Blog 20 26 Jul 2010 6:11PM Been a crazy week for me and the DNFT.

My girlfriend left on Thursday for Bangkok, shes off to train at Sasiprapa gym for a few weeks before fighting for the WPMF title on the massive Queens Birthday show. Unfortunately due to my fight on August 28th I wont be joining her on the trip, I'm not mega happy about not being able to corner her but I've got no doubt she will be awesome.

Friday me and Alan 'NO' Love headed for Dublin with Paul McVeigh for his fight with my pal Artemij Sitenkov, both guys made weight cool. Cage Contender the show that staged the fight was brilliant to work with, treated us really cool and done an awesome job of selling out a big venue and filling it from top to bottom with good fights. There was a fair amount of hype on this fight with both guys being in the top 3 at bantamweight in Europe, a lot of talk about the winner going to WEC and the fact Artemij had a win over me maybe putting more pressure on Paul. If Paul was feeling any extra pressure no one noticed, he was pretty awesome in the fight and battered Artemij everywhere, first round was like a 10-8 round and then Paul quickly finished in the second round with a weird pushing armbar form reverse triangle in side control, a move we are still deciding what to call, either going to be wanking the zombie or the jedi.

After getting no sleep due to boozed up mates we flew home and straight to a Scottish show called Brawl at the bay, we had 2 fighters on this, both guys fought well and took home the W. Martin Delaney won 2 fights in a 4 man tourney, despite being the least experienced guy in the group which was cool. Our other fighter Jordan McCool appeared to have been possessed by the devil for a few minutes and pummeled his opponent in a prison style beating. Cool and scary at the same time.
 
Most difficult thing over the 4 day period was trying to stick to my training programme, ended up with a bit of winging it, training in things I hadn't planned just to get a session in. I seem to have have got a lot more wrestling in than normal which isn't a bad thing. Also eating decent wasn't really on top of my agenda, so I'm now sitting at 72.5kg with less than 5 weeks until the fight. Back to the programme today however and with Joanne not around I'm about to go into a horrible 3 weeks of intense training along with a couple of my team mates who have fights around the same date.
 
These three weeks should get me sharp and should bring my weight down to the better side of 70kg before I need to start cleaning up my diet, fitness wise this coincides with the strength programme I'm on just now ending so I can change up the heavy weight for plyo training, technically I'm cutting down on the number of stand up sessions and focusing more on wrestling and BJJ. One thing I'm really getting into just now it some of the ground aspects of wrestling, before I was pretty much a straight BJJ guy with obvious modifications for ground and pound on top and defending against shots while being aggressive on bottom but some of the stuff my wrestling coach Kieran Malone and other guys in the gym like Paul are doing is more wrestling and for some reason it is coming pretty natural to me. This mixture of BJJ for MMA and wrestling should hopefully push my grappling level up a bit.
 
Off to the gym