Easton Muay Thai threw its first ever All-Academy sparring session on August 19th! The session was a massive HIT with over 90 people showing up to train and spar with people who they don’t always get to train with.
After training we had a food truck pull up so everyone could get some well-earned grub while catching up with their sparring partners. With the success of this event, look for more all-academy sparring sessions in the future!
Anytime we can leverage the strength of the entire Easton community by bringing all the schools together to share ideas, techniques, skills, or just to hang out, we move closer to realizing the quintessential promise of the community’s whole.
Training strictly in one academy allows everyone to develop tight bonds and accrue social capital within their groups, but it also means that we generally train with the same people day in and day out.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but what happens when you train with the same people is you all start recognizing each other’s games and develop specific strategies to defeat those games.
Over time, it can feel like we’re not improving because all of our partners know how to shut down our games. For this reason, it’s crucial to train with as many different people, body types, and fighting styles as possible. Bringing 90+ people to one location to train together seemed like the perfect way to do this.
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Why now?
Easton generally has an Open event at the end of the summer that allows students to get the type of cross-training that this event created. However, due to scheduling conflicts, this year’s Summer Open has shifted to the Fall.
With so much time in between the 2023 Winter and Fall Opens, we wanted to find a way to create similar opportunities as the Open for all of the Muay Thai practitioners.
An event like this All-Easton Sparring Session allows us to get the same experiences, and, with off-quarter scheduling, we can now create these opportunities to the Muay Thai program every quarter of the year.
