That said, despite Vallandingham’s decades-long experience in competitive martial arts, nothing could have prepared her for the demanding choreography of Cobra Kai. “You’re doing it over and over and over again, different camera angles, different lenses, different intensity,” she says. “It’s really so much fun, but definitely very intense.”
To get through these demanding moments on set, she would take a deep breath, sip an energy drink, and channel her inner eight-year-old, the version of Rayna that loved competition. When filming all sorts of flips, kicks, aerials, choreography, and weapon work, “that competitive mindset really took over again, and I got back to who Rayna really is at the core,” she explains.
This approach helped her get in the right headspace. “I was really immersed in this world, and I truly became this character,” she says. “I feel like we all kind of felt like we were truly in this world. It was definitely a cool energy in the air.”
Weight lifting plays a clutch role to complement her martial arts.
Vallandingham learned all her advanced material arts moves—like back flips and the 540, a jump spinning kick where you land on the same leg—at a young age. And that honed the muscle memory that helps her still do them today, she explains. But consistent strength training also plays a key role, especially since she has a history of tendonitis, a condition which inflames your tendons and can cause pain and swelling.
“It‘s really important for me to make sure that I have the strength needed around my knees to support” doing martial arts, she explains, since landing many of her tricks has an intense impact on her joints. That’s why she slots in weight lifting sessions three to four times a week. As SELF has reported previously, strength training the muscles that surround your knees (like the quads, hamstrings, glutes, calves, and inner thighs), can boost knee stability and alignment, ultimately bolstering the health of that joint.
And everything she does on that front she learned from her dad, Jeff, a former bodybuilder who still hits the gym every day for about two hours.
“He’s like my superhero, and he taught me everything that I know about fitness and listening to my body and strength,” Vallandingham says. He gave her a strength training routine years ago that she still adheres to: It focuses on the lower body, using moves like Bulgarian split squats, barbells squats, Romanian deadlifts, leg extensions, and leg presses to bolster her glutes, quads, hamstrings, and calves. Focusing on single-leg strength—through exercises like the Bulgarian split squats—is a great way to bolster balance, stability, and core strength, as SELF previously reported, and has pretty direct carryover to the one-leg jump kicks Vallandingham performs. She also incorporates martial arts moves alongside traditional strength exercises. For example, she’ll do a weighted pistol squat to a front kick to a back kick, an insane mobility-balance-strength challenge.
Alongside that, she’ll weave in balance drills—like doing 50 kicks on each leg atop a Bosu ball—as well as resistance band training. “I’ve literally been doing all those [moves] for my entire life, and they work,” Vallandingham says.
Yoga is a can’t-skip activity.
Believe it or not, Vallandingham is “not naturally flexible at all,” a genetic trait she says she inherited from her dad. Because this range of motion is crucial in martial arts, Vallandingham says she has to work “very, very hard” to maintain enough length in her muscles to pull off her high-flying kicks and other gravity-defying feats.
Read the full article here
