Workout Recap - Week of November 27, 2022
Well, I was feeling better this week, but it seems like the post-Thanksgiving time is light for attendance, since the classes were pretty empty this week. Oh well, as long as I've got someone to work with, that's enough for me. It felt good to get back to sparring, too.
Monday
Muay Thai class
This was a boxing-focused class, and I'm slowly getting more and more comfortable with those. I'm probably well past the point of beginner breakthroughs by now, so gradual progress is likely all I'm going to experience for the rest of my martial arts training. In any case, I was working with someone who had trouble keeping track of long sequences today, and that's what we were working on, so it was a nice opportunity to break things down into smaller chunks and check my own understanding. My boxing isn't good, so getting to concentrate like this is helpful (I say this as if anything I do is good on an absolute scale).
Tuesday
Muay Thai class
The kru was sick today, so one of the boxers led the class with more long sequences of interweaving offense and defense. I was with an experienced partner this time, so I tried going as fast as I could manage in order to tax my conditioning and test my form under fatigue. I was definitely losing steam after a while, but on the plus side, my power and bone alignment for both hooks and uppercuts is feeling more consistent, which is probably a net benefit for my training purposes.
Wednesday
Muay Thai class
It had been quite a while since we did any work on elbow strikes, so I was rusty with them to start out this class, but ultimately, elbows are simple and effective enough that it didn't seem to take long before I was back to throwing them with some conviction. Transitioning from a rear elbow slash into a lead round kick was awkward, too (it feels much more natural the other way around, but that's not what the drills were working on), but remembering some of what I'd learned previously from working on lead hook > lead leg round kick, I tried adjusting my spacing with a switch step during the elbow rechamber and seemed to have some success with that. It's cool to feel like I'm getting some of the underlying concepts as I experiment.
Thursday
Muay Thai class
We did the drill station rotation gauntlet in this class, which is always great for highlighting trouble spots as fatigue builds. In this case, I found a couple of new issues with lead leg round kicks, namely that I'm tending to both cheat-step too close and sometimes struggling with balance during the rechamber. Round kicks have so much technical detail, especially when combined with the complication of trying to get good power with the lead leg despite the disadvantageous hip angle to start. I'm hard on myself to be better, but sometimes I need to remember that I'm still only in my fifth month of training.
Friday
Muay Thai sparring
After a couple of weeks away, getting back into sparring was great. I mostly achieved the goals I'd set for myself, though I can't take it as a full win since I was sloppy about not counterattacking after defending or evading high kicks. On the plus side, I did have some success with doing a parry into a cross after baiting jabs a few times (including getting it on one of the seemingly-better fighters, albeit someone who clearly goes slower when sparring with me). There were also a couple of boxers who were sparring for the first time in this class, and it was cool to do a round with one of them so that I could get a measure of myself against someone closer to my skill level. Getting to be the bully was a novel experience, and even if nothing else, it was a confidence-booster to feel like I was actually doing stuff without a caveat that my partner was holding back. As far as goals for my next sparring, I need to think of how to frame this to be better, but I want to be more aggressive with countering during my partner's offense, and I want to also think of a way of push the pace more.
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