The Fighter's Guide To Hard-Core Heavy Bag Training Review

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(More customer reviews)One of the most memorable scenes in the 1976 Oscar winning movie for Best Picture, "Rocky," involves Sylvester Stallone pummeling slabs of beef hung in the meat locker where his future brother-in-law Paulie worked. Rocky knew what everyone in the fight game knows, in order to hit hard, you must train to hit hard, and the best tool for this training is the heavy bag.
Regardless of your fighting style or art, regardless of your goals for training, sport, fitness, or self-defense, training on the heavy bag will take your fighting and martial art skills to a new level while increasing your power and fitness levels. To get the maximum benefit from heavy bag training, Wim Demeere with Loren W. Christensen has written "The Fighter's Guide to Hard-Core Heavy Bag Training." This book is an excellent reference on how to maximize heavy bag training for increased power, speed, endurance, and explosiveness. Additionally, the drills here will enable you to perfect your form and work on timing. For one of the simplest training tools, the heavy bag produces some of the greatest gains for time spent with it training.
For the person new to training with the heavy bag, this book is a must. The guidance here will save you time, money, and wasted practice doing things wrong. It will also help you prevent injuring yourself or training partners. For the advanced martial artist, I bet you will still learn a thing or two. I've been using heavy bags for over 25 years and I still picked up a few great tips and drills to incorporate into my workouts.
The book contains 12 chapters, which I will briefly describe here. Chapter one covers kinetic energy and five types of impact. This is a good introductory chapter discussing a bit about speed and the ways to impact the heavy bag and how the five types of impact affect your opponent. Chapter 2 teaches the reader how to choose and take care of a heavy bag. From there, chapter 3 illustrates how to attach or hang your bag. The book covers various ways to hang your bag depending on your location. The 4th chapter titled Nuts and Bolts focuses on things like gloves, how to get started, and advanced hitting. It is a short chapter with some practical advice. Chapter 5 covers some basic and advanced training concepts for the heavy bag. Read this chapter twice and be sure to incorporate the concepts into your training routine. Chapters 6 and 7 contain a variety of drills to perform on a heavy bag. Using these as a guide, you should then be able to expand on what Demeere illustrates through photos to vary your heavy bag workouts endlessly. Even if all you do is the workouts shown here in this book you will have many hours of varied routines. Chapter 8 focuses on partner holding. Various drills are shown that work better when you have someone holding your bag. I like that Demeere and Christensen show how to hold the bag and help your training partner. Reading this chapter will keep a few people from holding the bag wrong and getting hit or kicked. (I've seen it happen in the gym) In chapter 9, various ways to use the heavy bag for ground training are shown. I've never really used a heavy bag on the ground much, but I plan to try out a few of the drills shown here. Chapter 10 shows some drills you can do with your training partner holding the heavy bag while it is not attached or hanging from someplace. Again, there is some interesting way of using the bag shown to vary your workouts and increase your range of training. Chapter 11 is a very short chapter on using various things to make your training with the heavy bag more precise. The final chapter, 12, contains ten common errors and how you can prevent them while training.
Overall, I found this to be a very valuable book for anyone who incorporates heavy bag training into his or her workouts.
Reviewed by Alain Burrese, J.D., author of the DVD set Streetfighting Essentials.

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In one session on the heavy bag, you can develop all the attributes you need as a martial artist or fighter: power, form, speed, timing, endurance, and explosiveness. What other training tool can make that claim?Throughout The Fighter's Guide to Hard-Core Heavy Bag Training, Wim Demeere and Loren Christensen show you how to master the critical skills needed to survive a fight. From these acclaimed martial artists, you will get solid information on how to choose the right bag for your needs, how best to hang it, and how to care for it so it lasts for years. You will also learn the types of impacts and how to make the best use of them for specific situations; innovative drills to maximize your fitness level and fighting ability; creative ways to grapple a heavy bag, including chokes, takedowns, and armbars; and how to avoid the most common mistakes in heavy bag training.Whatever your fighting art or goal, you can benefit from the hard-core drills in this book.

