Here is the main workout I'm doing twice a week. First, the routines:
Half guard flow drill
--this one is from Kesting's half guard DVD. But the clip is available on YouTube here. I just use a regular "dining" chair, put a DB on a pillow on the seat to keep it in place, and go to work. I'm amazed at how well it works as a substitute for a partner (use front set of legs of the chair that are wider).
360 drill
--I made my own grappling dummy with a bunch of old pillows, an old army trenchcoat and a white belt to keep everything in place. I use a length of plastic in one of the arms when I want to drill things like the armlocks. But for the 360 drill, that hard plastic just gets (painfully) in the way. This, if you don't know, is a drill that Cindy used to make a staple of her classes. You transition on top from mount to watchdog to side control to scarf hold to north-south to scarf hold to side control to watchdog and back to mount.
"Matwork"
--I use basic grappling drills for this. I used to do it Tabata style. Now I just try to work off of a count (10-20 reps). The drills are: alt upas, hipscapes (alternating elbow escapes), sit-outs, alt hip "splits", alt backrolls, alt crossover sweeps, alt armdrags from butterfly guard, alt hook sweeps from butterfly guard, alt lifts (technical standing)
Tuesday, I did three sets of 45 seconds of half guard, 45 seconds of 360 and 18 count matwork (about 5.5 minutes), with a five minute break between sets. I started off with 30 seconds of 360 and 10 ct matwork back on February 8 at the beginning of Week Four after doing the groundwork with the aerobic capacity-oriented LSD conditioning.
Thursday, I'll be upping the half guard and 360 drills to a minute. Next week, the count goes from 18 to 20.
Initially, my heart rates were around 150-155. But now, they are up to 170 on average, which suggests to me that I'm getting right where I want to be (weight loss, notwithstanding). The idea of threshold training, as Joel Jamieson of 8WeeksOut.com explains it is to "delay the point at which anaerobic processes begin to dominate" and I think it is the ideal type of training for this stage of things.
It's hard to tell how much it's benefiting my current on the mat training. In that way, it's kind of like the President's stimulus package: we don't know what things would have been like without it. But it's my plan - or most of it - and I'm sticking with it.
