I work with a lot of students that study martial arts on their own at home.
Many follow my video training series, while others use our online dojo to add more value to their own fitness martial arts program.
Some of these home study martial artists have their own training strategies and are just looking for an additional edge to add more value to their own efforts.
These students are all in need of training gear, ideas, tips, tools - you name it.
Anything that will help them to improve their martial arts skills while training at home.
Whether you want to save money or just add some unique training tools to your home dojo, the best multi-use (discount, do it yourself) martial arts training item to date are TIRES.
Why? Because there are so many things you can do with tires.
Here are a few ways to put them to use: TIRE MAN DUMMY Get yourself a bunch of car tires and stack them up on top of each other.
You will want between 5-10 for each stack that you make.
Just stacking them up will already give you a great punching and kicking tool.
Because the tires are made of a very hard rubber, they can take a lot of beating with little or no wear and tear.
If you want to keep the tire stack from falling over, you can devise a way to keep them on top of each other.
One simple way is to just put them on top of a pole type device - for example, take one tire and fill it with cement, in the middle of the cement place a wooden or metal pole.
Then, simply stack the tires up over the pole.
Another way to keep them together would be to drill holes in the rim of each tire and then thread long bolts or tie them up.
If you cut through the tire (breaking the circle), you can pull it open and wrap it around a solid beam, tree or other structure that won't allow the tire to fit over the top.
Street light poles and telephone poles are great if you live in an area that offers such a freedom.
These tire dummies are amazing.
Here are just a few of the benefits: * You can attack them with shoes on - for a more realistic training practice * You can hit them with sticks and wooden swords without fear of damaging the dummy * You can use them for protection against dangerous surfaces in your training area * They take up some of the shock and different tire styles offer various levels of flexibility * Tie them up for swinging targets With some creativity you can create a very realistic training dummy.
You can even place wooden poles through the tires to resemble limbs and for something that is closer to a Wing Chun Dummy.
You can usually pick up tires for FREE at a local tire shop.
We were able to gather a few truck loads of tires in only a day for our martial arts camp in California.
We used them for paintball obstacles, fitness tools for the martial arts training course and stunt protection as well as training dummies.
Whether you hang them, half burry them, wrap them around trees or stack them up to knock over - tires of various sizes can offer a world of amazing training possibilities.
Take a look the areas where you have the option of training in and consider what you can do to improve your home dojo.
Though making your own tire man dummy will cover most of your training, you can consider other ways to put them to good use.
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