Back to Boxing
This month, the other half of the Murderbeers Fight Team, Simon ‘Bunn Slayer’ Lowe, is back in the local area. As such, it makes perfect sense for us to brush up on our combat skills at some of the local classes.
Having decided to document some of these classes, I have also decided not to go into much detail about them. For one thing, the are only so many ways to say “Then we did this, and it hurt a whole lot. Then we did this, and I went flying across the room. Then we did this and somebody tapped out.”
For another thing, the reality of speed skipping for half an hour is infinitely more painful than words can describe, and I don’t even do it properly (I have forgotten how to skip with a rope). Instead, I’ll tell you a couple of things I learn in each class. Hopefully it’ll be a tiny bit interesting, even if only for myself.
To start with, we played to Simon’s strength and went boxing…or ‘playing Punch Face’ as we call it in the Guild of Adventurers. The warm-up and cardio sessions were typically boxing-orientated, made up of shadow boxing, skipping and a horrendous amount of abdominal work.
One thing in particular I learned from this was an exercise I now refer to as the wheel barrow.
Take a medicine ball and put it on the floor in front of you. Assume a press-up position over the medicine ball, resting the ball on your stomach. Now, get your partner to lift your legs off the ground, like a wheelbarrow. Remove your hands from the ground and the same time and – voila – pain!
The idea is for your partner to then slowly push and pull your body back and forth, rolling you along the ball. What does this achieve? It’s rather simple really; if you don’t clench your abs as hard as you can, you’re in for an even rough(er) time. By moving the focus of the pressure around, you make sure to iron out any kinks in your literal body armour.
It’s horrible, but it works like a charm and toughens you up quickly.
After that, we moved onto technique and bag work, where I learned that a) I have no technique but b) I can hit a bag reasonably hard for somebody who has no idea what he’s doing, even if it is for only 10 seconds at a time.
Being a man who has boxed before, Simon took to the class with a much greater degree of proficiency, and even looked like he knew what was going on for some of it. Sadly, though perhaps luckily, we weren’t allowed to spar.