September08
September 29th - October 2nd
The week started well with the commencement of my training with Craig Jose who is one of the best Muay Thai fighters I know (and I know a lot of Muay Thai Fighters). Having agreed to fight MMA on March 13th I decided I needed to get out of the comfort zone and asked Craig to help me prepare my stand up skills.
For people who don't train to a high level or not involved in competition it might seem strange for the instructor of a stand up martial arts system to ask someone from another system to help him out but if you look at the camps of good MMA teams they constantly diversify their training and try to fillas many gaps as possible. The stand up style I'm most likely to come up against is Muay Thai but one thing is pretty much assured......That I won't come up against anyone as sharp as Craig!
Tuesdays core class was good with a solid turn out.
We worked on our boxing skills and took some of the more advanced guys through some of the Chum Kiu concepts before regrouping the class to work on our boxing defences. A 2 t shirt night as i put it.
Wednesday night grappling was super quiet with only myself, Ben, Jenna, Terry & Rob from cyclone but that never matters when you have a guy like Dave Harewood teaching you Brazilian Jiu Jitsu aided my the also highly skilled Darren. We worked on a variation of mount and some triangle attacks from that position. I was still nursing a back injury but kept myself tight and avoided anything getting worse.
Thursday Night Sparring (2nd October)
An unusually quiet night was completely livened up by the arrival of my long term MMA training partner big Bryan Moore and his protégée Dave. We went through some of our typical boxing drills, light sparring etc and then Bryan showed the class some wrestling takedowns which progressed to doing some rounds of wrestling.
We concluded the night doing Semi Pro MMA rules sparring with some excellent progress shown by Mark Longbotham, Sedge & Joe. We're looking forward to Bryan and Dave returning in a week or two.