Workout Recap - Week of June 16, 2024
Personal turmoil over the weekend has me a bit off kilter, but I think this was a good week of training aside from the lack of sparring.
Monday
Muay Thai class
This class was a stamina-burner, with an emphasis on repeated kicks. It was also a bad balance day for my brain, so I ended up falling at one point while doing repeated lead leg round kicks, and I also took far longer than I should've to get comfortable with the footwork for the double knee strike drill we did to finish. On the plus side, at least my knee strikes were getting solid impact even with the poor footwork and then satisfying power once I cleaned that up. As I've said before, part of why I like knees and elbows is because it's easy to hurt people with them.
Tuesday
Muay Thai class
This was a day for working on power shots, and it was also probably the first time of late that it felt like I was getting more speed on my punches and still maintaining good impact. My kicks also felt sharp, and I was mostly successful in fending off the defensive checks that my partner mixed in (I did admittedly screw up a couple of times when parrying front kicks, but in my mind, that gets offset by the successes I had at mixing in some parries for straight punches instead of just blocking all of those). It was a good class overall, and as an extra little flourish, one of the competitive fighters asked me how many weeks out I am from my next fight, which I took as a lighthearted compliment for how seriously I take my training regularly.
Wednesday
Muay Thai class
This was a kick-focused day, and frankly, the drills themselves were pretty standard for me overall by now. That said, something potentially notable was that the partner I was working with made a few comments comparing holding pads for my kicks to some of the fighters, which could give me a baseline for actually understanding how well I'm capable of hitting (the answer being quite well, especially for my size). However, I don't know how much I can trust what they said because they're also kind of a clown and someone who seems to throw around praise at others even when those others clearly don't deserve it, so I'm probably better off taking the words as attempts at stealthy insults that can motivate me to work harder in order to make them eat those words in the future.
Thursday
Muay Thai class
Unfortunately, there was no sparring this week, since this class was working on fundamentals in order to help bring along a couple of newbies. Still, it was a good opportunity to observe that my punches are feeling more fluid lately except for when I do multiple consecutive lead straights, where I somehow often find myself not rotating my wrist if I try to go too quickly (even on the first punch). I've also been making a conscious effort to vary whether I step through or switch step when I do a lead leg round kick after a rear straight, which is also taking some adjustment to get comfortable with controlling the spacing for whichever option I'm going with in the moment. It's good to still have things to work on, which I realize will always be the case, but I mean that these issues still feel big enough that I can make palpable improvements in a short time if I'm focused on them.
