My favorite .....
... probably my judo-aikido buddy Raja, with whom we did our 3rd dan promo. Man, I threw that guy around like a 215 lb. rag doll... until he didn't ant to go and then it felt like he became a tree stump. One of the hardest guys to move I've been around, ever when he wanted to be... one of the best training partners I've ever had, too.
That's judo & aikido.
In TKD it was the hand-held kicking pads, not focus mitts... those came later.
For Muay Thai I had this love/hate relationship with this thing my instructor made, brought the idea from Thailand (remember the JCVD movie "Kickboxer"), but since he didn't have endogenous bamboo trees in Missouri, he rigged something else. 8-foot metal pipe, 6" diameter. Mounted/welded to a 1-foot square metal plate which was loosely bolted into the floor... bolts welded in place to the plate about a foot or so away from a wall in the back of the gym. At the top of the thing, on the wall-facing side, there was a small piece of reinforcing square iron rod about 2, maybe 3 inches long, which had been hammered basically round-ish. On the wall, opposite this little piece was a bell, like you find at the side of a boxing ring. Usually they hit on of those with a small hammer.
The pole was wrapped with rope, and there were three old (meaning worn-out, flattened and only slightly less hard than concrete) Thai kicking pads mounted on it, at lower leg level, mid-thigh level, and one at about the average man's rib cage level. We did not work head kicks on this thing!
Anyway, the thing was set up to teach you how to ... drive... the kick in, with penetrating impact rather than the snapping/shocking impact of the variety I was familiar with out of TKD. Different concept. Very dangerous and debilitating, as all of us who've watched any UFC as it was developing know.
I hated/loved that thing. When you kicked it right, the top swung back and rung the bell. The goal was... keep kicking it for the entire training round and to not fail to make it ring each time for the entire 2 or 3 minute round. It sucked. It made my leg kicks nearly impossible to withstand if one landed.
