Mizblog

TJ’s Thursday morning class. I arrived earlier than TJ and spent some time sitting outside and putting Vaseline on my left small toe. It was sensitive and red after the last class so I thought it might be on the verge of blistering up again. After he opened up, I got about 10 minutes of stretching in before class.

We started class with shadow boxing, and I was already warmed up so I got right into it. Good movement and combinations were coming out of me, and I felt pretty confident. TJ mixed in various calisthenics (push ups, sit ups) and shoulder tag, then moved us to medicine ball drills. Two-handed passes, one-handed passes (first right hand, then left hand), overhead passes with squats, push up passes, seated sit up passes, then crunches alternating with having the medicine ball dropped on your belly 5×5. I paired with Jeff, who was nursing a tweaked ankle from the previous night’s class. We finished with stretching.

Then we gloved up and donned Thai pads. I held first, and Jeff was gimpily kicking with his sore ankle. We ended with 10 kicks each side, and then we switched. Sometime while I was throwing kicks, I wrapped my foot around the pad and tweaked my ankle. It didn’t bother me much through the rest of the class, but it sure did bother me later after I got home. I can’t remember if it happened before or during the final 10-kicks-per-side flurry, but I sure was surprised to see how slow I was at those kicks. Got to get faster!

We then moved on to kick defenses with the hands. You always use the right hand for low kicks and the left hand for high kicks. I was bad at this, as it was literally the first time I’d ever seen these maneuvers. I seemed to pick them up quickly, but later they went away in the stress drill. Anyway, we added counters and it was all new to me.

Then we went to the back room to finish things off. We did kick absorption in the thigh, then a drill where we combined all those kick defenses in a sequence of attacks. I moderately sucked.