This one's rather short. After working out hard for three days, we gave it a break on wednesday. In order to avoid extreme soreness, however, I scheduled a morning session as a means of active recovery. Nothing special, you see, just some light shadow sparring and no-contact partner exercise. I'm a strong believer when it comes to shadow sparring. A quick search on this blog will produce quite a few posts on the topic, so I won't bother going into any detail here. I'll say a few words about what you see in the video, though. Basically, we were just throwing no-contact combinations at each other. I feel that this kind of training yields the following benefits: Distance control - throwing kicks and punches at a real partner instead of a pad gives you a more accurate feeling for distance. Natural reactions - even if the exercise is no-contact, most athletes (especially more advanced ones) will work their defensive skills. This will show you if feints or combinations w...