Professor Rodrigo Thursday for the evening class and Brock leading the class with Brian on Friday for the daylight session. The instructional in both instances was pulling guard from standing and then transitioning through de la Riva guard to sitting guard and the tipover sweep. There's nothing I like better when it comes to the instructional part of classes than just working the same technique over and over and over again. You can literally feel the technique being carved into your muscle memory; you lose your train of thought or get distracted for an instant after doing the same drill for five, ten, twenty minutes and all of a sudden realize that your body is on auto-pilot, behaving just as you have been programming it only minutes before.
One of my wife's favorite psychologists, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls it "flow." I'm convinced that it's a critical part of learning that lasts.
Live Training was typically a mixed bag. I need to spend a lot less time sparring and a lot more time in specific training. I don't mind some light sparring with smaller or less experienced folks to improve my range of motion. But as far as goal-oriented activity is concerned, the guard/pass guard specific I did with Peter Thursday night was as good a session as I've had all week.
What's working? Twist Back is working. Sticky Paw is working. Breathing is working
I want to increase my guard vocabulary along the lines I've been thinking about: refining my shin guard game and adding finishes, developing Rap Star guard ... But there are some critical issues with reguarding out of half guard that I've got to deal with immediately.
I'm also realizing that I haven't worked out of deep half or X-guard all week. What's not good about this is that I'm trying to make sure that the half-guard becomes more a movement, a way of climbing around my opponent, than a "position" per se. And that means moving from half to deep half to X and back again until the opening (the sweep or backtake) appears.
Friday's training ended on a very weird note. Maybe it's the full moon, or the solar flares, or the fact that today's date is "3/9/12." I was 158.5 on the scale post-train, which is the other key number of the day.
