MMA and me; Day 2.

So after a breif break to watch Felix Hernandez pitch (surprise! The Mariners scored no runs for him!) I headed back to Shoreline MMA. Again, I spent the first hour doing striking, but this time it was Muy Thai.

We started out doing drills involving the Thai clinch, and knees to the body. We then moved to working with a partner, and throwing the knees three different ways. I feel for the guy I was working with. In these drills, you get paired up with people of comparable size, but I usually end up being a good 30+ pounds bigger than my partner. It doesn't make much of a difference most of the time, but for these drills, we were almost hanging on the other person's neck while throwing the knees into pad that they held. I got a good workout, but I think poor George got put through the wringer when he had to hold up my *ahem* considerable bulk. We finished off with the plank position, and then holding our legs six inches off the ground while laying on our backs, for three minutes each. This was maybe the sweatiest I've been after just one hour of class.

Only a handful of people hung around for jiu-jitsu, which meant that for the armbars we were learning, I got paired up with the instructor, Jack. Whoo hoo! He actually said that my armbar was nice and tight, and it felt much more fluid and solid than the first time we drilled these positions. I'm starting to understand the concepts of going down the checklist of body positioning, and securing certain things before moving on. Jack said he could see me landing armbars a lot, which definitely made me smile. I'm nowhere near thinking about entering any type of competition, but I can see getting amped up for one though. Gotta keep it simple, and work on crawling before I start walking.