Zyaga Writing about whatever the hell I want, cuz it's the Interwebz!

Mixed Martial Arts – Day Eleven and Twelve

It’s been a little while since my last post, and that’s mostly because of so much going on around the holidays. Now that the holidays are over, I’ll start throwing more articles up here on a more regular basis.

I don’t even remember what days we had these past two trainings on, but they were during the holidays at some point. Anyway, we were attempting to try something a bit new from our normal regime. Our normal regime is to stretch, exercise, practice combination’s and movements, and then practice sparring at the very end. The approach varied a lot from each time, even though we did everything in that same pattern, we were always switching up our exercises and combination’s, etc.

Instead, these past two times, we decided to start out with just a bit of stretching before immediately moving into sparring. We’d spar for just a short period of time, before halting and doing some form of exercise. We’d then go back to sparring, then stop and do a different exercise this time. We continued to repeat this exercise over and over. Why is it any different than our old schedule, other than the order of the routine? Well, before we had small breaks in between what we were doing as well as the fact that when you’re just exercising, you’re switching from one exercise to another. So, you’re working out maybe your legs, then your core, then your arms, etc.

This new method of training we did, didn’t have any breaks nor any switch between what areas of our body we were focusing on. Sure, the exercises varied between the sparring, but no break was provided in between so after doing lots of push-ups, mountain climbers, squats, dive bombers, etc you had to immediately get back up and start dishing out kicks, jabs, elbows, knees, etc. And no, we didn’t have the comfort of simply not using our legs if they were tired. Why not? Well, I guess you’d have to know our teacher to understand completely. The moment you stop using some part of your body for a little bit and he picks up on it, is the moment he makes that area his target. So, if you stop kicking, the more times you’re going to be kicked. That’s simply how it goes.

All in all, it was an insane two hour work out. We did get one break, at the hour moment for a couple of minutes to get a drink. How do I know how much more of a work out it was than the previous times? Within the first hour I pulled a charlie horse in my leg. I haven’t had that happen in years. We stretched out before hand, so I don’t believe it has much to do with that, other than the fact that it was a much higher endurance work out than what my body is accustomed to. The good news is that my teacher ended up going on vacation for awhile after those two training sessions, and while he was away, I’ve been working on my endurance as well as specifically on my legs. He just got back, so he’s trying to figure out a new schedule for us to meet. I can’t wait to have another training session to see how well I can hold up.