My first week of intense training did not go to plan for myself. Point is, I should have known to do more stretching before and after training. I did none - literally.

Now, the thing with this is. When you begin to push your muscles and work on ones that you’ve never really pushed before, if you don’t do stretching, you will feel the ache for days on end after each time your exercise.
So, instead of getting a good full week of training, I got almost 2 days. I couldn’t finish my run on the treadmill as I had planned because of my calves and my right ankle. The ankle has been bad for a couple of weeks since beginning on the jump rope, but I bought some ankle guards to help with that. But on my first day of harder training I went for 3 by 3 minute rounds of skipping with 30 second breaks, on top of treadmill, weights, sparring and cardio; totalling 3 hours in the night. My muscles needed stretching, which I did not do. This put me off training for the rest of the week; argh!

I have 2 weeks off work now; holiday pay. So I’m happy about that. I can focus my mind, relax and concentrate on training properly. It’ll also give me time to relax my mind. Instead of work, train, work, train. I can produce a schedule to ease the mind. I found that with harder training and constantly thinking about fighting, you begin to lose the balance in your mind… something they call Yin Yang?  I felt a build up of testosterone for a while and more eager to get into a fight; more confident, but also to a point I felt I could be more cocky towards peoples attitude. This is something that is a big no for me, and requires that I focus, give myself time to sit down, close my eyes and bring my mind back to Earth. This was not during my first week; this had been building up over my previous 5 months.

Let’s hope next week will prove to be more of a success!