A really excellent session to finish the week. In many ways, it was everything that competition training is about: drills, drills, drills, with a little open mat/live training at the end to wrap things up. I went for two rounds at the end, and probably would have done a third given a little more time. But all in all just the kind of session that makes you looking forward to coming back.
We did takedown drills, guard pass drills (slap pass to knee on belly), adding mount takes and finishes as we went along in a steady, technically progressive way. It was a very good way to train for a couple of reasons, but the biggest reason for me was the way that each technique led into the other. From the different angles we attacked the leg and then the upper body for the judo throws to the variations on passing the guard, improving position and finishing, it was great "flow" work, training your body through the entire range of activity from takedown to finish as a series of progressive drills.
For me, there are days when I don't feel my brain can take any more additional technical information. I'm just not in the mental state to "learn" effectively. But training this way completely circumvents that both by being simple (each move building on the previous move) and more drill/body oriented than learn/mind oriented.
One thing I would love to try as an experiment some time would be to train this way for a month at least three times a week and see if what differences I might notice in my game. I think more than anything it would speed my jiu jitsu up some, creating more of that "high speed circuitry" that Daniel Coyle writes about in his book, The Talent Code.
All that said, there are some good things coming out of sparring to help me refine my guard game. In terms of the pass, I still need to be working more of the step-over/Hioki game against the half guard and more sccop against the closed guard. But there's still plenty of time to work on all of that. The 2nd Seattle Open has been announced for Saturday, January 29th - the last Saturday of the month. That at-home event will be a nice testing/proving ground for the Revolution to follow.
164.4 on the scale, post-train, everything but the coat. The weight is just not coming off me after the average training session like it used to three or four years ago. Insert "alas" here.
