Cutting Weight, Healing Leg: Part 5 (Training Videos!)

So, some training videos. These are not scintillating videos of combat derring-do; even by (my) amateur standards, they're about working specific things when you are tired -- that last bit being a big implicit part of the whole point of Muay Thai training in general and fight training for sure, namely functioning at a high level when tired. 

No one but me--or maybe Tracy, my generous and cheerful sparring partner-- will want or need to watch all of these. But I'll break them down a little, as a useful exercise for myself and for anyone interested.

First: boxing with Tracy.

The instructions from Coach here are for Tracy to be putting constant pressure on me, and me to be focusing on movement and distance, throwing "straight punches" (jabs and crosses, no or few hooks, no upper-cuts, no body shots) and moving in and out of distance. This is because of Coach's (correct) diagnosis that I am basically a bad boxer, but that I'm reasonably tall and have good stamina, so a good strategy for me is to move, use my length for long punches and kicks, and not get caught up getting swiped by hooks and overhand punches close range.

In the video, both Tracy and I do medium-okay-not-so-great. He does better than me; he just keeps coming forward, he gets me in corners. I
- always go in one direction; I need to change directions and juke more
- expose my chin often, particularly when I pivot out on my left foot (you can see him catch me a couple times when I do this)
- don't do a terrible job, by my standards, of keeping a tight guard, but
- still don't do a good enough job. I just can't think about it enough: keep a tight guard. Keep a tight guard. Flick strike hard move; tight guard.

Next: neck wrestling. This is a weird foible of Muay Thai; there's no grappling like throwing each other to the ground, and no arm-bars/leg-locks all that, but there is the "clinch" which is this stand-up wrestling thing you see me and Tracy doing here. This is not at all how this would go down in a fight; in a fight you come together and someone does something (for example, as in my fight in October, "someone" might throw a knee or two and break your ribs) and then the ref will break it up or one of you will break out of it. So this is a drill to work those moments, where you do it for a sustained period,

We have no gloves or wraps on, which I find frustrating because these techniques are very different with gloves on, but if you work this for rounds-and-rounds with gear on people's faces, ears, and eyes get scratched-up, etc., which can range from annoying to really screwing things up. So.

What I notice in this video is
- if there were elbows allowed in my fight (there are not), I'd be unconscious in a clinch toot sweet, cuz I'm wide open to that;
- I need to base more. You can see it in my feet. It's all the ballet training stuff, still, in my body: my feet are just too much on one line. On a positive side, you can see that it is effective when I do base; even though Tracy is much larger and stronger than I am, I'm sometimes then able to pull him off his balance, which is good because in a really successful case you can trip, but more likely you can throw a knee or something.

Last video. Called: "Tracy is Tired."

Cutting Weight, Healing Leg: Training GIFs

I don't know to say the word of this exciting new image technology--I'm aware of the options, but get confused about how the creator does/does not say what everyone else does-- but ANYWAY: I do know that one of my favorite things Google does is make GIFs of your pics when its robot-brain thinks it should. These ones worked out particularly well. Thanks to TSL for taking the shots.

The techniques are knees (you'll have guessed that) and push-kicks, the latter often in Muay Thai getting called "teeps".

Knees are a savage, close-range thing; it was knees that messed me up hard my last fight.

Teeps are for distance, for keeping and making it; they can be punishing in themselves if you time them right (as your opponent comes in), but they are mostly about positioning, spacing, setup.

At the end of training, when you're training hard although honestly often when you're training kind of normally, too, you'll often do something like what I'm doing here: 100 knees, 200 teeps.

Cutting Weight, Healing Leg: Fight Flyer

These are exciting and scary and make it real; it's wild that I get to be part of this thing. What a gift.

Cutting Weight, Healing Leg: Part 5

I weighed 160.2 pounds this morning. I ate approximately 2,583  calories today, and burned approximately 694 calories doing exercise (yoga, muay thai).

Leg: .

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Making weight making weight. Close.

Hope you enjoyed the something-different in the videos. Super big thanks to CCK for her awesome help. You can check out her and her ruggedness here.

I have several scattered thoughts to share with all the beautiful people today. Here they are.

