With apologies to Mr. Ondaatje.
Bishop Knife Trick
I was working on my latest set of jiu jitsu cardio drills ("mat work") and for some reason this scene from Alien popped into my head.
I've been using the first few chapters of Saulo's book as my "hypnotic" during hour-long cardio sessions on the treadmill. Very basic, foundational stuff like suriving against rear mount, mount and, today, side control.
There are a ton of reasons why LSD cardio is good for you (meaning me, I suppose). The fact that it gives you so much time to meditate and think about what your trying to accomplish can't be understated. By the end of the hour - and after a shower and some rehydration - I was full of energy and ready for the day.
I'm looking forward to adding mat work into my routine. I'm trying to adapt the conditioning concepts I'm learning from Joel at 8 Weeks Out, using tempo methods and extended sessions to develop real muscle endurance.
More than that, though, I'm trying to adapt important jiu jitsu movements into this routine, so that in addition to getting into better and better shape, I'm searing certain fundamental movements into my muscle memory. I've already seen the difference that doing 3 sets of one minute "armoplatas" has done for my armlock and omoplata attacks from the guard.
We've got a huge new bench weight set installed at the GB Seattle location: a full Christmas tree of stuff from leg extensions and lat pulldowns to bench presses and the rest. For me, the possibility of being able to throw in a few sets of leg extensions and lat pulldowns after training is ideal: those are the two exercises I have the hardest time recreating using dumbbells.
Except for the eagerness to get back on the mat, training three times this past week wasn't the worst thing in the world. I definitely felt more energetic on Thursday, failures during the sprawl intervals notwithstanding. Maybe alternating three and four trainings per week is the key.
One thing I do think is the case (and is borrowed from Joel's approach to conditioning) is that I think that heavy volume is important. In other words, when I train, I should arrive early and stay late, soaking up as my experience as I can. If that works out to only be able to train three times a week instead of four, then so be it. I tend to think that four is the magic number to keep yourself improving and fitting better and better into your jiu jitsu. And if I'm not going to be able to train on a given Friday, then I need to make certain I'm on the mat on Monday (the ATM rule).
Interesting goes on over at GB Seattle/Bellevue ... I don't know all the details, but I do know that from the moment Rodrigo told me that he was opening a school in Bellevue, I knew that GB Seattle/Bellevue would be a huge success. It was a no brainer. There are tons of people on the Eastside who would be ideal for jiu jitsu and there is no pure jiu jitsu training on the other side of the lake as far as I know. The facility itself is spacious - you could easily hold two classes at the same time. As I told Rodrigo at the time he brought it up: it will eventually have more students than the GB Seattle/Downtown school. That might be ten years from now. But there's no way that GB Seattle/Bellevue doesn't blow-up into something special.
Enough on that. I'm having a great time in training, feeling some modest cardio improvements, and seeing some technical betterment, as well. Just in time for spring training, so to speak.
