Saturday training turned out to be an open mat. Rodrigo got an opportunity to go to Portland to see UFC 102, so he had Pete open up the academy for about seven or eight of us who showed up to train.
I spent almost the entire time rolling with Ro. It was one of the best open mat training sessions I've had in a long while. I got a chance to really focus on not so much standing to pass the guard, but more just standing to test my balance, my grips, how to step and apply pressure. I swear, if I could spend two hours every Saturday in a nice, extended, focused medium speed training like that I'm convinced it would do amazing things for my jiu jitsu. No doubt whatsoever.
Both Connor and Alex were there on Saturday and a part of me misses getting a chance to roll with either or both of them. That said, I can't get over how productive my training with Ro was. Lately I've been thinking about the idea of passing the guard like the idea of takedowns. In other words, how to I get the guy to give me the position I want, the guard that I want to attack as opposed to the guard I don't want to attack. So on Saturday I was 100% standing guard passes, with an attitude of trying to force the sitting guard response.
I've got two main ways of attacking the sitting guard. I like the right grip on the collar with a pull and a left grip on the same side knee as a starting point. I'm either looking to backstep, swiveling my trapped leg in out and around his leg if I can, or to rotate clockwise, stepping up with my left leg and getting the angle on him. That angle should give me a shot at an underhook on the far side and a nice move to the half guard if not mount.
The big danger to avoid, and Ro was doing a good job attacking this vulnerability, is your free hand (left in this case). You don't want him to have control over that arm, at all.
Very nice training, like I said. And 153.4 on the scale afterwards, to boot. Next week starts a little pre-training cardio to get myself ready for the 8 Weeks Out. I've decided to add in another three week block to my training, but I'm not sure if I want to focus on lactic or alactic conditioning. The problem with alactic work is that I don't have access to enough iron to be able to really do the max effort phase of that kind of conditioning.
Actually, I've started to think that in the same way that Joel explains MMA as a aerobic-alactic sport, I think jiu jitsu may be more along the lines of aerobic-lactic. While there is room for the explosiveness of alactic conditioning, it seems to me that jiu jitsu operates more under a situation where it is rare that any sort of max effort can be applied (because of the ominpresence of gi grips). This both slows things down and intensifies them - making lactic and isometric work more important than they might be for both the MMA athlete and the no gi submission grappler.
