52 Blocks "Red Volume" With Lyte Burly
Offense Wins Fights, Defense Wins Championships
This DVD is the fourth one produced by Lyte Burly of NYC and is the best one to start with because it showcases his approach to 52 Blocks as a boxing art.  It includes an overview of Blocks 1-30 with special detail to blocks 21-30, exciting footage of his student Young Burly training for and winning in the Golden Gloves as well as technical drills to connect your flow when moving block-to-block with Dink the Professor from the UK.
Just $20!
 

52 Blocks Volumes 1-4 Set With Lyte Burly
This 4 DVD Set covers history and background of the 52 Blocks as well as highlighting many documentary interviews and training / sparring footage.  Blocks 1-30 are covered on the various different volumes.
Only $60 (Limited Sets Available)
 

When it comes to training equipment, what is your “desert island” list of required gear? What I mean is, if you were going to be stuck someplace and could only bring along a few things for practicing martial arts, what would you prioritize?

Personally at the top of my list of vital gear would be a variable electronic round-timer (like the Gym Boss), two sets of Boxing gloves, and a pair of Focus Mitts.

The focus mitts provide an amazing amount of versatility for the martial artist. A good focus mitt coach can help you develop offense, defense, combination, evasions, and do forth. Any weakness you want to eliminate or strength you want to further develop can be trained with the mitts.

When working with a novice, the focus mitts can be used to help introduce them to the feeling of sparring without putting them in any danger. Once they get used to the flow of moving, blocking and attacking you can introduce them to more and more levels of resistance until they are up to speed to engage in sparring.

Here are two videos of different focus mitt use for 52 Blocks and Boxing practice.

In the first video, you'll see Lyte Burly working with one of his guys doing Blocks 1-10 individually with the counter punching and then a little bit of them using the focus mitts in what's called the Shoe Shine style. The Shoe Shine does for your arms what running does for your legs as far as developing endurance.  You can do it with upward punches like you see there or with straight punches from a higher guard. You can see tons more Shoe Shine clips on Lyte's channel.

In the second video, you'll see me working with one of my guys on Blocks 1-10 using Freestyle movement and returning with three punch combinations. He's acting as the coach and is calling out random one and two movement sequences of blocks, each of which is followed with three strikes.  I'm keeping the power down because I wanted him to develop his flow in coaching the material without the concern of having to hold the mitts for big shots.

Hopefully these videos have given you some ideas of the versatility of focus mitts, and some ideas for your own practice. Look fore more clips in the weeks and months ahead, including how the focus mitts integrate with the Filipino martial arts and knifecraft.

All my very best to you,

Pete Kautz

PS - If you like the YouTube videos PLEASE SUBSCRIBE to the channel!  I already have some more 52 and a nice Filipino Martial Arts clip on deck.  This year will see a lot of new videos and you'll know first if you subscribe. 

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