Tuesday, December 18th
Main goal for this day: relax and stretch be ready to spar this guy in miami and then pick up Liu from the Airport.
No run this morning
at noon for my lunch break I did some really good strechting (I had a plan to try a lot of kicks on my opponent this nights sparring)
Sparring with these guys is always like a alley fight. Don't get me wrong here they are great guys and their intentions truly are to let us all get better thru training and sparring together. It's just the travel there, it's always at night (only time we are all off from work), the sparring area is on the second floor in a small room stuffed with heavy bags, the lighting is awful, our greetings are short, short warmup and then we spar my teacher (Mestre Cleber) in my corner and the other guy with his crew in his.
3) 5 min rounds
1st round started good, I was too tentative but was snapping off jabs that made him look like a bobble head. But he was firing back (he fought very pressure like) trying to overwhelm me with speed and power in bursts of combos and very strong leg kicks. I briefly felt like I was using angles well and saw him lose balance and lose the ability to counter me when I used footwork with my combinations that put me on the outside of his aim, but in the flurry of cliches and pushing and wild haymakers I got into autopunch mode and all that went out the window LOL. eventually we clinched again and I was working knees when they shouted 30 seconds and the "ref" came to break up and restart befor the end of round one. And then I got rocked, the guy in his fury swung at me as they were breaking us apart... I actually thought there was no foul and was scolding myself for getting caught; which actually pushed me in the second round.
2nd round was still a little dizzy but I remembered I had two legs and that I wanted to use them. this helped confuse the guy a bit, I imagine he felt I was a different guy in there. from bell to bell of round two I was the pressure guy and it worked well for me. He was still very crafty and quick still trying leg kicks and even some side kicks to the body when he could get away enough, and his attempts to get inside and clinch had me somewhat worried in hindsight but I was able to pull off knees from there and push away/sprawl well. and I think the kicks to his midsection had a lot to do with it. His cardio was depleting bad. I stand in an orthodox stance but my front leg(left) is nasty and I threw it at the liver over and over. this round felt really long and at one point he wanted a break because he was gassed.
3rd round he went for broke, and I was able to side step and fire more kicks to the body and eventually at the head which had him backpeddaling a bit and my teacher was yelling to throw six punches! because he was tired, eventually he gave in to his cardio problems...
overall I am very proud of this sparring session because of all the help and training from my Teacher, and friends like Liu and Travis really paid off, I had good cardio and a lot more comfort moving around swithching game plans etc. My sparring partner was really into it too and I know we will sparr again and he will be even better because of this, especially with improved cardio.
Everyone notice my improvements over the months.
After Sparring I trained some more with these guys and had a great workout.
Went to Get Liu at Airport. It was great to see my friend after so long. showed him to My new school:
www.hollywoodmma.net before dropping him off at his family's place. Gonna train some boxing with him a few times during his visit.