My week in Martial Arts: November 7th to November 11th

“Its cold tonight” said Lun as we made our way to Karl Tanswell’s Straight Blast Gym Wednesday night. The winter was finally kicked in after a couple of weeks of suspiciously mild to warm weather. We got there about 6-ish watching the Vale Tudo class prior to ours. Most of the guys and girls there fight at MMA events and they were training hard. It was impressive to see about half the Vale Tudo class stay for our session.

One of the major components of the Straight Blast Gym training is constant movement or aliveness training. This means when one throws punches at the other in a drill for the other to dodge, they are both constantly moving. As a consequence with constant movement, conditioning and fitness increases. My brother and I were escaping a one handed clinch (one hand wrapped around the opponent’s neck as if to hook them in)
We learnt an escape and arm lock and then variations of the arm lock that turned into chokes and sweeps. It was a good session.

Thursday I worked on a general Martial Arts website that my Eskrima Instructor Simon, Mike who also attends our Eskrima class and myself are working on. So far the website had a page for our style of Eskrima and Danny Henry’s Capoeira class. To be honest Simon and Mike have done most of the work although I wrote the content for the Capoeira section. Check out the website yourself www.flowdrills.com it’s by no means finished but it will be good to get some feedback.


Friday was Eskrima day again, before we get to that if you’re wondering what happened Monday and Tuesday well I didn’t do anything due to other commitments. More and more circuit training is happening in our classes and more aliveness training. This compliments our Straight Blast Gym training well, however the real reason why we are doing more and more conditioning training is that the grading for our level 6 is going to be very tough with almost non stop stick sparring and grappling.

We also incorporated focus mitt work and some empty hand sparring. We also did some close contact controlled free style sparring called Palakaw. “Give each other some space to strike” Simon instructed. This is required at level 6 and a chance to display our Eskrima skills close contact, in contrast our other sparring method is sparring full force with padded sticks.

Although only two classes this week, I felt that it was two good training sessions. I will try and make all lessons next week as my brother might have to fly out soon for work.






Keep training!

Kit