Workout Recap - Week of July 7, 2024
It was an impromptu route, since it came about from a surprise cancellation of my usual Saturday morning appointment, but I did get back up to five training sessions with a sparring capstone this week. It felt good; just a shame that it's unlikely to be something I can do again regularly in the immediate future.
Monday
Muay Thai class
This was a head-to-head defense day. We started out with doing set back-and-forth drills, and as usual, I was trying to push the pace while matching my partners' striking intensity; also as usual, I was generally successful in getting my partners to need breaks more often than I did. That said, we finished up with some rounds of taking turns doing freestyle exchanges, and I partnered up with one of the more experienced competitive fighters for one of those. Before the round started, they said that I was one of their favorite people to partner with for this sort of training, and afterwards, they praised me for having implemented some advice they'd give me the last time that we sparred. As usual, I have suspicions about how seriously to take that feedback, but this person is one of the two fighters at this gym who I'm somewhat inclined to believe, so I think it's at least safe to say that I'm improving in ways significant enough to be noticed.
Tuesday
Muay Thai class
This was a day all about knees; knees and punches, knees and elbows, knees and kicks, even knees and knees. It should've been a wonderful class for a knee fan like myself, but my partner was kind of shit at holding pads for knees, so I needed to be mindful about moderating my power to avoid splitting the pads and spearing them (as I nearly did at first). Still, even with that, it was all good; given that I've hurt fighters on accident twice with knees in light sparring (due to not expecting them to impale themselves on my patella), I know it doesn't take full power to do damage with those strikes.
Wednesday
Muay Thai class
This class focused on doing high volumes of punching punctuated with kicks. I had a pretty good time with it, and it was personally gratifying that I had to slow down my punching speed for my partner to keep up, given that I've been trying to be mindful about improving my punching speed lately. That said, there was plenty of other annoyance for me around this class due to multiple people asking why I wasn't fighting competitively. I don't understand why it's not enough for them when I say that I don't want to. I can't be certain if those people are all neurotypical, but they certainly socialize like neurotypical people, and I don't mean that as a compliment.
Thursday
Muay Thai class
This was a clinching day, which is a rare treat at this gym. I like that sort of work, though unfortunately, it seemed like nobody else wanted to work with me, so I got to deal with all of the downsides of rotating partners each round without feeling any of the benefits. Sometimes, it's difficult to not feel like I'm regarded as a joke here, but whatever, it's their loss if they're too scared to get out of their comfort zones.
Saturday
Muay Thai sparring
I happened to have a free Saturday morning this week, so I dropped in to do some training and got to do a sparring rotation with a couple of the competitive fighters, where we each took turns having a rest round. Things started out pretty light, though they did escalate gradually over the course of it (as did I, to keep up). Unfortunately, I'd lacked the foresight to set any sparring goals beforehand (I had honestly expected that I'd be left doing a bagwork session due to nobody else showing up), so I settled for trying to get a read early in each round that I could capitalize on towards the end, which I felt moderately successful with (in that I got a read every round, but I only actually landed something based on the set-up about two-thirds of the time). In the last round that I did, I blocked a kick with a perfect knee-on-knee collision, which hurt that fighter enough that we finished up with just boxing after they took a break to recover; unfortunate for them, of course, but it was satisfying to hurt someone by blocking their strike (which is typically tough to do when we're all wearing gloves and shin guards). It felt good to get in some more serious sparring than just the occasional light rounds in the general classes.
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