Just finished up a great weekend at the Kickboxing Ireland National Training Camp in Sligo. I was both training and coaching at this years camp and had an amazing weekend! As usual the largest numbers were taking part in the Pointfighting discipline with what seemed like almost 100 athletes training from younger cadets right up to the veteran age groups. It was so much fun training some of the cadet team along with the National Coaches and other coaches who ran the camp. The Cadets and Junior team are now only four weeks out from the WAKO World Championships and as they are being held in Dublin for the first time ever it is a really special event for Kickboxing in Ireland. These Championships will see real elite junior athletes competing as WAKO is the only Kickboxing body to be recognised by Sport Accord and making strides for IOC recognition.
The Saturday morning kicked off with the younger and older cadets going through some drills for tactics and a look at some potential changes in the WAKO rules. After this I was asked to take part in a Q&A Session along with three other senior athletes (Elaine Small, Shauna Bannon and Jay Daniels) as we all have a good collective mix of success and pre-fight routines that may be of benefit to our up and coming juniors ahead of their World Championships later this month. We spoke to them about our experiences of preparing for major finals, rest and recovery, making weight and much more. Hope they took something from it!
After this it was straight into my own training session with the junior and senior kickboxing team. I had a total of three training sessions this weekend and some really tough sparring also. There’s some unreal talent in this group and after the weekend we will be looking at some serious medal contenders in a few weeks time….I can’t wait to see them all in action!
As always a big thanks to everyone who organised and ran this training camp and looking forward to this again next year!!