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Fighting in the Clinch: Vicious Strikes, Street Wrestling, and Gouges for Real Fights Review

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(More customer reviews)I once had a "keyboard warrior" try to convince me that eye gouges don't work. His proof? They've been banned by the UFC. Yeah, dude really wrote that. Clearly some people just don't understand the difference between a sporting competitions and a real fights. Not so these authors. They've been there, done that, and have the scars to prove it. Like the subtitle says, Christensen and Mireles demonstrate vicious strikes, street wrestling, and gouges for real fights. Some of this stuff would get you disqualified (and possibly banned for life) if you tried it in the ring, yet it could mean the difference between life and death on the street.
As usual for these guys, the book is very well laid out. It begins with the nuts and bolts of clinching, then moves on to describe the functional combat stance model, wrestling concepts, outer-perimeter takedowns, close-contact clinch, clothing attacks, striking with the hands, forearms, elbows, shoulders, knees, and legs, pinching, ripping, and pressing, and, finally, head-butting. It is thoughtfully organized and beautifully illustrated (if you consider groin strikes, dislocations, and eye gouges things of beauty anyway). Clear photographs and logical progressions supplemented by pithy text that explains important nuances and critical details make the information easy to follow. It's the next best thing to training with the authors in person
This is a very well written, potentially lifesaving tome that I recommend without reservation.
Lawrence Kane
Author of Surviving Armed Assaults and Martial Arts Instruction, co-author of The Way of Kata, The Way to Black Belt, and The Little Black Book of Violence


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Brawling doesn't get any closer or uglier than when you're struggling to tear yourself out of a street attacker's clinch. Authors Loren Christensen and Mark Mireles know this from painful experience: with a combined 75 years of martial arts study and more than 40 years of working the mean streets as city cops, they have had many opportunities to develop their techniques for both powerfully breaking a criminal's determined grasp and hanging on to a suspect desperately trying to resist arrest.This book is not about banging around with training partners - it's about surviving a frantic street fight. It's filled with techniques for that gritty place where there are no tap-outs, referees or rules. If it's illegal in competition, it's in here. If it would get you jailed if you weren't legally defending yourself, it's in here.Christensen and Mireles present dozens of tried-and-true clinch escapes using clear, uncomplicated instruction and step-by-step photos. Let these veterans of countless violent street fights give you the edge you need to break out of a dangerous situation.

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Street Stoppers: The Martial Arts Most Devastating Trips, Sweeps, and Throws for Real Fighting Review

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(More customer reviews)This book shows step by step illustrated depictions of martial arts techniques for use in defending against violent confrontations against violent, agressive people.
I've been a martial artist for over 35 years, including karate, judo, wrestling and jui jitsu. One glaring problem with many martial arts, and many martial arts books, is that the techniques are either geared for sport, or they heavily rely on a system which emphasizes the "art" aspect of the martial art. This may be fine if your goal is spiritual oneness with the universe. But, when you are attacked by a violent thug, who is drunk, high, mean and a bully, spiritual purity won't help you. You need to be able to fight back and impose your will on that person who is trying to hurt you.
This book is an American martial arts book which gives highly practical, workable techniques. That is not to say that the proverbial 98 pound weakling will be able to read this book and overnight become a beast and a terror. Not at all. But for the serious student of the martial arts, or anyone who is interested in the subject, this book shows devastating techniques which will allow you not only to survive an attack, but to disable the attacker which may prevent a similar attack on some other person.
Overall, this is an excellent book that fills a void in the martial arts literature. Highly recommend.
Joe Scully, Los Angeles, CA

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Street Stoppers is your guide to the martial arts most devastating trips, sweeps and throws. Mark Mireles has combined his knowledge of wrestling and jujitsu with his many years of experience as a member of the LAPD to put together this collection of street effective takedowns that will stop an attacker cold. Together with verteran cop, author and martial artist Loren W. Christensen, Mark takes you step by step through each technique and shows you exactly how to apply it when your life depends on it. Mark kicks off your crash course in Street Stoppers with the basics of positioning and targets. From there, jump directly into the trips, sweeps and throws - over 50 solid techniques demonstrated in realistic fighting situations. Mark and Loren also include 15 combination techniques so you ll always have a Plan B to fall back on. And throughout the book you ll get inside tips on choosing the right technique, gaining the upper hand over your assailant, avoiding injuries and ending a fight quickly. Because this book is written by 2 expert martial artists who have decades of experience subduing criminals on some of America s meanest streets, you can rest assured that you re getting proven techniques that work.

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Extreme Joint Locking And Breaking: Restraint and Submission Techniques for the Street Review

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(More customer reviews)I'm a long time fan of Loren Christensens books and DVDs. This one is exceptional and exactly waht I was looking for.
Christensen shows effective techniques that he and others he knows have used on the street in street fights and in his job as a cop. He shows you how to bring on the pain and then if the situation calls for it, he shows how to cause extreme damage to a person's joint or bone.
He calls his approach walking the body, which means he shows how to hurt fingers, wrists, elbows and so on through all the joints all the way to the ankles and toes.
If you're looking for street realistic techniques, this is a good one.

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This book isn't about sport fighting, flashy moves or how to become a better person through a martial art. It presents realistic grappling techniques designed to control and restrain through the application of pain to the joints. Its purpose is to provide today's modern warrior - the self-defense oriented martial artist, combat soldier or law enforcement officer - with easy-to-apply techniques that first restrain and then, if taken to their maximum potential, inflict severe physical injury, including torn ligaments and tendons, broken bones and even paralysis or death in extreme cases.

