Workout Recap - Week of August 6, 2023
Despite something of a disappointing performance in sparring, it felt good to get back in there at all, and the classes leading up to it had me feeling more good than bad. While there's an obvious gap between me and the gym's good fighters, I'm feeling better about my skill level bit by bit.
Monday
Muay Thai class
This was a single class due to falling on a statutory holiday, and one lone boxer showed up, so I partnered with them while everyone else had a kickboxing class. I made a mental note of really focusing on knuckle alignment with my punches, and that seemed to make my strikes crispier than usual. My footwork felt a little lighter as well, though I'm definitely still on more on the plodding side of that spectrum (and I consider that a good thing overall, as I've mentioned previous). I did notice I was tending to chicken-wing my arms when I got deep into prolonged sequences; not an immediate practical problem since prolonged offensive sequences in actual fighting include enough little breaks that I feel fine with them, but it'd still be good to practice as a general step towards maintaining my form under fatigue.
Tuesday
Muay Thai class
This was a head-to-head defense drilling day, which is always good fun. We mostly worked on kick defense (the kru is always harping on the competitive fighters about that, it seems), and it felt like I did well overall at having strong posture and framing and pushing the pace with countering afterwards. I did a few rounds with some of the competitive fighters, too, and felt like I did well to keep up defensively when they'd decide to mix in something else without warning as an invitation to make it more fight-realistic. I even managed to return a few wrinkles on them, though at least one of them seemed to not enjoy having their ego poked like that, despite having started the escalation. Too bad, so sad, but I'm still alive.
Wednesday
Muay Thai class
This class focused on long sequences, and I got to partner up with a pair of good competitive fighters. My stamina held up well, I didn't seem to have any foolish missteps, and I only got one point of criticism during the class, so I feel like that was a good performance. We finished up with repeated round kicks, and I think I did better than usual about keeping my stance during the recovery from those, which was also encouraging. All in all, this class was a nice little boost to my confidence.
Thursday
Muay Thai class
This class was pretty much all about knee strikes, both free-standing and in clinch, so anyone who's been paying attention to these posts for some length of time should know I was a fan. Knee strikes are just great; easy to get high impact and to throw in high volume, doing well to develop stamina while also emphasizing the importance of good body mechanics. I don't use them on everyone in sparring (since there are some people who I don't trust to moderate their power if they were to try kneeing me in return, and also since it seems like more than half of my sparring has been with boxers in the last month or two), but I love using them to attack the midsection or thighs rather than punches or kicks, respectively.
Friday
Muay Thai sparring
My goals for this class were to do at least two right knee strikes per kickboxing round and do at least one parry and counter per round. Honestly, I failed at both of them. My first few rounds were with much more skilled people, and I'll admit that I cracked under the mental pressure to try keeping up rather than risking experimenting with different things. Even so, I do feel like I did well-enough defensively to take my beatings safely, and there was one sequence where I chained together three consecutive round kicks (lead leg flick to my partner's lead inner thigh>rear leg chop to the outside of the same thigh>step-out to lead leg power kick to the body) that had me feeling fancy. Not something that I would've thought to seek out normally, but the targets were open and I tagged them in flow, which is where I want to get to more often.
