Week 29

3 drill warm up in Ice Station Zebra: The warm tonight was quite literally that. Poor Andrew was berated for wearing his gloves and reluctantly removed them only to have cold digits for the rest of the session. The focus was to move the partner with forward pressure on attacks whilst keeping good body structure, so no leaning, reaching and keeping the feet under you in balance.

Pre fight work: Feeder wore a pad on the right hand, would walk towards defender who would gently shove away (palm thrust on chest) to maintain own distance. Feeder holds pad up and as he moves forward step towards him and drill the right hand. During the training I got talking to Nathan about this very blog. He is currently working the punching pyramids with the goal of a 23 pyramid! This got me thinking about my next goal after reaching my current punching one. I have it lined up but will reveal when I finish the 200,000.

Mr Pointy: We then moved onto looking at ways of overcoming said aggression type. We began by investigating the left hand pointer. We worked from the idea that he is going to be close and in your face. His hand is going to be in our face and down our centre so somehow we need to recover our own space and be in a position to attack. We need to make sure that we get to the outside of his hand and pull out the defensive fence. Whilst engaging in conversation initiate lap and punch. Keep hold of the wrist as this will inform you of his intentions. I was working with Mart for this and he realised that only when the held arm twitch was it time to follow up with elbows.

Mr Pointy right: As above in terms of re-gaining own space and this time you attack with pak and punch. The follow up for this one is repeater punches. It is important to keep correct alignment through the elbow-forearm-wrist-fist with good range on the punch. The range comes from a long piston of the elbow. My mistake was that I was lifting my elbow higher than the wrist, need to keep it lower as the punch is driving upwards to the chin.

Double lap from hell: The key is to make contact and lap at the same time but make sure the lap down down to you knees. Looked at a variety of painful follow ups from the headbutt, to palms to face, to head control to shiving into the wall via arm jolt.

Next we worked the double lap in the 3 drill (backfist or the change) with followups but hard to move like water. Take the tension out and just rep softly yet swiftly.

Following and leading footwork plus mistake highlighting. This was a case of highlighting and ironing our errors in following and leading footwork..

Sparring: Nick and his magnetic chop keeps making me feel messy. I need to solve a problem so will spar with him whenever I can to feel uncomfortable, awkward and frustrated.

So for me this was the first session in the new hut, which was very hard to find after a drive along a sinister track. It is cold, dirty and in the twilight of it's existence, so perfect as a training venue.