No gi tonight. Cindy was on the mat doing some drills with Angela, which surprised me a little. She did warmups with us for a little bit also, but she's obviously giving herself time to recover from the knee surgery.
Rodrigo had us working on some techniques, the kimura from the closed guard and the switch off the kimura in case the guy postures out of the shoulder lock. The switch and take the back move is definitely something to add to King Crimson, which is the one closed guard attack/sweep series that I feel takes best advantage of my strengths and hides my weaknesses.
One great detail that Rodrigo showed was that (surprise, surprise) you want to create an angle on the arm you are going to kimura. If you want to attack to your right, locking the guy's left arm and shoulder, then you want to escape your hips away from that side (i.e. to your left). Not only does this make it easier to keep the wrist, but also it makes it easier to sit up and get that crucial chest-to-upper arm connect before falling back into the kimura from the closed guard.
The switch to the back is one I remember Rodrigo showing us before. It's a really great move if the guy postures against the kimura attack.
Some good tatame tonight. Nothing that really stood out, though it was good to talk with Nick about "the fade" that Saulo talks about as a way of escaping the basic side control pin. The Fade is such a nice tool for so many situations, including countering the Royler pass of the half guard. I need to practice it more often.
Actually, one thing that was really working for me was the handcuff setup for the passing the closed guard. I probably need to ban it from gi training (except maybe at tournaments), but I'm really appreciating it as a way of dealing with no gi closed guards. I had a nice instance where I had one wrist cuffed, lost it, and switched to the opposite wrist.
I think the actual pass might be the Wilson Reis/Sao Paulo/Tozi variation where you lean back rather than forward. When trying the basic Reis pass with the handcuff, I felt like I was dangerously off balance. When I leaned back and then fought the leg, I had better success.
It's just a matter of practice. But, again, I think I've found something that will really work for me when it comes to no gi guard passing on the ground.
155.8 on the scale after training. My cardio is not where I'd like it to be, but as I think about it, my cardio really hasn't been top notch for awhile. Maybe three or four weeks into my last 8 Weeks Out I might have felt like I had a motor running, but I still see my cardio high water mark being a year ago, right before my shoulder injury, when I was taking advantage of the early class pretty regularly. I don't want to make excuses, but by the time we started training tonight, I was entering my 13th hour of wakefulness. Not the most opportune moment for demanding maximum physical output. Veritible high noon on the longest day of the year.
But I'm getting better. I think the math works out that recovery to 100% takes half the time that you are off the mat. So if you miss two weeks as I did, it should only take a week to get back to the pre-break cardio levels. It might just be a mathematical conceit, but it sounds reasonable enough.
I've backed off the off the mat conditioning, aside from the MEP, for now. I'm taking to heart Marcelo Garcia's point that I blogged about at "On Being Better," that the way to get better at jiu jitsu is to train more jiu jitsu. That's not to say that I'm abandoning the off the mat conditioning for good. But I do want to hold off until I feel like I'm already giving and sustaining maximum effort in training. That will be the time to really augment my on the mat training with some off the mat work.
I plan on doing the 3T/LSD9 workout this Saturday, though. That's a perfectly fine part of the program to maintain.
I'm short almost two hours of sleep each weeknight. It's not a huge amount, but I think it wouldn't be a bad idea to see how I might get that hour, hour and a half, back. Ideally, I'd like to be able to get up even earlier and still clock in nine hours of sleep each day, especially if I bring back the off the mat conditioning full force. We'll see.
Last note: a shout-out and go get 'em to one of our blue belts, Nate, who is competing at the Pan Ams this week, and Athena, a white belt who trains mostly at Ballard. I'm sure it is going to be a great experience for both of them and I'm looking forward to hearing some stories.
