we just build this foundation. We wire our brain in a way that when we open the folder—let's say it's a Muay Thai round kick, right?

I'm going to open up the Muay Thai round kick folder. If I have a thousand different variations of that kick because the coach that I'm working with has allowed my technique to slip so many times when I'm practicing, right, when I go to open that folder, it's like there's a [expletive] ton of different folders in my head and I don't even really know which folder that I want to open, right?

But if you've done a thousand reps and every single rep is the same as the last—sure, there's going to be some variation there, some variance—but if for the most part it's green, green, green, green, orange, green, green, green, orange, green, green, orange, green, maybe one red, then green, green, green, green. Think about a block chart. It's like every rep is a little green square, and it's like you get to the end of a block of training and you've just got a thousand green squares, right?

Whereas if you have [expletive] rep, okay rep, [expletive] rep again, good rep, [expletive] rep, good rep, [expletive] rep, and then by the time you get to the end of the block, it's just got all these red patches throughout that graph, throughout that chart, you're like, "[expletive]." When you got to open that folder, it's not so congruent. Whereas if we have the sea of green, maybe an orange here or there or a yellow, and then by the time we get to open that folder when it actually comes to the crunch, it's just like all those green just compound down to that one kick and then it's just beautiful, right? It's a thing of technical beauty.

So that's something to definitely for the people that are getting into martial arts that might be listening to this: really try to prioritize correct skill development from the start. And I think if we're just looking to learn skill and improve our skill, then there's definitely a line between what's actually going to be conducive to building skill and what is actually just mental toughness training, junk volume.

James de Lacey17:05

For sure. And I've talked to many different coaches, researchers, all of the stuff from this podcast and varying things, and it's funny, there's obviously different philosophies around the whole skill acquisition side. And I've talked to many people that talk about not so much that they don't like drilling, but more so like there's no such thing as a perfect punch or a perfect kick. So for them, drilling doesn't make sense. They just want to put you into situations and essentially do stuff like that.

Then there's the other side. We've got people saying there is a perfect technique for these certain things. And it's actually quite interesting. There's a guy I was starting to talk to and work with. He owns Strike Tech sensors, and he's actually mapped out essentially what makes, or close to what makes, a perfect punch through his g-force data through that, which is interesting. But obviously the perfect punch is dependent on timing and all sorts of other things within the ring, cage, whatever it is.

I want to get your take on, for example, you mentioned someone starting and you're talking about perfect or just learning the good technique to start with. Would you recommend someone ever going on their own and starting to learn from YouTube? Because obviously with other sports, for example a good example is Olympic weightlifting, you can start learning from YouTube and things, but you ingrain these bad habits. It's a sport that is less forgiving in terms of technique. If you start ingraining these bad habits early, they become very hard to break.

But with the combat sports, there's so many different styles. You could say someone has bad habits or bad technique, but they're a great fighter because of the way they're able to time and read opponents. So where do you sit on that spectrum in terms of starting on your own versus starting and trying to learn properly from the very beginning?

Steve Pipe19:04

Okay, cool. So just to get some clarity on the question, so basically on one side it's someone just watching YouTube and then just going live basically and just sparring essentially. And then on the other side, it's someone that's got a coach and they're just drilling perfect technique and stuff like that, but maybe not so much actually going live and trying real experience. Is that kind of what you're asking?

James de Lacey19:32

Yeah, we can make it a little more in the middle ground instead of really far extremes. So someone who's just trying to learn the technique themselves from YouTube and they're hitting the bag and trying to throw these perfect strikes from YouTube versus doing it with coaching.

Steve Pipe19:59

Good question, bro. Look, I think at the end of the day, you look at someone like Mark Hunt, right? And you say to him, how did you learn how to strike? How did you learn? He's like, oh, I just watched Street Fighter the game. And it's like Street Fighter? Okay. But then you see it in his fights.

He's in the corner, he's getting smashed by that guy's name—jeez, I can't remember off the top of my head—but that massive Dutch dude that was just punishing him in the corner. And then he just goes... This is back in K-1, okay? Yeah, Le, maybe he's French, I can't remember. But anyways, he was just punishing him in the corner, and then he just goes whoom, and it literally looked like a shoryuken from Street Fighter. Like Ryu's charging up, just taking all the shots, and then just boom, just clipping him. Knockout.

