MMA and me; day 93

In MMA, we worked on an arm bar/triangle drill where the person in your guard simulates throwing a heavy punch that you slip to the outside, and reach across with your far side arm and grab their tricep. As they try to rip their arm free, push off their hip and kick your near side leg over their face as you spin on your shoulders to lock in the arm bar. To defend, they will stack your legs up over your shoulders and rip their arm out, leaving them wide open for a transition to a triangle. The leg you kicked over their face should be brought back out and around their head, over the back of their neck, as you spin on your shoulders to the other side of their body. As your leg goes across the back of their neck, get your boot on, and slip your other leg over the ankle of the leg across their neck, and reach under the inside of their leg with the same side arm as the leg across the neck. With your other arm, pull their hand that is trapped in the triangle across their face, and simply squeeze your knees together. If you have to, pull down on the back of their head to finish the choke. We then worked a triangle drill where you grab wrist control with your partner in your guard, peacock their hands out, and slap on a triangle, then pull your legs out, and throw a triangle on the other side. We went back and forth for two three minute rounds each. We then worked the opening drill one more time before we called it a day for MMA class.

Kick boxing started with working low 10s on kick shields, just working on driving the shin into the kick shield, and making sure to lean into the kick, and opening the hip up before pivoting on the lead foot. Next the partner holding the kick shield would throw a low 10 and you would check the kick, and immediately return the favor with a low 10 of your own. We then drilled a step back to avoid a low 10 and reply with a mid 9. As your partner throws the 10, switch your stance and bring your lead leg back, then fire the mid 9 to their ribcage with mean intentions. We finished off with a few rounds of light kick sparring, which further reinforced the fact that I need to spar much more frequently, because I'm a flipping pansy when it comes to this (sorry Kyle, I need to get the sand out of my..., well, you know) Then we knocked out some leg lifts, and it was on to grappling.

Grappling was a conditioning class (woo). Half the class (my half) started doing the kettle bell 300. This involved doing 25 swing lifts with each arm, 25 push ups, 50 swing presses using both arms, 50 burpies, or squat thrusts, 25 lift and press with each arm, and 50 mountain climbers. This was pretty brutal, but I know I did better than the last time I did these, because this time I only really stopped once, and then got right back to it. After this exercise, our groups switched, and we alternated doing bag hangs and ab rollers for three minutes at a time while the other group busted out the kettle bell workout. With 15 minutes to go, we all finished with a little live grappling, and called it a day.