Starts today. 6-8 week focus on both standing and ground conditioning.
First 3-4 weeks will be aerobic capacity twice a week (one LSD/one matwork-based), HICT once a week and tempo training once a week. After that, threshold training will be the main mode of conditioning, with aerobic capacity (probably LSD since the threshold training will be matwork-based) and HICT once a week (though two sets of 10-20 minutes instead of one set).
One of the things Joel says about the general endurance block is that it's a good time to focus on technical improvement. This is when you are more than a few months from your next competition, and can gain the most by being experimental and adding elements to your game.
To that end, I'll be trying to train 4-5 times a week for the next month and a half or so. I've got a more modest set of techniques to work on, extensions of what I'm doing now rather than more exotic variations (paging cross guard) that I'd spent a little too much time on late last year.
I'm hoping to take a long-overdue vacation in early May - which may end up being just a long weekend. But it may end up changing the scheduling of the program. In any event, the next six weeks are set.
The main goal is to give me another 3-4 minutes of mat endurance when it comes time to compete. I think that endurance is the difference maker between winning and losing right now. A second goal is that better endurance will allow me to maximize my training time, being able to effectively execute the techniques I want to work on whenever I want to - as opposed to when I feel physically able to.
And a third goal is to see if a focus on endurance conditioning right now can help keep my weight at a somewhat lighter than usual sub-155 level. Properly charged, I think that's where my motor is most likely to run at its best.
