Workout Recap - Week of June 11, 2023
My mind was a bit off-kilter this whole week, getting bad enough on Friday that I ended up skipping sparring to avoid being a safety liability to myself and my partners. I feel good about having pushed myself to go to the regular classes every other day despite that, though.
Monday
Muay Thai class
This class focused on fundamentals, involving just straight punches and round kicks. We did a few rounds with multiple kicks using the same leg, and I felt pretty good about my body control when doing that with my rear leg; the kru even commented that it looked "beautiful" when she came by at one point. On the other hand, I felt clunky doing that with my lead leg. I think the main issue I'm having there is that I'm tending to bring it back too far during the recovery, so my stance gets more bladed than I like after the first kick. I might just need to find a chance to come in and crank out a bunch of kicks on the heavy bags to smooth that over.
Tuesday
Muay Thai class
There were a lot of new people trying the class today, so we kept things fundamental again. I was partnered with one of them, so I kept things relatively light on my power to keep them safe, focusing instead on my balance and flow. That said, we finished the class with just pumping out repeated round kicks, where I did turn up the power after my partner got into the pattern of how to hold pads for them, and they seemed to feel enough of a difference there to make reaction noises. Overall, it wasn't what I'd want to do for every class, but I think it's good to sometimes have a tune-up like that.
Wednesday
Muay Thai class
This was a pure kicking class, where we got to string together pretty much every combination of two consecutive kicks that would make sense offensively. We finished it up in trios, with one person holding a kick shield for non-stop body round kicks from the other two, which I enjoyed (and I was pleased with myself that I held my ground rather than scooting backwards gradually like the other two did, even despite getting kicked on my fingers a few times by someone who was still new to things). There was another fun thing about this class, too; the kru didn't realize that the round timer was set to only 30-second breaks rather than the usual 60-second breaks until pretty much the end of the class, so it was also a nice stress test for our stamina. I'd guess I was in the minority in taking that as a positive, but I liked it enough to message the kru afterwards to say that I'd be in favor of doing that occasionally on purpose.
Thursday
Muay Thai class
We focused almost entirely on knee strikes today, so anyone who's been following these updates for a while should conclude that I definitely enjoyed it. Aside from just the normal joy of knee strikes, though, I also felt like I did better than usual at stabbing forward on them, which was cool. We finished up with entering to clinch for multiple skipping knees, and the kru made me do an extra rep of that after the drill finished for her to record because she said I did them very well (watching the footage afterwards, there were naturally things that I could nitpick, but I did like that I was still managing the spacing and getting hip involvement on every knee even with the fatigue of having just finished up a whole round of them). In unrelated news, the equipment shop manager was also giving away some handwraps for free after the class, so I got a set of knock-off Hello Kitty wraps. No plans on how I'll switch between them and my typical ones, but it should be fun.
