Great class on Thursday—and I think I owe it all to a bowl of Mongolian Beef and fried rice.
For a variety of reasons, I’d been training jiu jitsu on an empty stomach. I’d get my last meal at 12 noon, and then eat nothing or next to nothing until it was time to go train at 6 p.m. I’d do okay, after a year of training I’m in pretty good grappling shape. But over the past few months I’ve been feeling really wrecked at the end of class. I’d still put in the mat time, but when I was done I was DONE.
I know that a part of this had to do with trying to keep my weight under 160—or even under 155 for a little while. And the easiest way to do that was calorie restriction. But it seemed like those missing calories were increasingly starting to catch up with me. For example, during Wednesday night’s class I only rolled twice. My second session with the tall Asian white belt was terrible. I was in his guard and couldn’t get out. Actually, I did manage to open his guard a few times, but I could get past his legs and spent a lot of time in “half side control”. What really sucked was that we were literally rolling at Mamazinho’s feet and the thought of him looking down on me haplessly trying (and not trying) to pass this guy’s guard almost made me want to throw up. I didn’t think I could look any more pathetic.
After last night, I’m really starting to wonder if I haven’t just been training with too little fuel. I felt like I had energy to burn and was able to move a lot more than I could the night before. True, the two weeks before this I only trained twice and that maybe took the edge off of my stamina. But the difference between how I felt at the end of Wednesday’s practice and the end of Thursday’s practice was dramatic.
I’m going to do some more research on pre-workout meals. I still don’t want a lot of stuff in my stomach when I’m rolling, so there are some other options I want to look into. But it will be interesting to see how things go next week (the last week of the “Three Before 30”).
More to add later about some training stuff. Picked up a few interesting things from Tommy and Cindy. Unfortunately, being without a computer means that I’ll have to wait until Monday to get those notes down.