The first is a story about my gym. It's pretty simple. I told one of the guys at the gym about the campaign to raise money for Nepal, and he listened and kind of crossed his arm and hmm hmmed as I did. And then he paused, and I could tell he didn't like it. He then pronounced it, in rapid succession, several things:
"okay"
Then, some waffling, then:
"suburban"
Followed quickly post more-waffling by:
"thoughtful"
Until finally, and with acknowledgement that this was the word he was looking for all along, the word that encompassed all the others:
"white"
I thought this whole thing was amazing, and feel privileged to have been a passive participant in the whole conversation.

Here's my really obvious next thought: it gets really easy not to waste calories when you're counting them. Like, it's not hard not to drink a f***ing beer or glass of wine; it's not hard not to eat that brownie. Do you realize how much you will not get to eat if you eat that brownie? That brownie is, like, the enemy. F**k that brownie, in the reals.

A subtler version of this is eating after training. My appetite is generally pretty suppressed for awhile after training hard, but later I get hungry. But... I'm not doing anything else that day. I'm not training. I'm not working (this is a complication: making sure my brain is fed while cutting). I'm going home and doing probably some dumb stuff maybe and going to sleep. So that's a good time to be hungry. Eating then: "wasted" calories.

This is a weird game, and I suppose it's good that I'm horsing around with it, but it'll be good when I don't have to play it anymore. I'm getting a haircut soon, and literally I'm calculating how much that'll take off my weight (my guess is about 0.3 lbs).

Cutting Weight, Healing Leg: Part 4

I weighed 163 pounds this morning. I ate approximately 2,153 calories today, and burned approximately 676 calories doing exercise (yoga, muay thai).

Leg: So now I have these weird bruises on both knees. But honestly I'm just talking about them because there's a "leg" space. They're the sort of thing you'd usually ice and forget about; not like the contusion in my thigh that's the point of concern. Anyway: bruised knees. Not sure how the right one got bruised, as I've not been kneeing it because of the thigh. Left: very clearly know how.

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Eat Protein.

This is my advice to you. To myself.

I know it is trendy and paleo to go on about protein. And I know that a macronutrient balance is essential to health and happiness; I sometimes even, in fact, wind up being the carrier of this very message to people who need it (I am thinking in particular of a few young women I've tutored, and "cleanses").

BUT, when you are counting your calories, and are still using your body, for me, every meal that I don't optimize protein is one that I kick myself for.

It's partially of course about indulgence, but also just calculation. A chocolate croissant does not have that many calories. If you are working out hard, even if you are cutting weight, it is not a big deal to eat a chocolate croissant. But it is, because you are using up your 290-or-whatever calories on something with practically no protein, and if you're me you will be hungry weak sad and tired because of that.

As opposed to, say, these. No I am not a paid rep for these people. Yes I would work as a paid rep for these people. Sweet Earth, hit me up. Their "functional" breakfast burrito is amazing, because it makes you not hungry for a long time.

What I'm saying is, to avoid the kind of cavernous dire hunger that I'm feeling right now, eat protein. Don't eat the chocolate g.d. croissant. Eat. Protein.

Last food thing: kind of interesting. While it's hard, not-eating to cut weight while training is really different than not-eating in general. I thankfully have very little experience not-eating in general, but in my experience it involves lots of will-power and this and that. Cutting weight for a fight involves will-power, too, but I guess you're so in it that it feels as much like an acquiescence to what is. Do you want to make weight for this fight? I.e., do you want to do this fight, that you are busting your ass for, and that other people are investing time and effort in your doing? Okay. Then you are not eating more, right now/today, or whatever. It's just fact.

It also helps that you train so hard that you're not hungry after, usually, although if you screw up your timing on eating & training gosh that makes training harder and way way less fun and effective.

Cutting Weight, Healing Leg: Part 4 (Training Videos!)

So, this is round... I don't know, I think 3 of 5, of pad work with Coach Vik from tonight.

I'm going to approach these training videos as an explanation for those who don't know the sport, on the assumption that if you're reading this, you know me, probably, and therefore probably you don't know the sport. If you're still watching and reading and those conditions somehow don't attain: thanks for watching and reading.

In training for Muay Thai, you do lots of stuff, but an anchor activity is "pad work." Pad work is the coach (or whoever) holding pads, calling hits or combos for you to do. That's kind of the long and the short of it. Obviously what you do, how advanced the techniques are, how many are sequenced together, whether or how much you're asked to defend yourself -- all that is largely up to the pad-holder.

