Workout Recap - Week of August 28, 2022
Good showing overall with five days of training this week. The gym is going through a schedule change (not sure if it's a regular thing for schools starting or something new for them in general), replacing the typical Friday adult classes with sparring sessions that had previously been done after the Thursday adult classes. I was planning to attend this week's sparring anyway, so I suppose I'll just have to see how that goes. On the plus side, this does mean that I shouldn't need to choose between Muay Thai sparring or grappling training when I eventually start the latter, since the place I'm likely to go for that has its classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
That's a ways into the future yet, though. For now, I'm pretty happy with feeling some more gradual improvement and with having had a (seemingly) productive solo practice session.
Monday
Muay Thai class
I think something was going on with the air conditioning in the gym, because it was brutally hot and humid despite opening the back shutters to the alley behind the place. Granted, it didn't exactly help matters that we were also doing a lot of extended sequences stringing punches and kicks together, so maybe that made things feel worse than they really were. In any case, I survived, and I think I'm starting to do something better with my left round kicks because I got a few good cracks out of them in this class. It's still inconsistent, and I know I lean back too much on them, but it felt good to notice some progress.
Tuesday
Muay Thai class
Knees were the theme of the day for this class. I think I'm still tending to angle upward too much instead of forward with them, and while I could lie and say that's because of aiming for the solar plexus, it's really more because I'm getting mindfucked about whether to keep my hips squared for a stabbing knee or to turn them out for a spearing knee, so I get caught between both ideas and end up with the worst mix of body mechanics. I should slow down and let the movements develop into muscle memory, but especially with how we mostly do partnered drills in these classes, I feel like that would be holding back the other person's development of impact durability and comfort with facing incoming strikes. Well, at the end of the class, the kru said people could come in whenever the gym was open to do extra practice on their own, so I'm thinking of aiming to take advantage of that for some extra development.
Wednesday
Muay Thai class
It was partnered defense drills again this Wednesday, and things got off to a good start since I wasn't the person who didn't have shin guards this time. We didn't do any freestyle stuff this time, so it's hard to compare how I did directly with last week, but I think I felt calmer and did a better job of keeping my eyes on my partner's chest. I also screwed up a few times when we were practicing parrying a jab into counterattacking because of losing track of whose turn it was, but I was very comfortable with hollowing out against a leg kick and countering with a round kick of my own, since the mechanics of that are similar to a Buakaw-style drop step into switch kick (which I tend to prefer to a full switch step at the moment, although I do also practice doing those as well as pendulum steps when we do any drills with lead leg round kicks do try having the full gamut at my disposal).
Thursday
Muay Thai class
This was the second class where someone kicked my elbow when I was holding pads for a round kick. I'm not sure why people keep doing it; I've yet to even really notice it, while they clearly don't like how that feels on their instep. I hope my partner wasn't too hurt by it, though, since he's been my favorite pad-holder and he's the person who's been encouraging me to come to sparring (and I think he's mature enough to not just be saying that because he wants an easy punching bag). That aside, though, this was one of my better classes to date in terms of being more fluid with my sequences. I also got to put Gabriel Varga's switch kick tip about doing the foot switch during the preceding punch to use (since we did one or two sequences involving a cross-switch kick component), and it felt very smooth (go figure that the six-time world champion with close to thirty years of martial arts experience knows what they're talking about, right?).
Friday
Muay Thai solo practice
There was no regular class today because of scheduling shifts, so I figured I would follow up on my thoughts from Wednesday and came in earlier to some work on my own (and I was literally on my own, since the kru left the room while I was wrapping my hands; not sure if she had felt obligated to do that or had other plans in mind in the first place, but no matter). It was nice to go through basic movements at my own pace and really focus on getting them cleaned up. Granted, I couldn't do as much with my left round kicks as I had wanted to because my shin was beat up along most of its length, but I could still work teeps and knees, plus all of the other basic strikes. I'm not going to expect that to make me feel good about them all from now on, but it should help me out. I'm aiming to do another solo session on Tuesday morning, since I'm taking the day off work for other reasons already and won't have a Monday class due to a statutory holiday, so I plan to focus more on my left round kicks then.
(And I'm still counting this as a class for the purposes of tracking my attendance, which makes this 19 classes over 40 days since I've started)
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