Well, my plan to only train the live training sessions is on ice. I went to the full class again Tuesday and that's probably going to be the way I go from here on out. Among other reasons, there's a major conditioning aspect to taking the full two class, two hours opportunity to train that really can't be beat. I'm predictably struggling to finish late in the second class - we worked on that Cobra guard dive sweep attack again tonight - with post-session heart rates above 160 and well into the anaerobic zone. It will be a great sign when I get to the point where that number drops into the 130s before we start the next round of drills.
With the Revolution less than a month away, we're working on a lot of standup to warm-up and start things off. I worked with Ro and Alex a little later as Rodrigo had us focus on the Machida, the Machacare and the kata garuma with collar control (instead of sleeve control as Gene LeBell's book does).
Rodrigo worked in squats, chokes and pushups toward the end of the standup. Again, more emphasis on conditioning.
The instructional was an escape from side control. If the top guy has the double underhooks (hand under the head, hand under the near leg), then this is one escape that gives you a two-on-one arm control and a move toward the back.
To go, you underhook with your inside arm and underhook the face with your outside arm. One important detail for the inside arm is to go between the guy's body and his arm. That is the arm you are going to trap - Alex called it "arm dragging" - as you come out to the side and on top.
As you are hooking your arms up (hook up, as if your arms were mastodon trunks, don't hug), you want to walk away your hips from him, going toward north south as if you might do one of those rolls that only works when your timing is 10,000% perfect. In this case, though, it is only to give yourself enough room to turn back into the guy, arm dragging out to the side the arm that you trapped with your inside hand and reach over with your other hand to grab the lat and control the back.
It's not a complicted move. But I struggled with it in two main places. First, it took me a few turns to realize that you have to put your inside arm between the guy's body and his arm. Second, I was trying to roll the guy after walking my hips away instead of turning back into him. I got it on my best side (side control pin on my right side), but I wouldn't mind spending another evening working on it.
In the second advanced session we continued to work on the same Cobra guard slide sweep setup as Monday night. I was really feeling major local muscular endurance issues as Joel might say, and will be looking to add some quadcentric work (probably roll sweeps from the butterfly guard using The Chair (TM)) over the next few days. I've backed off any off the mat conditioning for the week given how I'm responding to the daily training. I'll probably end up starting all over again and treating the November revolution as a play-through tournament, something I'd thought about for awhile. I think there's a lot of merit in Lloyd Irvin's idea that you should pick an event each year that everything in your training - regular classes, seminars, other tournaments, intramurals, video study - is ultimately building to.
For a couple of reasons, I think the summer Revolution event is my best bet for that kind of Major Event. It's the right time of the year (Pan Ams are late spring and Mundials are early summer), for one. For two, if I'm going to keep getting training-killing colds every autum, then there's no sense in making a tournament in November my Major Event.
Bottom line is that I'm restarting my conditioning program. A training only week followed by three weeks of cardiac output. That isn't how I should be training in advance of a tournament. But given the anaerobic states I'm reaching in training, I clearly need some basic cardiac output work sooner than later. That and those roll sweeps from the Cobra guard.
