29/1/19: Drilling with intensity, pad rounds and syllabus work

Warm up:

Partner shadow boxing out of range but using partner as target. (great warm up!)

punches only
elbows and knees
kicks
punches and kicks

Thai drills:

The focus for today was intent, and making each hit count. Everyone at some point is guilty of going through the motions. We worked hard on making sure there was an intensity to our drilling. That does NOT mean trying to knock each others block off. What it does mean it trying to touch leather to face. To actually touch your target and keep your partner honest. To work your range and moving in and out and to work on your forward pressure (while trying to remain balanced and not over commit). Nothing wrong with going through the motions at the start to understand the combo etc, but as soon as you got that, you do need to try and make it work.

One thing I did notice was distance issues. A lot of us in the drills marched forward and then did our jab cross feeds. However, the marching forward got us so close to our partner that in reality we would have been eating shots before we had a chance to throw our own. A quick fix for this in the drill was holding your lead arm out, almost like a jab, into their face (or touching their gloves) to keep them at an appropriate distance. This forces them to work harder to get in range rather than just let them walk up really close to you and then hit you without being able to respond (which I worked out the hard way!).

1) Catch jab cross with rear hand.

2) after 2 x catching jab cross, on 3rd rep use lead hand to parry the cross and off balance, step off line to the left and follow up with cross hook/uppercut, cross rear round kick.

3) after 2 x catching jab cross, on 3rd rep use rear hand to scoop the cross and off balance, step off line to the left and follow up with jab cross hook read round kick

Swapping partners to get different energy

Thai pads aka bring the pain:

1) Jab cross hook rear round kick
2) cross hook cross rear round kick
3) multiple kick drill (to finish us off and force us to dig deep) 5 x single rear round kick, 5 x double round kick, 5 x triple round kick, 5 x double round kick, 5 x single round kick.

Syllabus work:

people then split off into different groups and worked syllabus specific drills including lock flows, hubud variations and mixed weapon sumbrada.