We joined another ten guys and girls of varying sizes, plus a huge guy called Dave who was the instructor. He mentioned that he'd accepted an offer to fight an-ex WWE wrestler in a MMA event in Florida in five weeks time, so I figured he was not someone to mess with.
We started off with a "warm up session", first of all crawling around on all fours, then on our toes and fingertips. It's kind of hard crawling on your fingertips when you weigh 100 odd kilos. Next we did "pikes", a kind of sit up but harder, followed by pushups (on our knuckles, just for added difficulty). Then we did about twenty squats or so, which weren't heaps easy.
Next up, we put on the gloves, and matched up against a partner. We worked on left-right jab combos to the head, and using the gloves to protect the face. We did a few other types of combos and blocking, then we worked on taking a punch. Which meant one of us held our hands in the air, while the other one punched them in the stomach. This wasn't as bad as it could have been, since we were wearing gloves. Unfortunately for Matt though, he took a bare knuckle punch from the instructor when he decided to show me how it was done. Not having had a lot of experience getting punched in the belly lately, this started to get to me after a while, and I felt like I was going to throw up.
The instructor then decided we would do squats again, so we did 20 or so of these, and I was hurting. Then he said "OK, now we're going to do 100".
You've got to be freaking kidding me.
I knew there was no way I could do that, but I wasn't going to not try. I managed to get most of them, cheating a bit when the instructor turned around to face the other side of the class. At one point, he told me "Don't bend your back, it's going to be sore tomorrow". I thought of responding "All of me is going to be sore", then I remembered that he's willingly fighting this guy next month, and thought better of it.
After that we were given 30 seconds for a drink, then came back with the gloves and worked on some punching kicking combinations. Obviously someone thought we didn't get enough punishment to our midsections earlier, because then we did an exercise where we each got to kick our partner in the ribs ten times.
After this it slowed down a bit, it was more wrestling/grappling type stuff, with the instructor demonstating moves and us copying them. At one point he left to use the bathroom and told us all to do pushups till he got back. Awesome. I got through about thirty, then held the last one until he came back, then started doing them again.
The whole session lasted perhaps an hour and 40 minutes, and left me completely stuffed. He said at the end "I think you'd all agree it was a pretty light session tonight", so I'm a bit worried about what a heavy one will be like. He also told us that there'd be a two week break and we'd be starting again at a new location, because they wanted to "ramp up" our training. Not sure what that means specifically, hopefully it's not related to an increase in stomach punching.
I'm pretty keen to stay at it though, not just in terms of the physical side, but also the mental strength I reckon it will bring. It's one of the hardest things I've ever done, and I think that's a good thing, you've got to stretch yourselves sometimes. Even if it does involve being repeatedly kicked in the ribs.
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