It’s been a good week training as always. Despite going from training as normal to hardly training at all last week I’ve managed to get things back up to speed and this time around I intend to keep it that way. As always I’m keeping myself busy so if there’s a break between blogs it’s down to procrastination more than anything else.

I should be fighting again over the summer and in the mean time intend to keep training regularly. Of course training is never the same unless your pushing yourself so there’s going to be a lot of that too. I was planning to head back out to Thailand in June but life being life, I’ve been forced to push things back a good few months. Instead, I’m heading back out to the land of smiles for a few weeks in October this year. For real this time!

Cross training is still on my mind and I even picked up my Kali sticks for the first time in god knows how long the other day. What little I know I’ve still got (trust me when I say it’s more little than anything else) but it was a nice burst of inspiration that came out the blue.

Although training has been a little up and down of late I’m still as inspired as ever to keep up the momentum and it’s always refreshing to find myself making small leaps of progress in different areas. Just as an example my left kick is rapidly heading back in the direction of being a force to be reckoned with and my hips are opening up more when I practice. As someone said to me a while ago, I’m getting the ‘whip’ back into the kick. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than it was. 

I guess it also boils down to the amount of time I’ve been training for now too. Compared to some it’s a drop in the ocean but I like to think just over 9 years is a reasonable amount of time to get the basics to an acceptable standard.

Sparring seems to be heading back in the right direction too. I’ve gone from feeling really rusty to feeling that I may be learning more now than I was around six months ago. Sparring with the newbies always keeps me on my toes mainly because most of them are at least 5 or 6 kg heavier than me.

When it comes to weight I feel like I’ve let myself go a little when really I’m only  sitting around the 63 or 64 kg mark at present. To me that’s heavy, to most of the people I train with that’s the stuff dreams are made out of but then again I’m used to fighting a lot lighter than that.

Towards the end of this week I was working on keeping the pressure on sparring, and it was good to see that all of that is still there. I used to have to tell myself to walk forward especially when sparring someone bigger than me. But now I just do it.

It’s funny because when I used to pull training back a little and then got back into it again I would feel like I had a lot of time out. It would be hard to get my head ‘in the zone’ and I’d usually feel more than a little despondent. These days it feels like it’s just sitting there waiting for me to pick it up again. Even if the tools could be a little sharper.

I’m taking a lot of joy at the moment in just being at the gym training, and it’s nice to have remembered that it’s not always about getting yourself ready for your next fight. “Art for arts sake” springs to mind. In fact, it’s been spring to mind more often than not of late. I think when your passionate about something you stick with it no matter what form it takes.

So from next week onwards I’m going to make sure things are where they should be training. You know it’s funny because every time I say that there’s something that seemingly gets in the way. At points finding the time seems almost impossible. But that’s the thing with impossible. It always yields the best results. Have a great week, train hard and just like the last time, I’ll see you on that road.