The Plastercast - Removing the weakest link

This weekend saw the first PCWA UK Spring Camp with a great turnout and a fantastic weekend of training. We devoted one day to BJJ and one day to CM and crammed a fair amount into the weekend with a couple of major ideas to help boost everyone's game significantly.

The most important one of these is the Plastercast.

I have spent a lot of time recently looking at how to make clients' standup more efficient and more consistent and have come to realise that getting people to really understand the mechanics of what is happening when they are moving, throwing strikes or absorbing is key to developing this consistency.

Often I can ask someone how a certain punch feels when they throw it and they will swear blind it feels great, even if I can see that they are almost falling over, generating no power and struggling to recover to a safe position. I think a lot of this comes down to experience - when you have thrown a great punch you raise your own 'bar' and understand how bad the not great punches feel. If you keep on pushing the bar up your game constantly improves.

Unfortunately you can't keep on raising the bar by just looking at what you do, often you need to look at what you don't do and don't realise to see where the limitations of your game lie.

This is the key to improving consistency.

'But how do I change the things I don't know I do?' I hear you cry...

That's where coachs come in.

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I've recently put some material out on our newsletter that covers how to consistently achieve traction and drive on punches with our Formula 1 CM idea. The plastercast is an extension of this idea and specifically addresses what you need to do with your foot and ankle to maximise power delivery.

Most people do the bulk of their work when punching with the extremities of their bodies, pushing with their feet and throwing with their hands. The key to maximum power transference is to efficiently drive off the floor, up the legs, through the body and down the arm without 'bleeding' energy at two key points, the ankle and the elbow.

Of these two the ankle is most important, it is the weak link, the achilles heel, of any punch. It is also the part of the body most people are least aware of when they are throwing punches.

The plastercast works by immobilising the ankle on the drive leg as if it was held solid in a cast. The calf muscle is used to raise the heel but the muscles in the foot and ankle are then used to hold the ankle static in relation to the rest of the leg. If anyone is struggling to identify which muscles do this, just think of where your foot bruises up when you sprain your ankle. That is where you need to focus.




Above - correct alignment and angle of the ankle



Once the ankle is held still with the heel raised a number of bad habits can be removed from the game:


a) Collapsing of the heel to the ground


b) rolling over onto the toes


c) lateral breaking of the ankle.


d) letting the foot slip, lift or slide behind you when throwing punches.

All four of these common mistakes break, or seriously compromise, your contact with the floor making it impossible to drive through your punches.

The single, most important aspect of the Plastercast is that the point of contact with the floor becomes the fulcrum and pivot for movement of the leg rather than the ankle. Your whole leg rotates as one so your foot and knee always point in the same direction, this brings the big muscles front and back of your leg into line with the force of the punch and is key to generating drive.







This single fulcrum works forward and backwards as well as rotationally. By locking your ankle and making the contact point with the floor the fulcrum for this movement you can drive off the floor with the big muscles in the top of your leg without your ankle giving way and comprimising that drive. As you throw a cross, your knee drops and your heel raises and comes forward but because you have set your ankle your foot maintains contact with the floor and there is a definite feeling of the top half of your leg driving forward.



This is such a small idea but it makes a huge difference to power delivery.

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