[ledove]

My black eye is growing and appears to be ready to start turning pretty colors. (My mother is appalled. And even more appalled that I'm so happy to have it.)

Kickboxing today started with a quick warmup jog and then some heavy bag work. Then punch combinations while holding 5-lb weights. Then we sparred in rounds for the rest of class. My arms were exhausted toward the end!! After pushups and punches last night and then the 5-lb weight drills at the beginning, sheesh! That did, however, force me to defend more and to kick more. The last round I did, about halfway through I just gave up trying to punch and only kicked.

Might have mentioned this before, but in my TKD style we do continuous round sparring. That is, you don't break after you score like most TKD styles (Olympic style); instead, you keep going until the end of the round. Judges award points throughout the round; most points at the end of 3 rounds wins it. We also use our hands quite a bit, while most other styles don't.

Full-contact kickboxing rules are mostly the same as our TKD rules, as far as I can tell so far. (Only difference I've really noticed is that the face is not a target area for TKD, but is for KB.) So when we spar in kickboxing, I'm mostly sparring my TKD way. It seems to some people as if I've picked kickboxing up quickly, but really there are only a few tweaks I need to make to my TKD sparring. (Like blocking my face. Doh!)

So tired now... BJJ in the morning, KB in the afternoon. Whee...