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

Mixed Martial Arts – Day Five

I’m posting a little bit later in the week than I normally would because we ended up not having class on Tuesday because my instructor was sick. By Thursday he was feeling much better and all 5 of us (my teacher, me, and three other “students”) were able to make it to practice.

Anyway, as you might have noticed, I decided to change the title. While the core foundation of a lot of what we’re practicing is Muay Thai, we incorporate a lot of other Martial Art techniques into our routines. Thus, I believe “Mixed Martial Arts” is a better term. Even though everyone will immediately think of “UFC”, which I’m not too fond of, that’s really the best phrase for what we’re doing.

On Thursday, my instructor decided to switch things up a bit and let US choose what exercises we were going to do. We did a round robin type of game where one person picked an exercise, chose how many we were going to do of that exercise and then everyone did it together. We’re a lot different than most people, we don’t simply choose low amounts to make it easier on ourselves. We choose a number that we know we can do, but yet is definitely a work out for our body and then everyone has to do it as well. We did a lot of push-ups, as our instructor kept sneaking in sets of push-ups throughout the day in the middle of our training, and a decent amount of sit-ups. One exercise we did that you can really, really feel is jumping squats. When you go up in the squat, you jump up in the air and reach your hands up high into the air and then when you land, you crouch back down into the squat. Try doing a lot of these and see how far you can get.

We did more light sparring and form/technique work than anything else. We worked a lot in partners, having one person sit out, and switching up every little bit since we had an odd number of people(5). One of the sessions, one person would latch his hands up behind the others neck and squeeze his arms into the persons neck to cause pressure. The one in the “head/neck” lock would then have to try to fight their way out while the other person kept the pressure on as tight as he could without inducing injury. Knee kicks were also allowed to be thrown, so I definitely threw a lot of those.

We also worked a bit more on “self-defense”. You’re probably thinking, “Isn’t all of it about self-defense?” And while, in a way it is, the movements we practiced were more towards real life situations such as someone grabbing your shoulder, or starting off at a more aggressive pace where everything is sudden unlike in a spar or ring fight where you are expecting everything. We would have one person put his guard up, and the other partner would unleash punches at his head while the other person tried to only defend. Why practice only defending, sometimes? Well, if it’s sudden and somebody unleashes a fury of punches towards your head, the only thing you might have time to do is get your hands up to block as many as you can.

Anyway, I’ll post more articles soon enough.