As far as my triple-date training plan for Friday, suffice to say that two out of three ain't bad.
A late scheduled change precluded training Friday evening. But I did make it to Coach Z's 6:30 am class and Professor Carlos's regular noon class. Collar drags were the theme of Zee's class, a nice alternative for me insofar as I remain stubbornly against adding the armdrag to my sitting guard game. Professor Carlos had us working knee-on-belly transitions from side control, as well as the kimura from the top position.
On Saturday I arrived a little bit before competition team training began, so I missed out on some bow and arrow choke work Prof Carlos had the class doing for the Fundamentals session. I managed to get in two long rolls, one with John and one with Professor Carlos, for about 20 minutes of training. Alex was back visiting from New York and we talked about doing some no gi training after class. Unfortunately, I somehow missed my place in the queue and ending up sitting out the Open Mat. Hopefully when he comes back through in August, we'll get a chance to train some.
What's working? Armbars, strangely enough. I've been working more on the closed guard. And while that mostly means stuff like Rap Star (which is still awful) and the Barataguard, it doesn't exclude old school stuff like armbars and omoplatas. If I'm getting armbars from the guard, then it means that I'm making some major gains in my guard game because I've never been a big "armbar from the guard" guy. So it's been nice to train this way some.
Weight has been on point to finish the week: 158s and 157s. This has been the first time I've trained six times in a week in a very long time, and now that crazy goal of training 21 times this month and setting a new training year record might not be as crazy as it seems.
