I'm looking forward to next week. I fell off the wagon as last week ended--no class Thursday night and no resistance work Friday morning--which makes for a C+ training week, at best. I like the idea of having another two weeks to work on a bunch of things before trying to hone in on what I want to do on September 30th. The trick is to take advantage of this time.
I feel like I'm taking baby steps, slowly gaining the confidence to move consistently toward north-south out of side control, for example, as a fundamental position-to-control move as opposed to just "wrestling around" and finding myself in some relatively more advantageous position than the one before. I've put together a little warm-up/drill that I want to get accustomed to, a sort of 180 degree version of the 360 drill. I'm hoping that will help me move better from the top--and open up submission opportunities like the north and south cross body armlocks, the "Jacare" (north-south kimura to armlock) and the "Cindy" (mount keylock/Americana to armlock).
This is the time to lose the conservatism. You never know who you'll end up matched against in class. So you've got to be ready to work on whatever part of your game that you're given an opportunity to work on. It's tricky since I've never been on my back in a single fight out of seven in the past year. So, do I continue to work on my back game in order to do better against the guys I train with? Or do I work on the top game at every chance in order to do better against the competition at the local tournaments?
So I've just got to be able to do whatever the situation calls for. I've been so impressed by the notion of gameplanning that I've been discounting the Ricksonesque "flow with the go" Jedi Knight Tao Warrior caca that happens to be where we'd all like to end up. I remember reading Ken Shamrock's semi-autobiography, and his critical reference to Brazilian jiu jitsu as a martial art that built on "waiting for mistakes". Shamrock's point of view misses the point that there are a hundred litle mistakes, any one of which can be leveraged into something otherwise unexpected. I guess you could play a jiu jitsu fighter like Shamrock played Royce in Gracie v. Shamrock II, but that would be more making the point than contradicting it.
