Body Sparring

I was at Joicey's Gym in Wycombe today, body sparring. My arms are coated in sizeable bruises from his body shots, and there is a massive, about the size of a drinks coaster, yellow and black bruise above my heart.

This is probably only about my fourth body sparring session in a long while. The first one I felt like a rabbit in headlights, pinned against the ropes, essentially a twitching human punchbag. Now I've started to get a little better; as he said to me, 'you're throwing combinations and you can see if I'm blocking you here, you can try and land a punch elsewhere...it's just like chess isn't it !'

I can play chess about as well as i can box, quite frankly, but it's a lot less painful.