Winston Salem Gyms:Locate Outstanding Mixed Martial Arts Grappling Shoes
July 7th, 2009 by Winston Salem, under winston salem gyms. No Comments
Find Quality Mixed Martial Arts Sparring Footware ———- If you train in any form of mixed martial arts grappling, you know that protective equipment is critically important. Any guy who has the stones to start a sparring match without a cup on, wont be standing for too long. Theres protective safety gear like the well-padded foot gloves that I wear when Im drilling, so I dont do a spin kick and accidentally kick someone in the head, kick someone in the face when they miss a block. But the protective equipment I want to talk about today are the mixed martial arts sparring shoes.
Now, I use the mixed martial arts shoe for two extremely simple reasons. The first is that when I did a series of practice bits against a wooden sparring dummy, I walked out of the gym on several bone-deep bruises on my feet. Now, bruises are an expected result for any contact sport, including MMA. Even a little extra bit of padding could’ve kept me from limping painfully for two days. My friends and co-workers were making fun of my little tentative baby steps to avoid putting weight on the tops of my feet from a particularly nasty bruise almost a crack in the bone.
The foot has so many tiny bones. And almost no meat. almost no fat. Almost no protection. Weak bloodflow. At least that’s how mine are. They are like pain sticks attached to my legs!
I suppose Im a slow learner. Two weeks later, I did the same practice exercise and about destroyed my big toe when I miscalculated the distance to the wingchun wooden dummy on a kick instead of contacting it with the arch of the foot, I did a direct full force kick with the point of contact centered on the toe. The joint suffered, the toe swelled up to twice its regular size, and only pure blind luck kept me from having a visit to an emergency room.
OK, so kicking wooden dummies in bare feet is a foolish idea….
I went in search of things to save me from my own foolishness and found mixed martial arts sparring shoes. Those sparring shoes are different from tournament foot pads. Theyre light enough that you wont develop compensatory habits to adjust for the weight and while they dont offer as much protection, its the difference between kicking a wooden dummy with your bare foot and kicking it with a pair of boots on.
On top of that, they greatly improve traction on the floor, and stability when doing routines and drills. Because of how much I like Kung Fu styles, and how acrobatic they are, that extra traction was appreciated. While its not fun to be tossed on your behind by a sparring partner, its even worse to fall on your own because you slipped.
Plus, to be honest, it was good to come home from a session in the dojo without feeling like I was being a wussy because my feet were hurting. Trust me, these things saved my marriage my wife was making fun of my new dance steps when I was busy killing my feet and whining about it when I had to get up off the couch.
Didn’t I mention I can dance? That’s for another article. She saw the TV show Ballroom Bootcamp and I was dragged to dance lessons immediately. I don’t know what hurts more, learning to foxtrot or kicking that wooden dummy!
———- Yoshi Kundagawa is a writer covering the MMA world. You can read his free reports at http://www.martialarts3000.com
http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=416295
Tags: exercise, gyms, winston salem gyms