So you've got obviously people that are just talented. They're physically just built for fighting. Yeah, so we always have to understand that as these outliers, right? Outside of the general scope of things.

I think from what's optimal, I'd always say having some kind of coach to observe your technique. And I think the other thing, the other consideration that we have to take in here is that there isn't one size fits all when it comes to striking. Everyone has a different body type. Everyone's going to have different things, specific strikes and techniques that just work for their body, and they're going to have other strikes that don't.

Maybe it takes them a little bit longer to find something. Just from a pure biomechanical route, it takes them a lot longer to figure out exactly what it is that they have to do in order to get power and efficiency into those movement patterns.

But yeah, from an overall perspective I would say that, just from a general overall perspective, I would say that it's better off to have a coach that you work with. Even if they're just overseeing your training, I think that's always going to be better than if you're just doing stuff on your own. So yeah, that would be what I would say, bro.

James de Lacey22:49

Yeah, nice. Yeah, I think it's a good question to ask you, and for anyone listening, Steve's fought professionally in Thailand through Muay Thai and things, and he's obviously on the coaching side too with the strength and conditioning. So he's got a good view from both sides, and it's good to have his perspective on that.

But I wanted to come back to your strength and conditioning side too. And obviously you train a lot of Muay Thai, a lot of MMA athletes—feel free to name drop any of them on this podcast too. But I want to know how or if your strength and conditioning practices at all differ between your MMA and your Muay Thai athletes, and if they do or don't, why?

Steve Pipe23:15

Yeah, that's a really good question, bro. Really good question. It's something that I've kind of been refining over time, and now I feel like I'm in a position where I can give you a pretty good answer.

So I don't look at it from MMA versus Muay Thai anymore. I don't look at it like that at all. What I look at is I watch tape of their fights, and I look at the attributes that are associated with the strikes that are their most devastating weapons.

Okay, so for example, if I have someone that's very punch heavy—that's a very punch heavy striker-wrestler—that doesn't really utilize too much in terms of hip rotation, so they're much more like they've come much more through the MMA route. Obviously they don't have a very, they don't use what would be considered optimal biomechanics from a boxing perspective or even a Muay Thai perspective. They're much more just arm punches and then forward pressure and then obviously wrestling, right?

So someone like that, rather than trying to work on a whole lot of things that essentially are, it's like style is going this way and then the training that you're doing is going that way, right? So rather than trying to cross, cross, cross in opposite directions, I just try to kind of enhance the rocket ship that is already them.

So yeah, essentially looking at the attributes in terms of what it is that they do when they're striking or when they're fighting and competing, and then asking myself the question, is what exercises can I do that allow these athletes to enhance those strikes?

So yeah, looking at what they do when they're actually fighting, what works for them. If they've got, for example, a [expletive] ton of finishes from flying knees or when they fight they just do flying knee on flying knee, or they're just very heavy-handed, they just throw massive bombs but, like I was saying before, they don't really rotate the hips too much. So then for someone like that we're going to be more predicated towards upper body strength because the hip side of things is almost non-existent. They're just arm punching.

And it's like we're so far into the career that to change those biomechanics, especially for me as a strength and conditioning coach, I'm not their skills coach. It's not my role to say that, right? So I'm just like, okay, just got you to the party, let's just [expletive] send it on that front.

Whereas the cool thing for me is when I get a lot of my Muay Thai guys that are transitioning down to MMA. This is where it gets fun, right? Because it's uncharted territory.

We've got, for example, I've got this one fighter, Nico Ali kingy. He just won King in the Ring for a third time, so that was a massive thing. So if anyone doesn't know what King in the Ring is—I know you know—but for anyone that doesn't know, it's an eight-man tournament. Basically they have to fight three fights in one night against the best fighters in the country. So this guy, he won that tournament on three separate occasions, so he's the top dog. He's had about 50 Muay Thai fights, and now he's transitioning into professional MMA. So it's a pretty big transition.

But yeah, for someone like him, basically what we want to do is enhance attributes that would help him with stopping takedowns and then look at making sure that all of the things that are his strongest suits—which is obviously his striking is super sharp, super powerful—so basically just what we've been doing plus we just add in specific exercises that's going to give us a little bit of an edge on that front.

