Workout Recap - Week of April 16, 2023
All my little dings and bruises were starting to add up, so I ended up making this a short week to get a little extra time to recover. I'm feeling good about that choice as I'm writing this, but we'll see how it plays out.
Monday
BJJ class
It was just me and one other trainee today, so we worked on escaping from wall takedowns (an extension from last Friday) and a general response to double-leg takedowns. My inexperience with grappling seemed to be problematic, and I kept getting confused thinking about all the elements that the coach was talking about. Some of the confusion (or the resulting frustration) likely showed, because the coach paused at one point to ask if I was ok. It's something I'll need to work through a few times before it really starts to click, I think.
Tuesday
Muay Thai class
We had a head-to-head defense drill day, which I'd been missing for a while. Thus, my reaction times were a little rusty, but I feel like I mostly did alright, aside from going down a couple of times when swept following a caught kick. At least a lot of the competitive fighters were around for this class, so I got to work with a good number of them even with them tending to go amongst themselves, and my stamina felt like it held up better than it was doing last week.
Wednesday
BJJ class
This class was about passing guard with either double-under or over-under leg grips. The former was awkward for me to execute and didn't feel nearly as "miserable" to go through as the coach's instructions suggested it should, so I'm not really buying that as a core technique for me. The latter was a nice patient progression, though, and it felt far more uncomfortable for me to be on the bottom, so I liked that. Granted that I think I'd still likely prefer a side smash or knee cut as my main methods of passing the legs, but having another option doesn't hurt. The other three trainees and I did a round-robin rotation for sparring rounds, during which I focused mostly on jockeying for position. I was able to initiate a scramble into a nice back take at one point, but overall, I'm still having a lot of trouble coordinating all of my limbs for hip escapes and reversals. It's probably a matter of needing more experience (and also of going against people with more experience than I have), but at least I'm getting ideas of good things to do, even if I'm having difficulties with executing them.
Thursday
Muay Thai class
A pro fighter friend of the kru was visiting today to help train up the competitive fighters, so the rest of us did padwork drills while they had a shark tank. One of the drills included a rear straight punch > lead knee sequence, and I was much more comfortable with it than I had been the last time I tried that, so it's good to notice some progress like that. Unfortunately, I got a mild groin strain at some point, so I'm taking that as a sign that I've been wearing out my body a bit and thus will be skipping doing a fifth workout this week.
