Right now, the plan is to do conditioning on Monday and Wednesday morning, and train Monday and Wednesday evenings. I'll also get whatever time I can on Friday, Saturday and Sunday (in Federal Way), shooting for two out of that latter three for a 4x average.
Lesson-wise, we worked on the same material from Monday night. This I like a lot. Quite frankly, learning one technique a week (or one set of techniques from a given position) is plenty for my brain to handle.
This time Rodrigo showed us a conversion to a head and arm, no gi style brabo choke at the end which was a little hard to follow, but something I want to ask him about next time just to see what the steps are.
I think the main thing to do is focus on trapping the arm. There are a ton of options from there, but you have to get there first. Watching the Ultimate Fighter season premiere tonight after training, I saw how the fighter who ended up winning the match had countless opportunities to trap the arm. It's a technique worth learning.
Rolled with black belts tonight: Lance for about 10 minutes and Prof Rodrigo for about 20. Even with my morning conditioning, I felt pretty good, with just a little general muscle fatigue. In this, I think the little bit of weightlifting I've been doing over the past two weeks has helped. Matwork is good. Matwork is great. But at the end of the day, matwork is bodyweight conditioning, and jiu jitsu involves a hell of a lot of resistance.
So while it's been great - and will continue to be great - to do matwork at least once a week, bringing back the Man Maker Mondays and the Berardi/LSD on Wednesdays will likely fill a gap in what I've been doing.
The interesting thing about training with black belts is that you're best moves get countered very efficiently, forcing you to think about the necessity of recounters to everything you do. For example, I used to have a great recounter to the backstep half guard pass. But tonight, my recounters were countered again with a new challenge (specifically a tight leg triangle that prevented me from threading my far arm through into a leg rope - under the near leg and over the far leg - that usually allows me to get to the side against this pass.)
Some nice things did work. The seatbelt grip break worked very, very well (I had many opportunities to defend back mount rolling with Lance and Prof Rodrigo). And I'm doing a much better job of engaging when someone retreats from my half guard. I didn't ever come particularly close to passing, but I felt more comfortable than usual in the guard, standing often and fighting the guard with my legs more than my hands.
159.5 on the scale post-train. Light as a feather I am.