But yeah, most of the time, man, I just kind of go off what the athlete's telling me, right? So I start off with what I want them to get better at from a general athleticism perspective. I build the function out with them and I help them to improve on certain mobility, stability, strength, all that sort of things obviously.

Our biggest thing for me is just maximum strength. I just want my guys to be insanely strong. And then from there, once they have a fight lined up and we're in camp, then we start to ramp up plyometrics, ballistics, more slightly more specific exercises. But essentially, the maximal strength is the goal. But we don't want to get to the maximum strength and then basically just chop everything out in the process. We want to maintain all of that foundation that got us to that top point and train in a way that integrates that into the program.

And then from there I just listen to the athlete. If they're telling me, "I feel amazing, I feel the strongest I've ever felt, everyone in the gym is coming up to me and asking me what are you doing, what are you doing differently," these kind of subjective things are some of the best indicators that you're doing a good job. They look like a beast, they're training like a beast, they're doing insane, crazy workouts and their skills training, but their body is able to handle it fine.

All their training partners are saying you're looking amazing bro, you're training so well. They tell me they're sparring, they're doing great, they're piecing everybody up. Awesome, we just keep doing what we're doing. Obviously what we're doing now was already doing so well for you, it's going so well for you, we don't really need to change anything.

My mindset shifted a lot in terms of peak performance. It's definitely a component in there, but I'm also always asking myself the question of how can I keep my guys pain-free, how can I give my guys longevity in their career, how can I ensure that after they finish fighting they still have a life after fighting? They're not just a vegetable, their body's not all [expletive] up.

One of the biggest things that I've seen in my experience—obviously, you mentioned I've done both—one of the biggest things that I've seen that causes people to stop fighting is their bodies just being so [expletive] painful all the time. Just chronic pain. Chronic pain is what ends careers. And then they end up having to get surgeries, and then with surgeries come a lot of complications, and structurally the body's never really the same again, and then that's just kind of the career kind of taper off from there.

James de Lacey30:26

No, I'm going to come back to that. But you got a shout out in the YouTube live chat here. I hope I say there right. I'm not going to say it right, I'm sorry. But it's Daniel and he says, "Brother Steve Pipe, also meeting you at Night of Fury." So obviously—

Steve Pipe30:54

Yeah, thank you bro. Thanks for bringing that shout out. Yeah, that guy's a man, he's a cool dude. I like him a lot.

James de Lacey30:54

Awesome. So if you're listening to this on the replay, remember you can always join these live and ask questions too. But I wanted to come back to you mentioned about, okay, you've got Muay Thai guy or kickboxer coming to MMA, great striker, but the one thing obviously you need to start to improve—takedown defense, grappling, etc.—and you're about, okay, you're going to add some of these exercises in to potentially help with that. So maybe there's someone listening who's a striker transitioning to MMA or an MMA athlete looking to improve that in their game. What kind of exercises are you looking to do that meet that criteria?

Steve Pipe31:21

Yeah, that's a really good question, man. Really, really good question. From an overall exercise selection perspective, most of the MMA guys that I've worked with, I found benefit hugely from doing things like zercher squats and different variations of zerchers, and just in general just putting a big emphasis on hinging and a big amount of time spent on lat strength too.

This is kind of going back to what I was saying before, but a lot of it at the end of the day is all kind of the same thing. It's just applied slightly differently. When they're doing their skills training, basically what I'm doing—I feel my job is movement variability. I want my fighters to be able to go into any position and not get [expletive] up. I want them to feel they can go anywhere. Anywhere the fight takes them, they can go there and they're fine.

Zercher squats are exercises that I just purely from a joint angle perspective I feel, especially for strikers, I think it's a great exercise. I've seen—I know one of the biggest criticisms about it is, "Oh well, your arms are always going to be your rate limiter." But I've seen a lot of the fighters that I work with hold over 100 kilos comfortably on here and do squats. So I've seen it work well. Split stance zerchers, zercher RDLs, split stance zercher RDLs—these kind of exercises I think are really, really cool.

But yeah, obviously there is a rate limiting factor from the barbell being in the crux of the elbow. But outside of that, most of it is still going to be pretty much the same thing. It's just going to be about looking at the athlete and how their style changes from an MMA perspective, and then just looking to see what attributes they bring to the table when they actually start competing.

