Workout Recap - Week of May 4, 2025

The double-class grind continues, and I even got to do some dedicated fighter preparation this time, which was a first for me. I kept it fairly simple, but I might've inspired the kru in how to handle that for the current fighters because she had someone do the same sort of drilling today that I had been doing last week. Maybe that's just a fake pattern, but I'll keep it in mind as a potential stealth-compliment in case the pattern repeats.

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Monday

Muay Thai class (x2)

The first class was the usual Monday stamina-grinder, featuring lots of doubled leg attacks. My knee strikes and front kicks were moving people, which is always satisfying, even if I can't ever be entirely certain how much of that is real and how much is the padholder playing along. The second class built on that by stringing together longer sequences, which was tough (due to fatigue) but good. It was neat that, even in the last round of drills, my partner said that I was still punching hard enough to feel like I was going to rip their shoulder off. That was likely an exaggeration, but even so, I'll take getting a compliment about my striking power from someone who has about a fifty pound weight advantage over me.

Tuesday

Muay Thai class

This was a head-to-head defense day, which might be turning into a welcome pattern. We started out with some light sparring, during which I made one person need to take a break because I apparently made them forget to breathe from getting too excited (I'm not entirely sure how I managed that I was intentionally slowing things down and treating it as back-and-forth freestyle exchanges since the other person was very inexperienced, but I did it). Then we did several rounds of just exchanging one or two shots, during which I made two different competitive fighters regret partnering with me because apparently my body-level round kicks were killing their arms (despite that I was only going around 70-80% of full effort because that's what I usually do for these sorts of drills). When we finished up with some freestyle back-and-forth, I sat out the last round since there were an odd number of trainees and I figured that would be a good way of sparing anyone else from being a victim of my apparent menace. I don't feel bad about any of that because it's not my fault if people don't communicate for me to step things down in a timely manner, but I would like to have a better dial on when I'm being a productive bully.

Wednesday

Muay Thai class (x2)

The first class this day was boxing, progressively building up a long sequence with defense and counters mixed in. The kru had nothing but compliments for me, so I suppose I must be doing something right. The second class was a shorter session dedicated to getting fighters ready for their competition matches coming up in a couple of weeks with some rounds of intense padwork. I was just holding pads for it, but I pushed all of the fighters enough from doing a high volume of multiple kicks on reaction to how I was holding to get them all tired by the round's end, and I even got to slap some heads when they got lazy with their guards, so I'm still counting it as a training session from my side, too.

Thursday

Muay Thai class

The kru decided to let us have a class of fun padwork as a break from the typical rigor. We did some spinning backfists, question mark kicks, flying scissor knee strikes, and just generally a mess of flashier stuff to try out some different shit. Granted, we still finished up doing repeated round kicks to have something more serious splashed in, but overall, it was a nice change-up from the normal routine.