One of the great joys of both redundancy and working from home is the fact I have a martial arts school a five-minute walk away. This means I am back into a decent routine of training both BJJ and No Gi BJJ. I am also averaging a weekly hapkido class in London, so I'm training different things with different people and it's fab.
I did a 90-minute BJJ class last night and I decided I'd stick around to do an MMA class, too. Confession time: I am a huge UFC fan and I am currently watching them in chronological order. But I've never taken the step into training MMA, even though I have trained in several of the separate skills sets (striking, grappling, ground-fighting) that make up MMA.
But last night, my curiosity got the better of me and I thought I'd risk turning my 90-minute training session into a 180-minute one. And it was pretty god fun.
We mainly worked on movement drills and hand strikes. A lot of it was quite similar to many of the boxing drills I was taught while boxing several years ago, but the defence is slightly different as as kicks and knees also have to be avoided.
My head movement at slipping and rolling was a bit off the pace and my tight shoulder blocking to deflect hand strikes was a bit wayward. But my punching and combinations remain decent and I learnt a very good new movement drill involving a swinging pad.
I may do some more of this. My crap knees and advancing age, however, may dictate that this is only an occasional pleasure...
