The Floor Bag for Solo Grappling Training

In a perfect world, we'd always have access to a willing and able training partner. Unfortunately, we don't live in a perfect world and many of us are forced to spend part of our time training alone.

While this may not be a huge deal for a striker who can always work on the heavy bag or do some shadowboxing, it is kind of a big deal for a grappler (or mixed martial artist working on his ground game) who's art relies almost exclusively on partner work.

You could do solo drills on the mat, but without some sort of implement to stand in for a live partner those drills can feel a bit empty. Luckily there exists a very simple, very cheap tool you can obtain right now: a Floor Bag.

Does MMA Have Crappy Strikers?

So, Sherdog.com recently featured this answer to a reader’s comment/question on their site:

The Doggy Bag: One of These Days.

As you can see the reader talks about the “lack” of striking skill in MMA. With a few notable exceptions (Lyoto Machida, Anderson Silva, and Georges St. Pierre come to mind) there really aren’t that many “great” strikers in Pro MMA right now. I think there are a few factors that have led up to this current situation.

From the very beginning the MMA has been dominated by grapplers. With Royce Gracie's early domination of the UFC the BJJ craze was born. Many grapplers have been drawn to MMA events ever since. Especially because it was one of the few ways a grapplers could make a real name for themselves.

Strikers have had access to numerous popular ways of “making it big”, such as boxing and kickboxing, for quite a while. Up until the first UFC martial arts publications had been dominated by articles and features centered around arts that are primarily striking arts. So, MMA just hasn’t been quite as attractive to the strikers has it has been to the grapplers.

However, as MMA becomes more and more mainstream I think we will see more proficient strikers enter the cage. This could, perhaps, lead to a new era in MMA were the sport is dominated by fighters with a strong background in striking who have learned a little grappling to supplement and round out their skills (as opposed to the grapplers who’ve learned a little striking that currently dominate the sport).

Who knows?

I’d like to hear some of your thoughts so leave a comment to let me know.

Train Hard,
Josh Skinner

Check Out How Ralek Gracie Trains for his Fights HERE!