It’s been a practically full week of training this week, and I feel like I’m getting back into the swing of things. At the moment my main focus is on sharpening up and tidying a few things up. It’s been a good week of tough technical training and you can’t beat getting a good push to get that focus back.

I’ve made sure of course this week I’ve got some sparring in, some of which I was happy with, some of which not so happy. I jokingly said to one of my trainers in the week that  when I’ve got someone coming at me hell for leather I seem to be very good at moving in reverse. It’s usually when their a little heavier than me that I start  to get a lot more wary of what may or may not happen. Of course, this really isn’t the result that everyone (mainly me) is looking for and so after a quiet word with myself, I’ve come to the conclusion that feeling rusty or not, I need to make sure I’m sparring people that I know will keep me under pressure. Some days that feels like practically everybody. But as I’ve said before (and have had said to me on more than one occasion) it’s really not what about they are going to do to you, but what you are going to do to them.

You see the thing is, when it comes to training and fighting I want to start to capitalize on some of my strengths. I know that I’m fit enough to keep someone under pressure for a full five rounds if I really wanted to. and I when I say under pressure I mean constant attack. I think it’s very important to stay on the attack although sometimes it’s easier said than done. I see ‘in’ fighting as a skill set I really need to improve and intend to spend a lot more time focusing on it. A little while ago people were saying to me when I was training that I should work on pressure fighting, ‘it will work for you!’. Sadly, it sometimes takes me learning the hard way to really understand what’s being said.

This week it took  2 rounds of sparring reversing from the punching combinations from hell ( he was about 10 kg heavier than me to be fair and I got some cracking low kicks in ) and one of my trainers saying he really thinks this is a good way for me to fight, for me to have a sheepish eureka ‘that sounds like a plan’ moment, and to finally decide that this is something I really want to get good at. I know when I’m fighting I come forward a lot, it’s just that I think I need to start working on that constant attack and venom a lot more than I have done of late. A big part of Muay Thai is being able to take the punishment and take the fight to them. I guess sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and give it to them.

So next week onwards I’m going to make sure that I’m not looking for easy roads in my training and I’m going to do my best to keep that ‘on’ switch lit up. I think comfort zones don’t just exist outside environments like training camps. They can develop any where you let them. From now on I want to be all about the pressure. And of course, you could say it’s a work in progress. Train hard, fight easy and I’ll see you on the road.