Mizblog

TJ’s Saturday morning class started without Saranya, as she’s at Gigi’s house for a sleepover.

TJ got us running while he showed off his swollen cauliflower ear. Ouch. We did shadow boxing, shoulder tag, team calisthenics, and stretching. Then we geared up and did Bas Rutten combinations (the Thai Boxing tape) on our geared up partners while they defended. I did a poor job of defending against old man Mike, but at least I improved as the session went along. He defended well throughout, and his combinations were crisp and fast.

After a few rounds of that, we got into boxing sparring. I started with Mike, and immediately landed a good body blow after a jab to the face was blocked. He thought that was so good, he did it back to me a few times, and I did it a couple more times to him. We were pretty even.

My next sparring partner was Alex, who’s starting to warm up to me. Last time, he lit me up from the outside, but this time I had far better head movement and made him miss a lot of his punches. I was able to land quite a few of my own, and I felt I got the edge on the contest.

Finally I sparred with Ray, who had a sore ankle. A couple times I found myself standing on his right foot. I wasn’t doing it on purpose, it’s just that he’s a leftie and so he stands with his right foot forward, next to my left foot forward, so an advance means I’m standing on his foot. He stepped on my foot again later, and I did his once also. I found I was able to pressure him and get him dodging too much, but he was able to land a few good punches to get me to back off. I felt bad later for standing on his sore foot, but I did tell him it was unintentional. I didn’t want to hurt him.

After sparring was over, we got down to gun defense. Mike and I reviewed gun from the front and from behind, then we did gun pressing the back of the head and gun pointing to the face. We also went over gun to the side, both in front of the arm and behind the arm. Mike started bleeding out of his little finger, dripping all over the mat. He joked with me, saying “You animal!” and I retorted with the not-so-witty “I didn’t do that!” Anyway, it was little and he got a band aid, but it took time to clean the mat and we just moved into a drill with A’s and B’s, one group closing the eyes while the other group came around and did gun threats, and the threatened had to open their eyes, assess the threat, and make the defense.