And then once we start to get data, then it makes things easier. We get the feedback from the fight result itself, and we're able to kind of say, "Okay cool, they won by first round knockout, amazing. The guy tries to take them down, they stuff the takedown, awesome. That's fantastic."

But yeah, a lot of it is still essentially going to be the same thing. I mean, I try not to change things too much because I already know what their body needs in order to be able to handle the demands of their sport. And from a strength perspective, as long as we're hitting all of those categories, then yeah, they're good to go.

James de Lacey34:55

Nice, nice. And I actually want to—so if anyone's not familiar, Steve wrote some of the first articles on Sweet Science of Fighting as well. He's still—he's got a few up there. And one of them is about kicking higher. So it would be awesome for you to maybe dive into some exercises or your philosophy or anything to do with improving the ability to throw head kicks. Especially obviously people coming into the martial arts likely don't have the mobility, flexibility, awareness to be able to kick with the hips that [expletive] wide open. So what have you got for them?

Steve Pipe35:27

I'd love to go through this, bro. This is a cool one for me. So when I started out doing Muay Thai, I was just a low kicker, and that was purely because I couldn't [expletive] kick for [expletive]. Anything waist or high, and I just kind of accepted, "Oh, I'm probably not going to be able to do high kicks. My body just does not allow me to do high kicks."

Fast forward to now, bro. When I'm sparring here, I've accidentally dropped three people with high kicks, and I feel bad. My leg just flies up there and I'm like, "Oh [expletive]." He just did a lunge jab and I threw a forearm kick, but he kind of just went like that—boom. I feel so bad. But it's like my leg just effortlessly flies up now and I'm like, "Wow." When the kick's going up, I'm kind of looking at it and I'm like, "Wow." But then I'm like, "Oh [expletive], it's got hand on his temple. Oh [expletive], I'm sorry, bro." So that's a little personal testimonial to what I'm saying works.

So I think first and foremost, when it comes to starting things off, if people want to get higher kicks, they need to think about their hip through obviously three planes of motion—sagittal, frontal, transverse. First stretch that I recommend for every [expletive] combat sports athlete that likes to kick—and even that don't—it's just a good exercise: the couch stretch. So the couch stretch is sagittal plane. I like to do the couch stretch though with a slight variation. So it's couch stretch with hip internal rotation.

So if, let's say for example, my left knee was against the wall, my right leg's forward, I'm going to walk my right foot across so it's in line with my left knee which is against the wall, and then I'm going to rotate my body—

So that femur is fixed there, but my pelvis is kind of twisting on top of it, so it's causing that internal rotation in the hip capsule. So that's really important. Second range of motion would be the frontal plane, so I'd do something like a frog pose. So lying on my forearms, splay my legs out to the side, just kind of rocking back and forward.

And one thing I want to say as well, just to preframe this, is while you're doing these stretches it's really important to breathe. So breathing—if you're on a stretch and it's so intense, so damn tight that you can't even breathe, you're in too intense of a position. You're much better off going into a position where it's challenging, you feel the stimulus of the stretch, but you're actually able to breathe and relax and overcome that stretch reflex as the time goes by. So normally I tell most people that do these exercises just hold for around about eight breaths.

And then the next one is the pigeon pose. So pushup position, let's say I was doing my right hip—right knee to right wrist—my foot's coming, my right foot's coming across to my left hand, and then I just, I don't actually sink down to the side, I try to stay quite centered over the top of my hips, and I just really assess how far away my knee is off the top or away from the ground. So that's a really, really good exercise from an external rotation point of view of the hip.

So those three exercises are really beneficial. They basically, what they're doing is they're kind of increasing your sensory awareness of that joint capsule and allowing you to kind of temporarily expand outward. From a neurological perspective, neuroplasticity perspective, you're able to kind of temporarily expand outward and explore this new found range of motion.

But just the stretching in and of itself, we know from a lot of the data, is not the most conducive thing for performance. So if we down regulate too much, if we stretch too much, if we're just holding lots of passive positions, then it's not the best if we're wanting to produce maximal force at the same time.

So then we need to integrate an exercise that allows our brain to explore those ranges of motion, but at the same time it's a more active exploration that then creates a lot higher level of sensory awareness through that range of motion. So this is kind of going back to what we were talking about earlier in the chat.

