The journey of an MMA noob, week two
This week was my first Brazilian Jiu Jitsu lesson (in the last 2 years) and my first wrestling lesson, as well as another muay thai (striking) class.
Day one aftermath
In the previous post I mentioned my finger got kicked, well it swelled
up a lot and I could hardly move it.
I waited a day for it to get better but it didn’t so I thought I’d better get it checked.
The doctor said it seems broken so sent me off to the hospital for x-rays.
I’m thinking Ugh this is such bad luck after only one day.
I get the x-rays done and it’s all fine, it will just take a little while for the tissue to heal itself but there’s no bone damage. Phew!
When your middle finger is screwed up you realise how much you use it in everyday life. It provides a lot of support to the index finger.
Luckily I had injured it on a Thursday, so I had the whole weekend to recover.
I also took Monday off as it was still messed up, which is a shame because I really wanted to go, but didn’t want to keep re-injuring it.
The image above is what it looked like after most of the swelling went down.
Tuesday
OK so I’m back to training on Tuesday and we do some more striking. Like before I’m out of breath the whole time. I can’t remember much from that day so let’s skip to Wednesday.
Wednesday
Here’s my first BJJ class. It’s taught by Geoff Grant, 
pictured on the right with Royce Gracie. Geoff is a really nice guy (like Gareth is, too) and cracks me up, he’s always cracking jokes and giving the class a fun atmosphere even though at the same time we are all trying to work and learn.
That weekend they’d had a seminar with Robert Drysdale and he had taught the guys to spend more time on their feet while looking for position instead of being on their knees, so we drilled that.
That left me pretty tired from holding the squat position for long periods of time, so again I’m just looking forward to being more fit.
There was a lot of shin-on-thigh action which left me with 2 bruised and sore thighs since my partner was fairly heavy, ouch!
We learned some great stuff and I really love BJJ.
I could only stay for an hour because I’m not ready for the advanced class yet, which happens in the second hour.
Thursday
This is the last class of the week for me and I’m very pleased to see it’s wrestling!
Wrestling is the part of MMA that is most foreign to me so it’s what I was most looking forward to learning.
Like before, the first hour is instruction while the second is practice.
For the first hour we drill takedowns and takedown defense against the cage. I do OK against some people – the ones who are being nice to the noob – and fail miserably against others.
When we finish the drills we have mini competitions where you practice with a guy to get the takedown and whoever hits the floor first loses while the winner keeps their position on the mat. We do the same against the cage, where the attacker has to get the other guy down while the defender has to turn the other guy around so his back is against the cage.
In both exercises I didn’t have much success, I only won a couple of times (versus about a million losses) but I could feel myself slowly becoming more aware each time which is a cool feeling.
This is the most intense workout so far. Wrestling uses so much of your body at once!
Afterwards
I felt incredible a few minutes after that huge workout again, and my clothes were absolutely drenched in sweat.
The real fun came the next day, though, when I get out of bed and couldn’t sit up without relying fully on my arms. For that whole weekend I must have been pretty funny to watch as I spent several seconds just getting up and down from sitting. It was a good pain though, I knew it was because I had re-awoken muscles that hadn’t been used in a long time so I was still really happy about it.
The journey of an MMA noob, day one The journey of an MMA noob, week four