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Solo Training 2: The Martial Artist's Guide to Building the Core for Stronger, Faster and More Effective Grappling, Kicking and Punching (No. 2) Review

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(More customer reviews)This tome is an outstanding follow-up to Mr. Christensen's best selling book Solo Training (2001), sort of an advanced solo training manual. I think it is even better than its predecessor, chocked full of useful tips you can implement right away to improve your performance in any martial art. There are exercises to develop functional fighting strength in every part of your body. Most of these can be done alone though some require a partner. Some require training aids (e.g., weights, Body Opponent Bag) while others can be do not. There are some neat icons throughout which call your attention to cautions (e.g., extra care items), workout tips (e.g., critical information), important information (e.g., reasons behind the drills), partner drills, and training tips (e.g., stuff you can focus on for maximum impact). These icons make it easy to reference important information after you read it the first time.
Section one is all about building a powerful foundation to facilitate employing your art in tournament or combat. Subjects include developing powerful abs, innovative pushups, bench press exercises, leg development, core strength development for grappling arts, and grip strengthening. There are also some mental conditioning exercises as well-walking meditation, creation/use of mental triggers, and developing a powerful mindset-something rarely covered in this type of book. There is nothing really earth shattering here, just solid, practical advice.
The best part of this first section is called "41 Ways to Prevent and Relieve Pain." I consider it an absolute must read for all us aging martial artists, especially practitioners of the hard arts such as karate, tae kwon do, judo, or jujitsu. It includes icing tricks, stretching, and conditioning exercises to prevent and relieve injuries to knees, shoulders, back, and other commonly injured areas.
Section two covers some excellent methods to practice fighting without a training partner, including ways to attack and defend from the "I don't want to fight" posture, stances, innovative solo grappling practice methods, combinations, accuracy, BOB bag techniques, and ways to cheat speed. The differences between practice and real fighting are covered along with more mental techniques and things you can do before a tournament to become more successful. This is the really advanced stuff you won't find anywhere else; well worth the price of admission.
Section three contains some great ideas for 15-, 20-, and 35-minute workouts. The very last section (after the conclusion) is titled "Random Thoughts to Ponder" is quite short, but a really cool way to wrap up the work. It is also really insightful.
Christensen really knows his stuff. He began his martial arts training in 1965 and over the years has earned 10 black belts, 7 in karate, 2 in jujitsu, 1 in arnis. As the author of 29 books, he is one of my all time favorite martial arts authors. But I am not alone, he has also received high praise for his easy-to-read, informative writing style from readers and book reviewers in the United States, France and Russia. He is a retired police officer with some 30 years experience in military and civilian law enforcement.
Lawrence Kane
Author of Surviving Armed Assaults, The Way of Kata, and Martial Arts Instruction

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In his follow up to the phenomenally popular "Solo Training", Loren Christensen has dug down deep to come up with hundreds of more ways for you to rev up your training at home or in the gym. "Solo Training 2" kicks off with a focus on building your body's core for stronger, faster and more effective grappling, kicking and punching. A strong core - your shoulders, chest, abs, hips, and back - is the source of your body's power, speed and coordinated movement. As a martial artist, a strong core helps you to get more out of your training and to respond instantly and effectively to the fast changing demands of competition or an explosive street encounter. You'll also get over 100 ways to work your combinations, cheat speed, improve accuracy, fight from unconventional stances, practice grappling when you can't find a partner and get the most out of your mannequin bag. If hundreds of new training drills sound overwhelming, not to worry. "Solo Training 2" wraps up with 8 workouts, each with a specific goal like the Free Hand Power Builder and the Boxer Workout.If you've read your copy of "Solo Training" to tatters, give it a little time off and dig into "Solo Training 2", where Loren Christensen promises to take your fighting techniques and understanding of fighting concepts to a new level.

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Solo Training: The Martial Artist's Guide to Training Alone Review

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(More customer reviews)There is no secret to skill in the martial arts. If you want to get better at something, you have to spend time practicing it. In Solo Training, Loren Christensen provides literally hundreds of solo drills and routines for practicing a wide variety of martial arts skills and developing the physical and mental attributes necessary to apply them effectively when it counts.
Although many martial artists may be familiar with a large number of the drills and exercises in the book, I believe that everybody will find dozens of new ways to improve their solo training among the hundreds covered, or ways to make their solo training more interesting.
If you're not doing extra training on your own outside of your classes, you should be - you lazy slacker. This book will help to get you started, and keep you motivated. Other books by Loren Christensen you should check out are The Fighter's Fact Book and The Way Alone.

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