More good training tonight at GB Seattle - and it was very nice to see Professor Carlos, who I thought I might not see very much now that my training schedule has changed. Having him walking around as we were training as well as Prof Rodrigo was a big plus for a pretty diverse class of white belts to brown.
More flow training - about which I cannot say enough good things. For me, personally, it is allowing me to open up and "move" in ways that I frankly never do when learning purely new techniques or in sparring. Part of that is my problem, especially when it comes to sparring and being generally risk averse. But part of it is in the nature of learning and sparring. That's just how it is. It is impossible to do a completely new move with any fluidity or agility and sparring is too conflictual for a certain type a otherwise critical skill development.
It is as if the standard "class"/seminar exists on one end of a spectrum, and sparring and Live Training are at the end of the other. What the flow training does is allow us to participate in the middle, making the familiar more familiar, but at the same time demanding more fluidity, more agility, more speed in the transitions of what we know (or think we know, in the case of my weak side tripod sweep).
If it isn't completely obvious, I really enjoy this kind of training. One thing that was especially nice about tonight, training with Angela for the first time in awhile, was that we called out the specific guards, for example, we wanted to deal with or situations the guard passer should set up. This was exactly what I was thinking about a few days ago in terms of what would make this flow training even better and it was very, very nice to add this element in so that you were able to turn the drill into a sort of custom-made, self-directed, flow-specific from move to move.
Add in the conditioning element with a good hard pace (including the mental conditioning of thinking of new situations per above) ...
A very good way to spend a Wednesday. And it's a reminder of why I've said that I want to train for the competition cycles and help train those who are competing regardless of whether I am competing at any given upcoming event or not. On that score, special thanks to Prof Carlos for calling me out to that third round of Live Training and to Chris for a great, tough roll to end the training.
157.6 on the scale post-train, which I did not expect but more than gladly accept.
