If you haven't watched a top level jiu jitsu match at 60% speed, then you are cheating yourself out of an amazing experience.
I love instructionals as much as the next guy. I've got Saulo's first, Jeff Glover's, a couple of Kesting's, GB Fundamentals ... I've even got Cesar Gracie's brick-like instructional series (!), a Mike Swain judo instructional and an old school VHS from Joe Moreira. But as Prof Rodrigo has pointed out, just watching competition footage can do an incredible amount of good when it comes to getting a better and deeper understanding of what jiu jitsu is all about.
And slowing the action down to about 60% (the slowest speed on my DVD players fast/slow play function) gives you the opportunity to see every grip, every posture adjustment, every opportunity seized and missed at a speed that is not so agonizingly slow that you become impatient, but not so fast that you don't get to actually see - and anticipate - what actions and reactions are likely.
Maybe I'm making too much of it. But the "vision" I felt watching Michael Langhi v. Augusto Mendes (Mundial 2010 leve) at 60% speed, for example, was pretty incredible. I can already feel it starting to transfer into my actual training, how I think about every position and feeling like I'm capable of being more aware of options and "best practices", so to speak. I felt I could really see, for example, why specific guards like the inverted guard continue to give even the highest level competitors problems - and to see exactly why a certain alternative (maybe from an instructional book or video, maybe from class) would have been so much more effective.
It's been really something else. I can't say enough about this kind of film study.
A great night of training Wednesday evening with a whole lot of familiar faces. I got to train deep half guard takedowns with Alex, a blue belt on the eve of purple, including 12 minutes of specific training with the deep half. For live training, three sessions (two eights and a ten with Prof Rodrigo) with about two minutes break in between each.
Very grateful for the off-mat conditioning, I'll tell you that much. While I'm still reaching pretty significant fatigue levels during performance, my recovery time is not very long. That bodes well for my overall conditioning, if not the more specific, alactic conditioning competition tends to require.
Did some solo drills before class, working on the initial posture for the running escape, the rollover and sideroll escapes from north-south, my basic "hips right/kick left" mount escape ... Alliance leader Fabio Gurgel is a big fan of "range of motion" as a way of warding off injury that is superior to both "warming up" and stretching exercises. But they are also a great way of branding into your casca-grossa some of the fundamental motions and mechanics that make possible all the rest.
164.5 on the scale, post-train. Absolutely shameless.
