I don't think this was wrong, per se. But one thing I did negect was reflected in something I read the other night while paging through Ultimate MMA Conditioning the other night:
If you're a naturally strong and powerful athlete, then your goal should be to use this ability in your fighting and to train to get even stronger and more powerful ... If you have the genetics to be strong and powerful, but you've always had endurance problems, your training should focus around improving your endurance to the point that it gives you the opportunity to use your strength and power ... Don't think you can go from being stronger and more powerful than everyone else to also being a conditioning machine that can outlast anyone, because chances are that you can't. What you can do, however, is develop the conditioning necessary to use your strength and power to your advantage to get the win.
I have been insufficiently and improperly applying this insight. The most obvious aspect of that has been my complete abandonment of weight training over the past several months in favor of bodyweight jiu jitsu drills (matwork) and treadmill hiking (LSD9 and LSD3).
There is a certain stigma against power when it comes to jiu jitsu, a stigma I support, to be honest. The beauty of jiu jitsu - and its ultimate effectiveness - will always lie in its technical features and its "sensibility" as Rickson Gracie puts it, not in its ability to be enhanced by athleticism. At the end of the day, it is what makes a 120 pound jiu jitsu black belt far more formidable IMO than a 120 pound karate black belt or kung fu practioner.
That said, there is room to apply power in a way that doesn't cheapen what is beautiful about jiu jitsu. I think of fighters like Jacare (the Younger), Cobrinha when he is passing the guard, Marcelo Garcia's armdrags and X-guard, the "wait and explode" mixed martial artisty of Fedor. Power, at the end of the day, is really just a matter of having overwhelming edges temporarily on your side, earning that critical over-reaction or the under-reaction that gives you the takedown, the sweep, the pass, the finish.. That's what is great about jiu jitsu, how it allows you to generate power from the same source you are seeking to overcome.
But another part of being powerful is feeling powerful, feeling in your muscles that when the time comes, everything will respond as required when required. There is definitely a "feeling of strength" that you either have or don't have if you are wired more for power than endurance, and pretending that factor isn't important is likely to be counterproductive.
That doesn't mean I need to turn myself into a fireplug. But it does mean respecting the need to "feel strong" by moving some iron around in some progressive, programmtic fashion from time to time. I like what I've been doing with the 1x/week tempo workouts on Thursdays and am looking forward to adding incline bench when the 8 Weeks Out begins in another few weeks. That - and maybe a little reuinion with those 9-minute Berardi complexes - may be all I need. And this far out from competition is the right time for that kind of general work.
