MMA and me; day 131

A week on vacation can do wonders for your mind, body, and soul. I finally got back to the gym yesterday, and although a bit rusty, it felt great! We got right into it too, working on some new movements, and combinations. We started off with a jab, jab, straight, hook, straight, high catch counter, catch counter. We added to that a slip, rear uppercut, straight, hook, straight, hook catch, hook, straight, lead uppercut, hook, straight, pull counter. We finished off with a left pivot double jab, making the whole combo look like this;
1-1-2-3-2-high catch counter-catch counter-slip-6-2-3-2-hook catch-3-2-5-3-2-pull counter-pivot left-1-1. This was a tough one for me and I has a hard time getting used to the timing on some of the punches, and I'm still tensing up a lot instead of just relaxing and letting things flow. Still, I felt like I was starting to get the hang of it by the end of class. We finished off with flutter kicks and plank positions, good day of boxing!

We started off jiu jitsu with our usual stretching, and got right into shoulder rolls, forward and backwards rolls, then started working more sweeps from half guard. First was from active guard, where you shrimp from guard to having one hook on a hip, with that knee across their stomach, and have the other foot on their other hip. In gi, grab across to the opposite side lapel with your top side hand, and grab a handful of gi on back of their upper arm with the other hand. In no gi, instead of grabbing the lapel, get an under hook, and grab the tricep with the other hand. Extend your knee on the stomach to push them away as you pull their arm towards you, stretching them out, and flare your foot on their hip out straight and then quickly sweep it into their leg while flipping them over with your other leg, pulling the lapel/under hook, and dragging their arm all at once. Extract your leg back to a lunge, lean forward with a C block, and end up in side control. The next sweep we worked was a scissor sweep, and I had a little more trouble with this one. From full guard, shrimp to half guard, and grab your same side under hook. From there, switch your half guard to the other leg, keeping your under hook, but instead of switching your outside leg to being completely underneath them, transition it to a butterfly hook, kick the outside/top side leg out wide, and simultaneously bring it in to their leg while lifting with your butterfly hook, lifting with your under hook, pulling towards you with your over hook on the other side, and you'll flip them over to their back, where you can extract your leg back to a lunge, get your C block and reclaim side control. Whew! Great first day back, I really missed you guys.