Workout Recap - Week of December 10, 2023
Attendence is declining at the gym, presumably for the holiday season. Hopefully that doesn't mean I get stuck with bad training partners too often, though unfortuantely not all people who still show up to train during this time are ones interested in taking it seriously.
Monday
Muay Thai class
This was a day of Dutch-style extended offensive sequences in padwork. I had to take a couple of pauses for an extra breath during them but otherwise feel like my stamina held up pretty well, despite my ongoing struggles to get adequate sleep. My padwork partner even threw in a few surprise defensive checks that I handled without issue, and in a potential good sign, my front kicks seemed to be getting more hip involvement than has been their trend of late.
Tuesday
Muay Thai class
This was a fundamentals day, with some extra defense mixed in towards the end. It felt like I was constantly exhausted, and I caught myself not rotating my torso well on my punches multiple times, but on the other hand, it also felt like I was generally getting good performance on my kicks, so it was kind of a seesaw day overall. And speaking of kicks, I tried out a few detail tweaks to my round kicks inspired by Gabriel Varga's video about Tawanchai; I didn't like how they felt, honestly, but it was still good to experiment in case something about them did click better for me.
Wednesday
Muay Thai class
This was a head-to-head class focused on low kicks, plus a couple rounds of padwork. In a break from the norm, the kru said she wouldn't get upset with people for deciding to tank the kicks instead of checking them just for this day, so naturally I took the opportunity for some impact conditioning (though I did mix in some checking for the practice). I was striking a bit lighter than I usually would for these sorts of drills on account of my general fatigue of late, but after the class, one of the competitive fighters said that I "fucked up their leg" during the one round we did together, which surprised me so much that I couldn't think of how to respond in the moment other than to say "thanks". That person is chatty and upbeat, so they might've just been saying it to be nice, but perhaps it's a sign that my technique has developed enough to get decent power with reduced effort.
Thursday
Muay Thai class
Attendence was very low this day (just three other trainees), so the kru used it to have some fun doing atypical stuff in padwork. That involved a handful of rounds focused on low kicks and knee strikes, so I was in my general fun zone. My knee strikes have gotten good enough that I was knocking my partner back even while trying to just flow through the motion with control rather than violence, though admittedly my partner was also not good at holding pads, so that's not necessarily indicative of much. We finished up with some freestyle padwork, which was a fun challenge in part because of my partner; they were too new to really know what makes sense, so they were making up some creative stuff than I had to push myself to make work. All in all, a fine finish for the week.
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