One of the more helpful reminders about today's training was the importance of technical conditioning. I've spent a lot of time lately working on my base conditioning, adding a little more standup work (i.e., forward and backward sprints) to better conditioning my heart for short-term maximal effort. The idea has been to bring on the heat fast and early, and then settle into a high-grade, more aerobic pace for the majority of the conditioning session (i.e., alternating cardio power with HICT).
"Free for all" guard passing and sweeping is technical conditioning, the intermediate step between the jiu-jitsu conditioning I've been doing before Live Training and the technical drilling I've been doing often instead of that third and final sparring round.
We've been doing this "free for all" passing and sweeping for the past few months from time to time, and I think that as more of us become used to the freedom to do whatever we want during these drills, we won't just start to appreciate them. We'll start to long for them. I know that it's quickly become one of my favorite drills, and I always find myself scrambling to think of the pass or sweep that I've been wanting to work on whenever the Profs put this drill on the agenda (I'm talking about you, Double F pass ...)
Prof Carlos did a nice variation of this kind of drilling by combining "Free for all" with specific A/B guard pass or sweep options. One of the things that is very effective about this approach, IMO, is that it reinforces the "game" or "play" nature of training, the controlled experiment environment that is most conducive to the kind of testing and retesting that makes technical improvement that much more swift in development.
One of the tropes of The Talent Code was the notion of Brazilian soccer players excelling due to a "play" environment that encouraged innovation, and East European musicians achieving perfection as a result of very limited,very focused, very deliberate and rules-based training. More and more, I feel as if Profs Rodrigo and Carlos are combining both approaches, helping us build more movement, more muscle memory, more focus. In many ways, I feel as if I'm training better than I have all year.
158.3 on the scale, post-train in the gi. Watermelon juice uber alles.
