Mizblog

TJ taught this Tuesday morning class. I felt surprisingly good after my double class on Saturday, so I came prepared for a repeat performance!

We started by running around, then shadow boxing, doing some push ups and sit ups. We paired up and practiced our level 1 pluck chokes. I teamed up with Mustache Matt and helped tune up his stuff. Then we stretched, got water, gloved up, and did focus mitt combinations.

In the middle of the focus mitt combinations, TJ told a story about an unsavory character who came in to the gym looking for training for his girlfriend’s kid. TJ recognized the guy from his work.

After the focus mitts, we did some light boxing sparring. I had good head movement. My footwork was shaky, and I kept noticing it and trying to fix it, only to notice it again a few minutes later. Work in progress. My hands were okay. I was able to see some things coming, but some punches caught me blind. Both kinds still sometimes landed, and sometimes I was just a little off in anticipating the next punch to counter. It’s just right there on the edge of my awareness! So it might come along.

Then Dave knocked Matt out with a punch flush to the temple. Holy shit! I had just sparred with Dave before, and he crossed my eyes with a jab to my forehead, so maybe my head movement frustrated him and he was looking for a better result? Maybe he just doesn’t know his own strength? I don’t know, but Matt dropped hard.

Once we’d done 3 rounds of sparring, we moved on to gun defense from behind, like we did last week. Easy stuff now. Then I had to demo it with TJ, but on the 3rd time, the gun was a knife! He set me up! So we learned the difference between gun defense and knife defense (hint: it’s in the take-away part). We learned two grips (handcuff and hand meat) that you can use to extract the knife. We learned to keep a fighting stance and locked out arms to help us with leverage in a pushing and pulling contest, if such should develop. I kept forgetting to do that last part, dammit! At the end, we did a drill where our partner would come at us with one weapon or the other, either side of the back, and we’d have to do the defense and take-away. Good class!