Cobra Kai’s Rayna Vallandingham Shares the Secret to Crushing Those Spin Kicks

That stated, regardless of Vallandingham’s decades-long expertise in aggressive martial arts, nothing might have ready her for the demanding choreography of Cobra Kai. “You’re doing it over and over and over, totally different digicam angles, totally different lenses, totally different depth,” she says. “It’s actually a lot enjoyable, however undoubtedly very intense.”

To get by means of these demanding moments on set, she would take a deep breath, sip an power drink, and channel her interior eight-year-old, the model of Rayna that liked competitors. When filming all types of flips, kicks, aerials, choreography, and weapon work, “that aggressive mindset actually took over once more, and I received again to who Rayna actually is on the core,” she explains.

This strategy helped her get in the appropriate headspace. “I used to be actually immersed on this world, and I actually grew to become this character,” she says. “I really feel like all of us sort of felt like we had been really on this world. It was undoubtedly a cool power within the air.”

Weight lifting performs a clutch function to enhance her martial arts.

Vallandingham discovered all her superior materials arts strikes—like again flips and the 540, a leap spinning kick the place you land on the identical leg—at a younger age. And that honed the muscle reminiscence that helps her nonetheless do them in the present day, she explains. However constant energy coaching additionally performs a key function, particularly since she has a historical past of tendonitis, a situation which inflames your tendons and may trigger ache and swelling.

“It‘s actually vital for me to make it possible for I’ve the energy wanted round my knees to assist” doing martial arts, she explains, since touchdown lots of her methods has an intense affect on her joints. That’s why she slots in weight lifting classes three to 4 instances every week. As SELF has reported beforehand, energy coaching the muscle tissues that encompass your knees (just like the quads, hamstrings, glutes, calves, and interior thighs), can increase knee stability and alignment, in the end bolstering the well being of that joint.

And all the things she does on that entrance she discovered from her dad, Jeff, a former bodybuilder who nonetheless hits the fitness center day-after-day for about two hours.

“He’s like my superhero, and he taught me all the things that I find out about health and listening to my physique and energy,” Vallandingham says. He gave her a energy coaching routine years in the past that she nonetheless adheres to: It focuses on the decrease physique, utilizing strikes like Bulgarian break up squats, barbells squats, Romanian deadlifts, leg extensions, and leg presses to bolster her glutes, quads, hamstrings, and calves. Specializing in single-leg energy—by means of workouts just like the Bulgarian break up squats—is an effective way to bolster stability, stability, and core energy, as SELF beforehand reported, and has fairly direct carryover to the one-leg leap kicks Vallandingham performs. She additionally incorporates martial arts strikes alongside conventional energy workouts. For instance, she’ll do a weighted pistol squat to a entrance kick to a again kick, an insane mobility-balance-strength problem.

Alongside that, she’ll weave in stability drills—like doing 50 kicks on every leg atop a Bosu ball—in addition to resistance band coaching. “I’ve actually been doing all these [moves] for my complete life, they usually work,” Vallandingham says.

Yoga is a can’t-skip exercise.

Imagine it or not, Vallandingham is “not naturally versatile in any respect,” a genetic trait she says she inherited from her dad. As a result of this vary of movement is essential in martial arts, Vallandingham says she has to work “very, very onerous” to keep up sufficient size in her muscle tissues to tug off her high-flying kicks and different gravity-defying feats.