26/01/2013:
Muay Thai:
Spent the morning at Combat Room in Welly. After hanging around looking suspicious and trying to find the way in, a dude sitting across the road came and introduced himself as one of the trainers, and said that he'd left his keys at home. We got in a while later, and started with a basic warm-up, some shadow boxing, then a small bit of bag work. Some guys skipped, other guys did whatever. It was pretty relaxed. After that a structured warm-up, running across the mats, doing lunges, sprints, rolls, etc.
From there we went into sparring. Combat Room is a fight gym- the guys who were there mostly were amateur fighters, some with more experience than others, most of them more experienced than me. We started off quite light, but some of the guys picked the intensity up pretty quickly. I remember blocking one head kick, and somehow the guy's knee hit my nose, so I spent the rest of the day with a crusty red nostril. About an hour later, my left shoulder started playing up, so I decided to stop using it to punch, and to just try hit with my right instead. I paired up with a fairly aggressive dude shortly after and wound up with a small cut on my lip when he landed a fairly clean right hand. I decided to call it a morning there, watched some more sparring for another 10 minutes and then went off to my next place to train.
Next stop was Jai in Wellington. A more white-collar, business-based gym, but not without its share of fighters. My favourite thing about visiting Jai is the Thai trainers there, there's always something to be learned. At this stage, my left foot was pretty badly swollen (I think from kicking someone's elbow) so I needed to get a new pair of ankle sleeves and got some liniment oil too. Ankle felt much better with these, so I sparred from about 12:30 until about 2, keeping things light.
At 2:15 the structured sparring class began. Started off with boxing for a few rounds, doing sets of push-ups between. After the boxing sparring, moved into doing about 6 rounds of regular sparring, and then finished off with 10-15 minutes of continuous clinching. I enjoy sparring here because it's usually lighter, more technical, the way that Thais do, and the fighters there are technically skilled too. After that, 200 running knees and then 100 push kicks on the bag nonstop. Dead afterwards.
No pictures or video though.