Speed is an important aspect of any sport. Being able to move faster than your opposition can react is a surefire key to victory whether you’re playing non-contact sports such as football or tennis, but when it comes to contact sports, such as Muay Thai, it becomes even more important. Not only does it make it easier for you to land strikes and defend, but speed is also a vital part of the power equation; the faster you can transfer your body weight through a strike, the harder you can hit.
In Muay Thai, your hands need to be fast, not just for the aforementioned reasons but because you need to be able to land your shots and cut an angle or step from range before your opponent can counter with a higher-scoring body kick or wrap you up in the clinch. Unfortunately, the traditional training style for Muay Thai overlooks the importance of hand speed in favor of training kicks and knees, and with so many weapons to sharpen, even modern gyms fail to develop this skill.
Luckily, if you want to increase your hand speed in Muay Thai, it only takes a few tweaks in training to make some massive improvements. In the next few paragraphs, we are going to give you our 4 top tips for improving hand speed for Muay Thai. So, if you struggle to land punches before your opponent counters you, or you can’t finish a combination before they retreat from range, read on, this article is for you.
Tips To Improve Hand Speed For Muay Thai
1) Get A Sport Specific Strength And Conditioning Program
Strength and Conditioning is becoming an increasingly important part of a modern fighter’s training. While many people lift weights simply to get stronger, a specialist strength and conditioning trainer will be able to create a program that develops your speed alongside your strength.
One of the most common ways of doing this is through ballistic or plyometric exercises. These exercises focus on developing speed through resistance e.g. with a lighter weight, resistance band, or a medicine ball. While you will always get better results by working with a qualified coach, you can try adding the following exercises to your training routine to get a start on developing your hand speed:
- The Med Ball Wall Throw
- Landmine Rotational Punch
- Resistance Band Bench Press
2) Pick Up Some Small Hand Weights
If you want to get faster hands, then there isn’t an exercise more specific for increasing the speed of your hand combinations than actually punching under resistance. It’s for this reason that shadowboxing with a pair of hand weights has become a tried and tested exercise for developing hand speed in boxers.
When shadowboxing with hand weights, less is more. You want to use smaller weights—ideally less than two kilos per hand—and you only want your round to go for as long as it takes for you to notice your hand speed slowing down. Once you notice your speed has declined, it is time to stop and resume your weighted shadowboxing another day.
3) Hit A Heavy Bag
Heavy bags are a staple tool in both boxing and Muay Thai and can be used for a variety of purposes, whether you want to develop higher kicks, stronger knees, or even faster punches. A great way to develop hand speed on a heavy bag is to focus on throwing three or four-punch combinations as fast as you can, before stepping back out of range and resetting.
Drilling in this way is perfect for developing hand speed for Muay Thai because punches are a conditionally scoring weapon, so it is rare that you’ll ever throw more punches than this in a single combination before transitioning to another weapon. Also, by quickly resetting out of range you are also increasing the speed of your footwork, which is vital if you want to get in and out of punching range before your opponent can counter you with kicks.
4) Work With A Boxing Coach
WBA Boxing World Champion Drian Francisco is always eager to share his wealth of boxing knowledge with his students.
If you want to get good at something, you go to an expert. You wouldn’t go to a ballet studio to learn breakdancing, just as you wouldn’t travel to Sweden to practice speaking Japanese. So, if developing hand speed is your goal, it is definitely worth training with an experienced boxing coach once a week.
Boxers have dedicated themselves to mastering the art of punching and while we do punch in Muay Thai, our ability to rely on other weapons makes it easy for us to cut corners on our punching techniques. A good boxing coach can help you make your punches less telegraphed and more efficient, therefore faster. Just be mindful, that some aspects of boxing don’t translate well into Muay Thai. If possible, you should elicit the help of a boxing coach who understands the sport so that you don’t accidentally train in some bad habits.
Conclusion
While punches are one of Muay Thai’s key weapons, the development of punching speed and technique can often be overlooked in gyms. If you want to be able to get into range, unload your hands on your opponent, and then retreat without getting countered then it is important to spend some time polishing up your boxing skills.
By adding the right strength and conditioning exercises into your training, shadowboxing with hand weights, and drilling on the heavy bag you can make huge leaps in developing explosive hands but, if you truly want to develop high-level hand speed, you can’t overlook the value of working with a specialist boxing coach, preferably one who has a great understanding of Muay Thai’s specific boxing requirements.
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