Week 37 (13 September - 19 September)

The biggest change this week is the weather, usually the rising sun and its rays wake you up but now its the alarm clock instead. At 5am it's still dark outside, just over a month ago it was getting light at 3:30am. The temperature has also drastically dropped, for morning runs long pants and a sweater are now a necessity.

pads may look funny but are kind of necessary

On Monday we had our annual test day and this time we had to perform, I didn't really feel like sparring because my shin was still swollen from the previous week but in the end we decided to anyway. Daniel also performed two 3 minute rounds of wrestling before sparring with me so he was pretty tired.

On Tuesday morning we felt pretty battered and bruised, Daniel had to go to Siping for his Visa. During morning training I spent most of the time sprinting up and down the drive way and doing frog jumps, I was really exhausted.

Daniel was back in the afternoon but didn't manage to get his Visa sorted. Because my legs hurt so much so the shifu suggested we do some weights, which I thought would be pretty relaxing. We had to do 10x 20 Barbell pushes, 10x 100rep dumbell curls, 10x 30rep push ups, 10x 30rep elevated crunches, 10x 20rep bench press. This felt very unpleasant and my entire upper body was trembling when I was done.

Wednesday morning Dan and I felt so stiff from all the weightlifting we had to take the morning off, we just did some stretching in the training hall. In the afternoon we were back in full swing, after a strenuous 30 minute warm up and 30 minutes of continuous sprinting and jumping we then had to punch and kick the bags continuously for 2 minutes, we had to repeat this 10 times and got a 1 minute break each time.

The weather on Thursday was terrible, it was rainy and freezing, Dan had to go back to Siping for his Visa and this time they managed to sort it out. For morning training I had to run to the bridge and back with Umit, when we got back we had to hold the handstand against the wall for 1:30 mins, my head felt like it was going to burst. Afterwards we practised take downs on the matts, after 30 minutes of having our wind knocked out we then had to do 8x 30rep leg up crunches. In the afternoon we practised kicking and bunch combinations with hand pads.

The end of the week was much anticipated but we knew it was still another 4 painful hours away. In the morning we got bombarded with intense stamina exercises.
6x full speed sprints (50m)
6x frog jumps (40m)
6x backwards frog jumps (40m)

after this my legs were shaking

we then had to do
10x 30rep leg up crunches
3x 50rep backwards crunches

In the afternoon it had stopped raining and so we had to go for our run through the nearby villages (+-10km), it was pure torture and on our way back to the academy our shifu caught up with us on a bicycle and told us to run to the nearby birdge (+-3km) before returning to the academy.

The weekend was awful, I spent the whole of Saturday in my room, every step was just really painful, clearly we had slightly over trained. On Sunday my legs still hadn't recovered and I went for a walk to try and loosen them up but it didn't help much, not even stretching helped.