So hip airplanes are a really good exercise. It's a closed chain exercise. Obviously the hip that I'm working on, the foot and the hip that I'm working on, is flat on the ground, and that's really important to me because when we do strike, our foot is on the ground. Sure, we're much more in a late stance position when we're actually kicking, but it's still important to be connected to the ground and understand how the hip actually functions when you have full foot pressure on the ground.

So from there, it's internal rotation and external rotation on a fixed femur. So that femur head is fixed inside that socket, and then all the musculature on the outside and inside of the hip is rotating around it. So this is a really, really good exercise for helping your brain to kind of calibrate in that new range of motion that you've just kind of expanded out into with those three stretches that we started with.

And then from there, another big one where people get kind of screwed over is their inability to keep their rib cage stacked on top of their pelvis. So when the rib cage is not stacked on top of the pelvis, a lot of the time the pelvis is dumping forward into this anterior tilted position. When we're in this more anterior tilted position, it puts immense pressure on the adductors.

So if you don't know what the adductors are—I know you do, bro, but people don't know what they are—they're basically your inner thighs/groin muscles. So if the pelvis is tilted forward, then when you go to kick, your adductors are already stretched, and then you're kicking upward and you're trying to stretch them even further, and they just feel like they're going to rip apart.

So if you can actually just pull the ribs down, keep that rib cage stacked, and understand how to generate the force from the hips as opposed to just compensating through the back, trying to haphazardly whip your leg up, that's a really big one. So in terms of exercises, I'll just say just the plank. But when we're planking, we're actually trying to create this flexion, purposeful flexion, and then we're holding in the position and we're trying not to let our back kind of go like that. We're trying to keep the rib cage stacked down on top on top of the pelvis.

So yeah, just that is a really good one. And then we've got suitcase hold or side plank, and then another good one would be pull-through. So again, just looking at three different planes of motion—sagittal, transverse, frontal—and ensuring that our core is able to stabilize through those three ranges of motion in order to keep that rib cage stacked on top of the pelvis. And then when we're kicking, our kicks are able to move a lot more freely. We get a much more accurate representation of truly what type of range of motion we have.

And last but not least is just practicing the art of kicking. I just came back from Thailand, bro. I was there for three weeks and I was training the entire time that I was there. I come back, I go to go into my gym, and normally throughout the week I'm working, I'm driving a lot, everything. I get into my gym on a Monday and I do a training session, and I'll throw a few kicks, and normally it feels pretty stiff.

I'm like, "Oh [expletive], man, it feels pretty tight. I've got to do some stretching." I do my hip airplanes, bit of core stuff, warm up properly, and then I'm good.

I came back from Thailand, I didn't warm up, I didn't do [expletive], I just went through a kick and it felt great. It was just whipping up there, and I was like, "Well, that's just the representation of my body feeling immensely comfortable with that skill because I've just been doing it on repeat, repeat, repeat for the past three weeks." So at the end of the day, if you want to get higher kicks, you've actually got to train it. You've got to practice it, right? And then over time your body gets accustomed to that movement pathway and it doesn't feel so restricted anymore.

James de Lacey44:06

Nice. And the reason you drive so [expletive] long is because you live in Bombay and then you have to drive into the city. I don't know how the hell you do that.

Steve Pipe44:06

Oh my God. I got a CBD. Oh nice. Sorry bro, not enough pillows for Steve there, for Steve there.

James de Lacey44:06

Oh man, we still got some mad lag on this, but we could keep going on this. But in this one here, hopefully the audio and stuff comes across well in the recording for anyone listening. But for the people who are listening, where can they find you, Steve, and follow what you're doing?

Steve Pipe44:48

They can just jump on to my Instagram at Steve Pipe Fitness. That's the easiest place to find me. I know quite a few of the people that listen to this podcast, that's where they found me as well. So look, I always say to everybody, don't be a stranger. If you want to reach out, just reach out. My DMs are always open, I'm always happy to help. Yeah, I just genuinely just like to help people. So if you want to work with me, if you just want to ask a question, it's chill, come on through.

James de Lacey45:14

Sweet. I'll link all those down in the description as well. But thanks for coming on, Steve. Appreciate it.

Steve Pipe45:45

My pleasure, bro. Always nice to be here, man.