Darryl asked me to mention that his site is down for some maintenance and should be back up later this week.

17 days until we test.

I got together with Darryl and Adam on Sunday morning to work on Chen Ch’eng. We worked exclusively on that for a couple of hours and I feel a lot better about it. I think I’m ready for Sifu to check me out on it tomorrow night. Eighteen days until we test.

Our gracious hosts at Slithytoves are on the move, so there will be some downtime tomorrow night while we shift the server to a temporary home until they get settled. It shouldn’t be more than a couple of hours, tops.

Buckets of rain prevented us from working out at the park on Saturday morning so we ended up at Rob’s apartment instead. Communications difficulties and last-minute interruptions whittled us down so we ended up with only three people, Rob, Darryl, and myself. In any case, we had a lot of fun. We did some standup sparring, some groundfighting and submission basics, and worked on a lot of throws. It was tons of fun and I’m looking forward to doing it again.

I’ve got a pair of the ubiquitous dipped foam sparring gloves, but they’re starting to tear. I need to replace them soon, but I’m pretty sure that I don’t want to get another pair unless my instructor requires me to, and even then I’ll only use them during class. Those gloves are a menace. My fingers are long enough that when I straighten them for a deflection or a grab, the middle knuckle sits right against the edge of the glove, which is curved across the top to wrap around your fist. This means that the glove is designed to hyperextend the joints in my fingers. It’s fine if your hands are always in a fist, but that’s not how our style really works.

I’m considering getting some heavy mixed martial arts gloves to use instead. MMA gloves are more like biking or weightlifting gloves with padding across the backs of the hands and up to the first knuckle on each finger. I don’t want some of the 4 oz. thumb-less style gloves that you see in no holds barred competitions. Those are too light, don’t have enough padding. Those are intended to protect your hands so that you don’t break them, not to protect your sparring partner. I’m looking for something with heavier and softer padding.