Coach is a very good pad holder. I've trained at not that many gyms, but not that few: 6 or 7, on different cities and continents, and by "gyms" I don't mean fitness muay thai classes but gyms that make fighters (although of course not everyone at even such a gym is there to be that). My point is that I have a non-zero comparison group, and Coach's specificity of technique and demanding pace, in particular, are admirable and daunting. There is no doubt that in fight prep the pad work is what's most grueling; you ramp up from the usual 3 3-minutes rounds, to 4, to 5, and it just leaves you empty.

You can see me kind of empty, here; slow both in how I sequence attacks and in the execution of each attack, and slow on my feet, and struggling. To some extent that's on me, but to some extent that's what happens: the goal of this work is to drive you to that point, so that you're trained mentally and physically to still operate there, to still do something, throw something (jab jab kick, go go go) even when it's all empty.

Anyway, enjoy me being tired and a bit rubbish. Thanks, Coach.

Cutting Weight, Healing Leg: Part 3

I weighed 163 pounds this morning. I ate approximately 2,560 calories today, and burned approximately 210 calories doing exercise (yoga).

Leg: y'know. Right direction. Glad it came out of yesterday fine, there was one sec I was worried, but fine.

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"What part of your past are you trying to atone for?"

I don't remember if those were S the novelist's exact words, but that was her sentiment. Everyone around the table, in a sun-dapped backyard in Venice (Los Angeles, not the other one) went ooooohhh; like "burn", I guess.

She'd asked this, S -- who was (still is! I am sure!) winsome and red-headed and gracefully accepting/deflecting another member of our party's probing personal questions about her, which was partially why the big ooooohhh: role reversal, the questioned now asking tough questions.

I had been sitting there, kind of spaced out, and everyone knew it was cuz I was hungry because I was cutting for the fight. Etc.

I'm actually not going to rattle on with this anecdote; that's the nub. The nub really being a return to the question that is animating this series, at least here at its start. "Why do this?" I don't think, as S cheekily posited, that I'm exorcising (exercising. har.) some angry / scared / compensatory inner thing. WELL. Maybe the last one; it could be that there is something in some people that when your life is so good, so rich, you feel that you have to test something. But even writing that frankly it feels like obvious bullshit, and even sort of wasteful (if things are so good, shouldn't you build on them to make more? And that's more what this feels like). So, that's not it, either.

I do think there's a sometimes hard-to-bridge gap between people who derive deep pleasure/satisfaction from challenging, pushing, and yes-sometimes-hurting their bodies and those who do not. I'm not saying S is a "does not". I don't know her. I'm saying that part of it is just really simple: net-net, I like it. It's hard sometimes, but I like it.

But I also take her point, and I'm asking myself the same question in less pointed terms. What are the particularities of this: the little rushes of fear, and excitement, that overtake you every day; the fact that I am at this point always mentally and emotionally (nevermind physically. obviously physically) affected by hunger, mild to not-so-mild; the fact that you could get hurt (probably not. but you could.); the fact that you could hurt someone else (ditto)? What are the things in me that makes me want to do this?

It's actually a rich and complete feeling, facing these questions in myself.

I have no idea how to answer htem.

It's also a good lesson, and maybe that's what I'll close this on, so I can offer something a little thought-ish instead of just questions. I have, for a long time, had an itch to fight. Not in my life, never that, but as sport. I've done 2 so far; this will be the 3rd. I know that there is an end to my road with this sport, somewhere not impossible to imagine; I'm 35, I want to be active for years, and if you're as bad as I am at fighting you should not be fighting much past my age if you want to stay healthy for other activities at a good level. I know all that. Et cetera et cetera.

But right now what it is is that I'm doing the thing that I was itching to do but was hard. And scratching that itch.

It would be a terrible bummer if my leg got re-screwed-up and I had to drop this fight; that's looking okay touch wood. It would be a terrible bummer to get hammered and injured again in the ring, as I did in my fight last October. It would be a disappointment, but a noble one, to have a good fight but lose. It would be a glory to have a good fight and win. But whatever happens I am doing it. I'm doing it.

The things that we want and always wonder if about, do not have to stay if. We can do them and, in so doing, relax the threads that pull some of us (it can't just be me) many ways. Satisfy desires; answer some of the questions. They lead to others, unavoidably--thanks, S--but still: we can forward ourselves through more than just time.