Workout Recap - Week of July 16, 2023
Took a light week to give myself a little extra recovery time, since the physical stress of training felt like it was accumulating to a troublesome degree. I think the break was also a good thing mentally, because I was pretty checked out on Wednesday and beyond.
Monday
Muay Thai class
This class focused on knees, particularly while clinching. As a fan of that family of strikes, I had a good time with it, regardless of whether we were doing repeated knees from the same side, alternating skip knees, or pivot-pulls into knees. Then we finished off with a six-part drill station rotation gauntlet, which had me dead by the end of it since I hadn't one of those in a long while. That did give me some useful feedback, though; I was cognizant of lacking hip rotation on my strikes in the last station, so I want to focus on maintaining full body involvement through fatigue as something to improve.
Tuesday
Muay Thai class
It was a head-to-head defense drill day, which I usually enjoy, except this day focused on catching body kicks and sweeping, which I really only do to go with the flow of everyone else working on it. The kru called out me and my partner for going light and slow in the first round of sweeps, but I actually found that useful to hone in on the mechanics of the movement, which perhaps fed into having more success than usual with actually sweeping people as we increased the resistance later on. I think my time training grappling also helped me with having better awareness of the other person's balance and thus helped me focus my effort more efficiently to tip them over. Really, though, sweeps remain a low priority in my mind, but I suppose it's still useful to get more practice falling safely.
Wednesday
Muay Thai class
This class was about sequences of multiple kicks, though we also mixed in a few niche things like Superman punches and catching front kicks. I got to work with someone very new, which I usually like doing since helping them also helps check my own understanding, but when the person is starting from basically nothing, I have a hard time judging how much to explain without overwhelming them, so I tried to leave most of the instructing to the kru and just gave a few spot tips when I noticed little things that could make reasonable impacts if cleaned up. Anyway, it was an odd day in total, and somehow oddly forgettable as well; might just be that I was in a bit of a mental haze.
Thursday
Muay Thai class
This class was back to working on stamina, with things like sprints, constant punches, and constant kicks. Despite not wanting it initially, I got talked into wearing a thigh pad for one drill involving low kicks; it was great for absorbing impact, but I wasn't a fan of that since I like benefiting from some conditioning when holding pads, so I gave that pad up to someone else after one round. Also, it had nothing to really do with the class, but the kru seemed to be in a rut of asking people if they smoked weed when they were slow to understand what she was telling them, which I found incredibly amusing since a majority of the mentally-sharpest people I know use marijuana.
