Take What You Need

My son and I got to the gym earlier today, but it's still a two-hour limit. If you think two hours is a lot of time, you're not taking into account the mundane things like stashing your bag, coat and boots, showering, changing clothes, and in my case today, snipping little pieces of moleskin to stick over each knuckle before wrapping the entire hand with white tape. And a ring of white tape around each pointer finger as well. Today I'm trying the new Revgear Kid's deluxe MMA gloves I got a few weeks ago. I'd been waiting until the scab on my left hand had healed sufficiently. I don't think it's going to be any better than it is now so WTH. I miss whacking the Nexersys machine.

It takes me nearly 15 minutes to get myself ready, once I get my son signed into the Child Care room. I need to warm up first, so I do 10 minutes on the elliptical varying the incline after each minute, but keeping a relatively steady pace. I have my old pink gloves and wraps with me just in case the new gloves are a total fail. The new gloves aren't exactly what I had anticipated either because the palm-side is hard to see in the product photo. There's a ton of padding on the knuckle-side, but the gloves are held on with black elastic bands stitched as finger holds. There's a fairly sturdy velcro wrist-wrap, but it's not very helpful, probably because I have skinny wrists. I worry that the bands will chafe and cut into my fingers as I punch. And the fingers are not stitched with any consistency in sizing, so the ring finger is huge and the pinky seems a tad tight. I don't have fat fingers either. The thumb is really loose. I have the Large kid's gloves because the Mediums fit 7-yr olds, and I know that my hands are sized closer to a 10-yr olds.

My knuckles sting a little toward the end, but in general they were fairly protected. Once I learned to pull my punches. I only did one round at Beginner Level because I got tired of having to constantly reset the machine. I didn't miss any punches or kicks, but the 83/108 stat reflects the 25 times I had to hit the reset button because I was "punching too hard". Jeeze. It's not like I'm a big person either. When I move to 5 rounds at Intermediate Level, I'm expecting the machine to adjust its sensitivity but I was wrong. Hence the abysmal accuracy stat.

I did one round at Advanced but aborted it halfway through once I realized that the machine had abruptly switched to SouthPaw stance. It also couldn't keep it's program consistent and kept flipping back and forth between Standard and SouthPaw, while maintaining that it was in SouthPaw mode. That's just too annoying. I punch in another 6 rounds of Intermediate, and am really careful to pull my cross, jabs and elbows. Digs and kicks are full force or they don't register at all. This is reflected in the stats as my accuracy and strikes go up, but my power goes down. Oh well... I still got a good workout. I think my cardio training is really paying off though, because even though I'm fairly sweaty, I'm not winded. Or tired. Waaay cool.

When I pull off my gloves and all the tape, I see that my knuckles are pink, and I've inexplicably lost some skin between the ring finger and pinky knuckle. Okay, I didn't put moleskin there, figuring that knuckles, being high points, would need the additional protection. I'm not quite sure how I'm wounding myself here, but next time I'll be sure to stick a piece of moleskin between those fingers as well. Not sure what I'm doing tomorrow though. Maybe just a lot of cardio... haven't done a 6-mile day since last week.

Wednesday Workout

10 min ellliptical steady state = 0.86 miles

Nexersys Kickboxing Machine

1 round Beginner
  Accuracy 75% / Strikes 77% / Average Power 142%

5 rounds Intermediate
  Accuracy 64% / Strikes 87% / Average Power 115%

6 rounds Intermediate
  Accuracy 82% / Strikes 97% / Average Power 102%

 photos for actual stats