Crazy Monkey Defense

The past few lessons I have been focusing on my footwork, where I find that

1. I bounce too much
2. My legs often come to close together

After a lot of practice, managed to reduce my bouncing by following suggestions from the CMD Pro Forums and my trainer

1. Imagine that you're a ninja walking
2. Always keep at least one foot touching the ground when moving
3. Practice, practice and practice!

This has improved my footwork a bit but I find that I still slip up when my legs get tired.

Last night I got in two sessions of light sparring with Albert along with the usual tennis match sparring and it felt a lot better.

Several key pointers that I noticed while sparring with Albert:

1. I was aware of large movements trying to corner me in but when done inch by inch, I often didn't notice I was being cornered until it was too late.
2. Because of the way Albert positioned his head and his shorter height, when I did manage to contact his head mostly by virtue of my longer reach, it felt difficult to get a solid punch in because of the angle of his head.
3. I lowered my guard when trying to attack quick. I should not be sacrificing defence for attack at this stage. I got hit in the mouth once because of my carelessness
4. I don't quite like the Runner style, extremely tiring and I don't like the idea of prancing around my opponent while he takes his time to move in towards me. It also feels less flexible in an environment where you don't always have a lot of room to move. However this may be just due to my lack of conditioning.
   
5. MY CONDITIONING IS HORRIBLE. Need to do more running/skipping/cardio activities.
   

Here's a vid of me struggling in my last spar of the night (I was pretty exhausted already and after a while decided to just stick to defending as I had no energy to throw any meaningful punches so I focused on just keeping a good CM1). I panicked halfway through and got myself mown down as you can see me frantically shuffling my hands in almost pure desperation.



Basrull is showing great improvement and I notice his punches to be more probing and his defense a lot tougher to get into. I'll be so sad when he leaves back to the UK :(.

Our CMD class is growing to a nice number and I hope we can have a more regular set of people coming in!