How does shin conditioning work

And focus on tensing your abs each time you get struck with a body blow to lessen the impact. As for shin conditioning drills, try exchanging roundhouse kicks with your sparring partner, but keep your kicks below the waist. Now this move might seem a little archaic, but rolling a metal or acrylic tube along your shins is a great way to improve bone density. This is the main muscle in your shin and is one of the most important muscles in your Muay Thai story.

Thankfully, to strengthen this muscle, the best workout you can engage in is weighted toe-raises. Toe raises. And the other epic exercise in the search for perfectly conditioned shins is calf raises, which involves the opposite motion of toe raises. Instead of rising up onto your tiptoes, the challenge is to keep your heels on the ground and raise your toes up. This motion will flex your calf muscles, which wrap around to the front of your leg and connect just beneath your patella, making them pretty important muscles to condition given the amount of impact they might end up absorbing.

What you eat is as important to a fighter as knowing how to perform a high kick. Nutrition is life. And a big reason for this is to with conditioning. To put it simply: your body needs the right amount — and balance — of nutrition to both heal and build both muscle strength and bone density.

If you want to keep performing at the top of your ability, training week in week out, your body needs to be able to recover — and the most effective strategy of them all is rest. This is all because the recovery phase of any given workout is when your muscles absorb the most protein, and then use those proteins to repair any tears and build stronger muscle tissue.

Sleep is also imperative because it encourages your body to release some pretty epic hormones that will slow down your breathing, relax the major muscles in your body and help reduce any inflammation you might be suffering from. It also means focusing your training so that you can give those areas of your body that need to recover the chance to do so, which is oh-so-important for your shins. You can find out more about the book here. It is available to purchase on Amazon.

Most fighters run as part of their training. While this is one of a few approaches to cardio that are needed to create a well rounded athlete pounding pavement serves a dual purpose — the repeated impact has been shown to increase bone density in the legs. In the same vein as running, weightlifting has been shown to increase bone density. Squats, deadlifts, lunges and all the other lower body exercises that you can be doing to improve your strength and explosiveness will also be working in the background to get your bones stronger.

Use your calves and shin muscles to raise yourself to tiptoe position over two seconds, hold it for three seconds, then lower on a count of two. Rest for one second, then repeat. Do as many reps of this exercise as you can. Start with 5 pounds in each hand, gradually working your way up. Ask your instructor for hints or advice. Calf raises work the same way, but for the muscle on the rear of the leg. It wraps around to the front, connecting just under the kneecap, and can be used to absorb impact as well.

Calf raises involve the opposite motion of toe raises. Rather than pushing up onto your toes, you keep your feet flat on the ground and lift your toes, flexing your calf muscles.

To do this exercise with a free weight, it with your legs extended fully and grip a dumbbell between your feet, allowing it to pull them to full extension.

Pull your toes upward, lifting the dumbbell in the process. Even without specifically working the shin muscles, weight training can increase bone density. Barbell squats and lunges work virtually all major muscle groups in your legs. When you do squats, keep your knees and feet aligned to reduce the risk of injury. The same goes for lunges when you step forward onto one leg. Now we come to an exercise you may have seen in movies: rolling a metal tube along your shin. This may not seem like a big deal, but it gets surprisingly painful after a few minutes.

The idea behind this practice is to compress the shin bone. Compressing the bone makes it denser. As you strengthen bone and muscle, any point at which the bone is weaker than the rest poses a risk of fracture. During the recovery phase of any workout, muscles take protein and synthesize them into stronger muscle tissue to repair the tears.

For the first day after you take blows on the shin, ice it down to reduce the swelling. You can also take a cold spoon or your fingers and press the fluid away from the bruise in one direction. Be warned, doing this will hurt quite a bit so you may want a mouth guard to bite while you work.

Next, you should focus on keeping heat applied to the area. Heat draws blood to the surface of the skin through vasodilation, a process that promotes healing. In Muay Thai something is almost always going to be hurting or sore.

Hurting an already damaged leg means it will never heal. You can also apply tiger balm to the affected areas. Your body needs enough calories and protein to heal and build muscle and bone. Too few calories cause the body to burn its fat reserves and then muscle. Proteins form the building blocks of tissue. Some good sources of protein include lean meats, legumes, leafy green vegetables, yogurt, and low-fat milk. Aim to consume one gram of protein per pound of body weight.

Water is also vital; you need at least eight glasses of it per day. Alternatively, you can drink sports drinks that keep your electrolytes replenished during a tough, sweaty workout. A heavy bag, shin pads, kick pads, and focus mitts will fulfill most of your needs as far as specialized equipment. For recovery, you can pick up an ice pack, heating pad, and tiger balm at your local pharmacy. You can use alternatives like a free-standing bag.

In some ways, the free-standing bag is better. It allows more room to move around without the bag swinging at you. It also is weighted to the ground by water, sand, or some other filler. The other methods of shin conditioning still apply. Muay Thai shin conditioning can cause difficult-to-heal injuries to the bones , muscles, and connective tissue. If you notice any of the following effects, stop training and see a doctor for further instructions.