Workout Recap - Week of November 6, 2022
I was back in sparring this week, but that turned out to mostly be a waste of time since there's a major event coming up next weekend with multiple fighters from the gym competing, so I was mostly on mirror-guard duty. It's understandable, though I wish I had known that's how things would be ahead of time. In any case, I'll be skipping the Friday sparring hour this coming week since I expect it'll be more of the same.
With about ten weeks left on my membership, I should also start thinking about what to do when that expires. There's obviously still plenty for me to learn, but I'm thinking it'd be worthwhile to give myself a few months to try other gyms as well, now that I have this one as a baseline to compare against.
Monday
Muay Thai class
This was my best jump rope performance since switching to doing single-leg jumps. I'm not sure that that really means much, since it doesn't seem to have made me any more coordinated nor more comfortable with shifting my full body weight, but still, there was some inherent satisfaction in getting down to just eight mistakes. As for the class itself, we did a lot of work with alternating round kicks and alternating knees. My left round kick is still weird, but I did have a few more reps similar to last week where the body mechanics seemed to come together to produce good impact. That progress feels good.
Tuesday
Muay Thai class
There was a heavy emphasis on punching today, specifically on doing lead hooks (either singles or doubled to different targets). As before, the boxing-heavy classes continue to be the most tiring, so I definitely started getting sloppy with my form sooner than I'd like to. I'll need to think about ways to work on that outside of the classes.
Wednesday
Muay Thai class
Today was a fancy day, with lots of work on spinning backfists and even doing some question mark kicks. I got dizzy pretty quickly from the former and kept having to slow down to not feel like I was in danger of cracking my partner's face, but a veteran martial artist friend of mine said afterwards that she has similar experiences with drilling spinning attacks, so I suppose I just have to learn to deal with it (plus taking solace in the very low likelihood that I'll ever use a spinning backfist in reality). My work in previous weeks on compressing my round kick arc and timing the hip snap to coincide with the shin impact seemed to pay off with still getting good snap on my question mark kicks. That's also a technique that I don't expect to use in reality, although at least it's slightly more likely since chambering for a front kick tends to make untrained people react by protecting their groin with their arms.
Thursday
Muay Thai class
This was a very interesting class of head-to-head drills. A couple of the fighters did some tricky things to test my defensive soundness, like jabbing with a vertical fist to slip through my forearms or doing the occasional head hook to check if I was dropping my arm too much to protect against a body shot. I took those as attempts to help me improve, rather than bullying the newbie. Speaking of which, there was also an actual newbie without previous martial arts experience who I did a few drills with and tried to coach up on how to defend properly. That was nice to see how much I've improved since starting; while I know I'm always trying to get better, it can be hard to appreciate the progress when I'm constantly the bottom dog in the gym overall.
Friday
Muay Thai sparring
The kru wanted to focus on preparing the fighters who are competing on the 19th, so I mostly stood in front of the mirrors to help protect them. Still, I did get in three or four rounds (depending on whether I count the pure boxing round I did at the end, likely because the kru felt bad about me not getting to do anything for most of the hour). I achieved my goals of working in more movement both on offense and defense, and I also landed a nice knee strike as a counter to an incoming punch at one point (I checked with the other person afterwards to make sure they were ok since their forward momentum gave it much more impact than I usually do for knees, but fortunately I had pulled back on it enough to not cause any injury), which was a very cool moment for me. The fighter who's been the nicest to me of anyone at the gym got chewed out by the kru for their lackluster teep defense, so I texted them afterwards to offer emphasizing throwing teeps in our next time sparring. Towards that end, I will set an offensive goal of doing at least three teeps per round, along with a defensive goal of firing an immediate return kick (round or teep) after every shin block. Neither one will apply to pure boxing rounds, obviously, so if I get any of them, I'll instead make my goal doing at least one counter hook after dealing with a right punch.
