All conditioned out

Last night it was along to the Edinburgh Judo dojo on Lorne Street for Rannoch Donald's (http://simplestrength.com/) 2 hour Combat Conditioning workshop.

To say it was hard would be putting it mildly! I've trained with Rannoch before, so I kind of guessed what we might be in for. Unfortunately I hadn't anticipated the cold! The dojo is in an old church and it's unheated. It's also falling apart, smelly and manky. However it IS a good 'space' to train in and fully matted.

Anyway, despite how hard we trained I don't think my feet ever quite managed to thaw out.

We started with a 5-10 min run to warm up (I should have been so lucky - I still had my hoody on well into the session) then onto mobility drills. Rannoch can do move his body in ways that are quite possibly illegal in several small countries, the rest of us just try to emulate him in whatever way we can!

We then moved onto dynamic and plyometric drills, lots of bounding and jumping and generally doing things that our knees complain about. Then we did lots of stuff to open up the hips, very reminiscent of harimau silat. Kicking was next - no power, just height. I was working with this tall Polish guy and I impressed the hell out of myself by getting my foot up to his head (I'm only 5' 2" - 5' 3") - obviously opening the hips really worked lol.

After this little warmup we moved onto 10 press up variants. Probably the less said about that the better, suffice to say that it was both challenging and painful.

To finish off we worked combinations on the pads for several rounds.

I was very glad to go home and get in the bath!